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By Propulo Consulting

By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Creating and sustaining a “learning culture” is critical for optimal safety culture and performance. Unfortunately, this can be challenging with organizations that have a history of “old school” cultures. In other cases, new leaders may legitimately need to establish a baseline of accountability to clean up messes created by overly lenient past practices. Overly lenient cultures often result in “looking the other way” and increased risk-taking behavior. However, emphasizing only compliance and regulation leads to safety performance plateaus. Promoting an open “learning culture” and infusing more positive recognition is needed to advance safety culture beyond current levels and

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Peer-to-peer safety feedback is an integral way to improve safety culture and prevent serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs). Unfortunately, employees often fail to speak up when they observe coworkers’ risky behaviors even though they want to. Survey research shows that more than 90% of respondents believe employees Giving and receiving peer-to-peer safety feedback can be difficult. Employees may be reluctant to give safety feedback because they’ve never done it before, think it’s a supervisor’s (or safety person’s) job, question their own knowledge of the coworker’s job, lack confidence in their ability to provide good feedback, or because others may

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By Brie DeLisi In any strong safety culture, both positive recognition and discipline are valuable. However, often organizations find the discipline piece is often considered an ‘easier’ method to drive change. Unfortunately, a focus on discipline without positive reinforcement and recognition will keep an organization at a ‘Compliant’ level of maturity – in which employees will solely focus on how to avoid punishment, rather than owning safety to keep themselves and others injury-free. You may wonder, what’s so bad about a motivation to avoid punishment? It is similar to only following the speed limit when you know there is radar and police monitoring,

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By Madison Hanscom, PhD When it comes to natural disasters, companies with mature safety cultures have robust emergency preparedness plans that are specific to every scenario imaginable. These plans are accompanied by all the resources needed to carry out the action (e.g., training, practice drills, water supply, shelters, power supply). Although it is a paramount responsibility for organizations to have strong emergency preparedness, it should also be a priority for you to have emergency plans at home. A safety champion understands the boundaries between home and work are extremely blurred — they see the big picture: safety doesn’t have boundaries. For instance, weather-related

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By Madison Hanscom, PhD A safety champion embodies the notion that safety comes before everything else. These individuals always have safety on the mind. They understand how safety connects to the big picture both inside and outside of work, and they are the backbone of a strong safety culture. Those who work with a safety champion know it, because it feels like someone always has your back." Researchers were interested in this topic of strong safety support. They conducted a study with railway maintenance employees to explore the extent to which perceived safety support from those around you at work might influence

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. One of the most important aspects of safety leadership is providing effective safety management systems and a safe work environment. Employees are more likely to be injured if the organization has safety management system failures such as inadequate manpower, 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: Close call reporting should be encouraged in a learning environment. Close calls help people learn from each other to prevent serious

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