Safety Culture Excellence®

The fact that perceptions affect safety cultures is undeniable, yet too often organizations pay little attention to existing perceptions and the conditioning affect they have, when new employees become a part of the safety culture, and tenured employees are trained in new jobs.

Very often perceptions become culturally norming beliefs, whether they are valid or not. When these common beliefs are combined with values, attitudes and hypercompetitive priorities, a potentially dangerous mixture of tools are used to solve problems in day to day operations. In addition the more uniform the perceptions are, the more likely they will both positively or negatively, encourage individual and organizational tendencies.

For a systematic approach to safety culture improvement or behavioral change to work effectively, it is important to understand what common perceptions exist within the organization. Moreover if the perceptions are inaccurate, the approach should consider opportunities to change the experiences that create the perceptions, for the safety cultural change or improvement to be sustainable.

A safety culture is made up of common practices, attitudes, and perceptions of risks that influence behavioral choices both at work and away from work.  A safety culture is also influenced by leadership, management, supervision, workplace conditions and logistics. To better understand your safety culture, (certainly a complex metric of perceptions are important) consider also assessing the workplace realities, past accident history, and inter-connectivity of the people at all levels.

Shawn Galloway

President & COO - ProAct Safety, Inc.

Founder & Coauthor – Safety Culture Excellence

Greetings from Tampere, Finland. Whether you are gathering data from Behavior-Based Safety (Behaviour-Based Safety, BBS) observations, work place audits, safety blitzes, Kaizens, whatever you want to call it; many companies struggle with creating action plans that truly have an impact on operational risk.

We see a lot of organizations that are putting a tremendous amount of energy into these activities, which obviously should be recognized. We often get called into help companies when this level of activity becomes unsustainable. Many times this is because the results tend to plateau after the benefits from the activities alone are recognized. Generally we find sites struggling with what to do with the data that they have collected, and how to use it to solve safety problems.  

You have probably heard me say it many times, if you don’t understand what you are measuring it is still hard to improve. The activity of measuring by itself will bridge some of the gap to safety excellence, why would you want to stop there? If you really want to positively impact common practice you can’t only look at employee performance trends, or whether the behaviors were safe or concerning. We need to understand what influences people if you really want to get at the root of what might encourage someone to put themselves at risk, whether they know it or not. If you fail to identify the influence, are you really fixing the problem and removing the barriers to sustainable safe performance?

If you are listening to this file through streaming media and would like to download it for later use. All files and other ideas to help you bring positive improvement in your safety culture can be found at www.safetycultureexcellence.com or you can visit our consulting firm’s website at www.proactsafety.com

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings from Portland, Oregon. Over the years millions have participated in safety perception surveys. Some have tried a customized safety perception survey, some have bought the packaged products and others are only able to get a few safety statements squeezed into an annual HR (Human Resource) Perception Survey. There is nothing wrong with perception surveys, if they are used correctly. In this podcast, Terry and I discuss the positives and negatives or hidden dangers if you will, of safety perception surveys and how to ensure they are used correctly.

If you are listening to this file through streaming media and would like to download it for later use. All files and other ideas to help you bring positive improvement in your safety culture can be found at www.safetycultureexcellence.com or you can visit our consulting firm’s website at www.proactsafety.com

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings from Corvallis, Oregon. It is often said that the only thing constant is change. How you carry out the change will largely determine the success of the initiative. Many people call change successful when the project has ended and the change agent goes away or on to other things. Our belief is that you can not label it as successful, until it has demonstrated sustainable value. To get to that point one must realize that in change management, it is almost always 95% how you do it and 5% what you do. When first planning your approach we encourage you to consider that everyone in the organization will react differently to the change. Now this may seem obvious. The unfortunate fact is that what is called, “social and emotional intelligence” is hardly ever, taken into consideration. Now some would suggest that you develop an approach that takes every individual’s potential unique reaction into consideration. Theoretically I believe this was a good strategy when we had a lot more time and resources available to us. In today’s world, if it isn’t lean it isn’t going to work and if it doesn’t demonstrate quick wins it won’t last.  Based on both research and 15 years of application with over a thousand change engagements, we have found that for most companies, with some planning and the right amount of insight, you can categorize people into five major groups. This is what this week’s podcast is all about!

If you are listening to this file through streaming media and would like to download it for later use. All files and other ideas to help you bring positive improvement in your safety culture can be found at www.safetycultureexcellence.com or you can visit our consulting firm’s website at www.proactsafety.com

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

Listen Now:

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Greetings from Atlanta, Georgia. As children we experience things through trial and error and we react to the stimuli in the world around us. This makes the challenge of moving effort in safety away from being mostly reactive, towards being more proactive, a difficult one. There is even a management philosophy called managing by exception. This principle of effective business management many times propagates the reactive mindset because it can encourage people to wait to make any decisions until there changes in situations that then trigger the need.  It has been said many ways, that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Even myself, every week I close out these podcasts with my thought that “In safety, prevention trumps reaction”. Well the podcast this week is a response to another listener’s request. We will discuss ideas on how to help site managers be more proactive vs. just being reactive.

If you are listening to this file through streaming media and would like to download it for later use. All files and other ideas to help you bring positive improvement in your safety culture can be found at www.safetycultureexcellence.com or you can visit our consulting firm’s website at www.proactsafety.com

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

Listen Now:

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