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Featured Insights

By Propulo Consulting

By Josh Williams, Ph. D. Much of the focus on improving organizational safety today focuses on influencing safety behaviors (e.g., Behavior-Based Safety) and improving organizational systems to reduce human error (e.g., Human Performance). These are both critically important to advance safety culture and prevent serious incidents and fatalities. But what about employee safety attitudes? During training sessions, I’ve often asked employees to tell me which of the following is most important with their coworkers: experience, intelligence, or attitude. Initially, I expected that most employees, especially those with more tenure, would tell me “experience.” However, employees have overwhelmingly said “attitude” regardless of their

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Over the last few years, we’ve been hearing over and over how hard it is to find high-quality employees for physically taxing jobs. In some cases, it’s difficult for employers to substantially raise wages and stay competitive. This leaves them in a position where candidate pools have shrunk and, in many cases, people applying for jobs have little hands-on experience. “We’re hiring people who don’t know how to use a shovel.” This creates insufficient personnel and the people that you do have are often stretched thin, which leads to a host of complications that compromise safety like

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. For many years, there was a powerful stigma associated with mental health issues. If someone had a physical injury, the question was, “What happened to you?” If there was a mental health concern, the question was, “What’s wrong with you?” Fortunately, this is beginning to change. There is a growing awareness of mental health concerns

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. For too many organizations, safety is reduced to a scoreboard of recordable rates. Life is good when rates are low. The sky is falling when rates are high. The absurdity comes in when comprehensive root cause analyses are done with recordables like bee stings and tick bites. Employees have to figure out how they could have prevented it. Managers get worried that their numbers will go up and that may put them on the radar screen with executives. What are we doing here? When everything is important, nothing is important. Leaders need to better distinguish between incidents with serious

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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 Eric Michrowski A leader once told me their safety strategy focused on driving actively caring within their organization. In his words, “If we care for our people, safety will take care of itself.” While actively caring is integral to building a robust safety culture, I would caution that it’s insufficient on its own. Actively caring means showing personal concern and appreciation for employees individually. When relationships with team members are firmly established, and employees feel appreciated, understood, and respected, they are more likely to demonstrate discretionary effort and go above and beyond to keep themselves and their coworkers safe. Actively caring

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