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Safety Systems

By Josh Williams, Ph.D. One of the most important aspects of safety leadership is optimizing safety systems to prevent risky actions and incidents. Employees are more likely to be injured when leaders fail to address system gaps like inadequate personnel, unreasonable production pressure, excessive overtime, faulty equipment, insufficient safety training, unclear safety policies, non-existent safety meetings, poor safety communication, and blame-oriented discipline procedures. Leaders improve safety culture by optimizing these key safety management systems: ·      Close Call Reporting: Near-miss reporting should be encouraged from a learning culture perspective. Close calls help people learn from each other to prevent serious injuries and

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. We have worked with numerous organizations over the years to re-create or re-energize their behavior-based safety (BBS) programs. Several years ago, a leading manufacturing company asked us to revamp their program. Despite early success, their process had devolved into a “pencil whipping” exercise with an overly long checklist that people didn’t want to fill out. There was also an absence of effective safety feedback following observations and insufficient follow-up with identified concerns (“black hole”). This is typical of most clients reaching out to us to improve their BBS program. We started fresh by discarding the lengthy behavioral

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Increasing leadership ownership and engagement is critical for safety performance and safety culture improvement. EHS groups should support and partner with operational leaders but should NOT be the sole owners of safety. Here are a few guidelines for improving operational leadership support of safety. Minimize Blame Safety-related shortcuts or risky actions are involved in most incidents. However, these actions are almost always influenced by system factors like excessive production pressure, unavailable tools/equipment, insufficient manpower, ineffective training, confusing/incomplete procedures etc. Leaders need to maintain accountability but also improve system factors when gaps are identified. The first question when someone

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. The way in which incident analyses are handled in organizations has a significant impact on organizational culture. In fact, effective incident analysis practices are significantly related to fewer incidents and injuries.1 In healthy organizations, incident analyses are used to get considerable field input into the factors associated with the incident and help leaders understand and analyze system factors contributing to incidents. This reinforces a learning environment to prevent similar incidents in the future and helps avoid typical “blame and train” perceptions following injuries. Leaders should follow these guidelines to create robust incident analysis processes:   Ensure system factors are

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. In Part 1 of this blog, active steps were addressed to reinvigorate your behavioral safety program with BBS 2.0. This included transitioning from lengthy (often pencil whipped) checklists and quotas to a more robust program focused on: Conversations over cardsPeople over paperQuality over quantityHigh leadership and employee engagementFixing problemsAdvertising improvementsShowing appreciation for involvement Setting up BBS 2.0 involves shortening and redesigning your card to promote better safety conversations and to address identified problems, involving employees in process design to increase discretionary effort, simplifying how cards are managed and analyzed (more focus on SIF potential), and creating or rebooting

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By Emily Wood Many high-risk industries have carefully studied thousands of near miss, accident, and incident reports, finding most were very similar. Investigations found the same causes of error influenced people to make mistakes, and if they changed the date, location and employee names, the same accidents and incidents were seen again and again. This blog speaks to five of the most common preconditions for human error (in no particular order) and identifies some countermeasures various industries have identified to combat such error. The American Institute of Stress found 83% of US workers suffer from work-related stress and US businesses lose $300

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