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Safety Systems

By Martin Royal Serious incidents rarely occur because people “don’t care about safety.” They occur because decisions are made in contexts that differ sharply from the conditions under which safety policies, procedures, and commitments were designed. This gap between intention and action, planning and execution, is best understood as the Emotion–Context Disconnect. For senior leaders, this is not a frontline issue. It is a governance, system design, and leadership challenge that directly affects operational reliability, workforce trust, and enterprise risk. Safety Risk Is a Leadership Problem, Not a Compliance Problem Modern organizations operate in environments defined by competing priorities: productivity, cost control, customer demand, regulatory

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Early last year, we began working with a fleet-related company to conduct a comprehensive safety culture assessment. Despite a very strong commitment from their COO, they faced a number of challenges that impacted their safety culture. This included extremely high turnover, excessive time pressure, and insufficient safety ownership. They had recently experienced several fatalities, and their accreditation status was in jeopardy. After conducting a kickoff session with key stakeholders, we conducted a series of assessment activities, including a safety culture survey, 50+ onsite interviews and focus groups, safety artifact reviews, and onsite observations. Once done, we provided

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. In late 2021, we began working with a leading chemical manufacturing company to revamp their behavior-based safety (BBS) program. This organization has a strong safety culture and emphasizes safety as a core value. However, their BBS program had grown stale. This was due to an overly long checklist and overemphasis on quotas which led to “pencil whipping” cards and very negative perceptions of the program. Recognizing these limitations, we worked with EHS leaders to create an entirely new BeHOP® process which combined the best elements of both Behavior-Based Safety and Human and Organizational Performance. One of the

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Safety leadership can be tricky. Conscientious leaders regularly review safety incidents but often fail to distinguish between more minor incidents and those that can kill you. The primary focus is often “on the numbers,” especially when bonuses are tied to recordable rates. This can result in smaller incidents (tick bites) being blown out of proportion and very serious incidents (falling from heights) being treated like any other incident. Here are a few things to consider. There is natural variation in incident occurrence. For instance, you may be managing safety poorly but still have reasonable outcome numbers for

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By Julia Beckel Due to the dispersed nature of their work, lone workers are largely responsible for their own health and safety, and often are needed to assess and identify a variety of occupational hazards such as heat exhaustion, fatigue, and environmental distractions. While modern research has shown a number of mechanisms for supporting the health and safety of traditional workforces, organizations are increasingly tasked with understanding how to translate these support systems for their dispersed workforce.   A particularly relevant challenge is how to extend and promote a strong safety culture among workers who are not co-located – keeping mobile

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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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