Safety Culture Excellence is a weekly audio series designed to assist you on your journey, towards either achieving or sustaining Safety Culture Excellence. For more information: www.ProActSafety.com
Greetings all! As you may already know, a few months ago I became a columnist for COS Magazine. Aside from contributing articles monthly, I’ll be contributing videos as well. When up in Toronto recently; I recorded several videos in their studio. The video column is titled Culture Shock. In the first video I talk about achieving safety culture excellence. You can either watch the video here, or directly on the magazine’s site at: http://cos-mag.com/component/option,com_seyret/Itemid,100092/id,102/task,videodirectlink/ or you can watch it at Youtube.
Greetings, this podcast recorded on the road in Denver Colorado. In the podcast last week I provided an audio recording of an article of mine that was published in the April Edition of EHS Today. It was titled “Assessing Your Safety Culture in Seven Simple Steps”.
For the podcast this week I would like to provide the follow-up article that was published in the May 2010 edition of EHS Today. This one was titled, “Establishing A Culture Of Safety Excellence: Strategies Worth Repeating”. Both of these articles can either be found at www.EHSToday.com or under Insights at www.ProActSafety.com. I hope you enjoy this reading of Establishing A Culture Of Safety Excellence: Strategies Worth Repeating!
Greetings, this podcast recorded while on the road in Toronto, Ontario. After seventeen years of working on and developing safety cultures, we receive comments and questions on a weekly basis on how to assess a safety culture. A lot of people believe it can be performed solely by completing a safety perception survey. Remember perception surveys are an indicator of a safety culture, not the indicator of safety cultures.
If you really want to understand your culture, you have to properly assess it. However, it doesn’t have to be that complicated. I realized that there isn’t anything out there that properly describes how to internally accomplish an assessment of a safety culture. So based on ProAct Safety’s experience of assessing over 1,100 safety cultures, I decided to write an article on how to do just that, in seven simple steps.
The article was published in the April 2010 edition of EHS Today. It can be found either at www.EHSToday.com or under Insights at www.ProActSafety.com. I hope you enjoy this reading of Assessing Your Safety Culture in Seven Simple Steps!
Greetings, recorded this podcast while on the road in San Jose, California. Safety has evolved at an impressive rate. I would argue, increasingly so over the past decade. As we improve our ability to prevent risk exposures and injuries we must ensure we do not fall into what Dean Spitzer in his book SuperMotivation calls, “Theoretical Chauvinism – the tendency to adopt one theory to the exclusion of others. Whether the theory is Maslow’s, Herzberg’s, McGregor’s, Freud’s, Skinner’s, or anyone else’s, no one theory alone is sufficient to explain the complexity of human motivation.”
Terry and I talked about the positive and negative impacts of advanced safety theories. I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as we did!
Greetings, this podcast recorded on the road in Canton, Ohio. This week I would like to share an article I wrote (Hiring for Safety — Risk-Takers Need Not Apply), that was published by Industry Week on the 5th of April 2010. If you would like to see the actual article it can be found at:
Greetings, this podcast recorded on the road in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This week I would like to share a recording of an article written by Terry Mathis. Motivational Punishment: Beaten By Carrots and Sticks was published by EHS Today in March 2010. If you would like to see the actual article it can be found at: http://ehstoday.com/safety/news/motivational-punishment-beaten-carrots-sticks-1120/index.html. You can also find it (and all our other published articles) by visiting www.ProActSafety.com and click on Insights. I hope you enjoy!
Greetings, recorded this podcast from the road in Naperville, Illinois. Recently we held our 9th Annual Behavior-Based Safety (AKA: Behaviour-Based Safety) Conference. Upon completion we asked the audience to share what they would like more information on. We then promised that we would focus our next Terry-Shawn conversational podcast on it. The result: More Thoughts on using Motivation in safety efforts.So, here it is!
Before listening, consider this: Do you reward for no accidents, extrinsically incentivize for desirable behaviors, or do you create an environment that allows people to increase their intrinsic self-motivation for safety? Terry and I share our thoughts on the use of motivation within safety. In this discussion we talk about why motivation works and what doesn’t. We also talk about the use of incentives and rewards. If you would like more thoughts on this subject see the Safety Incentives and rewards Category on this page (www.SafetyCultureExcellence.com). I hope you enjoy!
Greetings, this podcast recorded on the road in St. Louis Missouri. This week I would like to share a fun article I wrote, that was published by Canadian Occupational Safety on the 23rd of February 2010. If you would like to see the actual article it can be found at: http://www.cos-mag.com/201002231817/safety/safety-stories/safety-culture-goes-beyond-work.html. You can also find it (and all our others) by visiting www.ProActSafety.com and click on the Insights tab. I hope you enjoy!
Greetings everyone! Recording this week in Belle Fourche, South Dakota just outside of Sturgis. When asked how long it takes to change a culture, the predominant answer most of our fellow experts provide, is anywhere from five to seven years. Moreover it is often said that it takes time because you have to implement resource intensive methodical change process and lots and lots of patience. From this you will be able to improve and change the safety aspects of a culture. Well, perhaps if you want to completely change every element of your culture, it could take quite a while, that is true. In this podcast we would like to offer some suggestions of how to go out and have a fast positive impact on and within your safety culture.
Now consider we are not talking about bad to perfect overnight. We are also not talking about band aid fixes or Hawthorne flashes in the pan. We are talking about getting turned around and facing the right direction and making progress in the direction in a relatively short amount of time. The business realities of today’s world dictate a results oriented approach to change. Respectfully, most business leaders do not have the luxury to recognize a return on investment after patiently waiting for multiple years. I have personally seen multiple sites experience dramatic improvements in both performance and culture within 6 months. Then sustain that improvement and success-seeking mentality, by developing cultural systems to do just that, sustain! If you think about it, early successes themselves creates the drive for continuous improvement, not programs. Programs after programs have effectively created the program of the month perception. Success after success creates what we are after, what we call a Results Driven Change Philosophy.
There is nothing wrong with the models of positive change over multiple years to create new cultural norms. We just think they need to be tweaked to fit the business realities. So today we would like to share with you what we have been using in practice in over a thousand projects to experience FAST culture and safety improvement.FAST is an acronym that stands for: Focus, Architectural Structure, Skills of Interpersonal Communication and Transformational Results Orientation. When we look at cultures we often find these four elements are lacking. This is the topic of the podcast this week. I hope you enjoy!
Greetings, this podcast recorded in San Antonio, Texas. Both of my parents were born in San Antonio and I still have a lot of family here, including a family ranch with Texas Longhorns on it. Go figure I’m from Texas and my family has a Longhorn Cattle Ranch, who would of thought. Moreover I bet you wouldn’t be surprised to find my family runs a horse farm and my sister is a Equestrian Hunter/Jumper horse trainer. What is this a Dallas Episode? Anyways sorry for the digression, back to the topic here in San Antonio.
Wikipedia defines a black hole as “a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, including light, can escape its pull. The black hole has a one-way surface, called an event horizon, into which objects can fall, but out of which nothing can come. It is called “black” because it absorbs all the light that hits it, reflecting nothing…”
In a previous podcast I referred to how a black hole could apply in safety, calling this phenomenon a “Black Hole Safety System”. This is where safety information goes in and nothing comes out. For this week, Terry and I will talk about this topic in more detail. We will provide some examples of what this looks like in an organization, and steps to correct and avoid such an undesirable element of any organizational systems.
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