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Safety Leadership

By Eduardo Lan I often hear clients complain about workers' lack of engagement. It is not uncommon to hear comments like, “we ask them for their feedback and opinions, but they hardly speak up,” “it's like pulling teeth” or “we are afraid to ask them because we´ll get a laundry list of complaints.” Never for a moment do they stop to consider that the problem with communication might have more to do with how they listen than with what workers say. There are many benefits to effective listening. According to the article “Are you Really Listening?”, “When leaders listen in focused, attentive,

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Organizational safety communication is a key litmus test for healthy (or unhealthy) safety cultures. The best organizations have ongoing, open feedback throughout the organization. Weaker organizations have one-way traffic with communications (not getting employee input), insufficient psychological safety, and disorganized messaging. It is common for us to meet with EHS leaders who will provide pages of safety improvements over the last few months. However, when we speak with field employees, many are unable to list a single improvement they’ve seen. The hard work of making changes was made but the (seemingly) easy task of advertising them was not.

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By Eduardo Lan Raising safety awareness is essential to getting frontline workers to work safely and speak up whenever they encounter an unsafe condition. It is also necessary to generate a strong safety culture where workers actively care for each other and warn their peers when they see them taking an unnecessary risk. However, this level of safety awareness does not usually come naturally to people. As I wrote in my recent blog post “Start With Your Why For Safety”, people aren’t born thinking safety is important. Thus, we need others, typically our leaders, to help us awaken to this importance. Unfortunately, many

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Effective safety training engages employees in safety efforts and improves workplace safety performance. Unfortunately, employees often complain that safety training is boring and repetitive. Effective leaders improve safety training by providing hands-on training (e.g., use actual fire extinguishers during fire safety training), bringing in dynamic guest speakers, hiring training consultants for special programs, and ensuring new employees receive all necessary training before working and more experienced employees get periodic refresher training. Also, webinars are an increasingly cost-effective and convenient way to conduct training. This is especially true during COVID re-entry. Computer-based training programs are also increasingly used. However,

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By KyoungHee Choi “What is the Flip side?” This is a great question, designed to get us thinking about things in a different way. Flip side leadership is looking at problems and solutions through a new lens by considering a different or opposite aspect, possibility, situation, or result. For leaders, it is a powerful catalyst for integrating creative thinking and new insights into your organization culture. Business leaders recognize the creativity gap in their organizations: While roughly 82% of companies connect creativity with strong business results, only 11% agree that their organizations implement creative thinking as a core element in their business

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By Eric Michrowski Observations have been and continue to be a powerful tool for improving safety performance – especially when they are used to their full potential. They allow leaders to recognize good safety behavior and opportunities for improvement. Unfortunately, in too many cases, the focus is placed on the volume of observations instead of the quality conversations taking place. People get stuck in a loop of filling out paperwork for the sake of meeting a certain quota, forgetting to take the quality of observations into account and losing sight of their ultimate goals: preventing injuries and saving lives. In fact, in

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