Hello, welcome to this week’s podcast, brought to you by ProAct Safety, the leader in the world of safety excellence. For more information on this topic, or how we help lead individuals and organizations towards excellence in performance and culture, please visit us at www.ProActSafety.com
I hope you enjoy the podcast this week. If you would like access to archived podcasts dating back to January 2008, please visit the store section at ProActSafety.com. For additional insights (articles, blogs, books, speaking locations, webinars and videos) visit www.ProActSafety.com/Insights
Hello, welcome to this week’s podcast, brought to you by ProAct Safety, the leader in the world of safety excellence. For more information on this topic, or how we help lead individuals and organizations towards excellence in performance and culture, please visit us at www.ProActSafety.com
I hope you enjoy the podcast this week. If you would like access to archived podcasts dating back to January 2008, please visit the store section at ProActSafety.com. For additional insights (articles, blogs, books, speaking locations, webinars and videos) visit www.ProActSafety.com/Insights
When can good safety practices go bad? When they become routine and quit adding value to the daily safety of workers. In short, when they are completed just to check off the box that says they are completed. This seldom happens intentionally.
Most safety programs and activities have very specific goals to increase safety awareness or engagement, provide pre-job planning, or just to keep safety on everyone’s’ mind. But when programs stress the quantity without the quality and do not focus on capturing or delivering value, they can become meaningless activities.
Safety moments in meetings, JSAs, audits, observations, refresher training, safety toolbox meetings, all of these can add value or become valueless activities based on how they are carried out. As soon as any safety activity is speedily “checked off” just to get it done, the opportunity to continue doing it this way appears. It is incumbent on everyone to question the value of safety efforts and not let them become meaningless.
This means leaders must listen to workers regularly and keep in touch with the reality of shop-floor safety. If doing it poorly ever becomes acceptable, the die is cast. In this, as in most safety efforts, prevention is preferable to reaction.
Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in ‘The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS in 2010, 2011 and 2012-2013. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence, 2013, WILEY.
Who is the safety expert in your organization? The larger the organization the more people should have safety expertise; but at what level does the expertise reside? Certain types of safety expertise can be limited to one or a few individuals at the mid-management level.
Regulatory compliance issues in detail can easily be referenced when needed from a centralized source near the top of the organizational chart. Expertise on daily safety issues should be located nearer to the job. This expertise can reside in the safety manager or supervisor if there are enough of them. If there are not enough safety managers or supervisors to adequately oversee the jobs, the expertise should reside in the crew lead or the workers themselves.
Many organizations are in the process of driving expertise down to the lower levels and most are finding great value in doing so. When every employee at every level becomes a safety expert at their particular job, organizations find their safety performance greatly improves. The old reliance on the boss telling the worker what to do and how to do it safely is changing to the boss becoming the coach who teaches the worker to direct his or her own efforts and to do them safely. Performance coaching skills are the vehicles that transfers safety and job-specific expertise to where it does the most good. Does your culture have this crucial capability?
-Terry L. Mathis
For more insights, visit www.ProActSafety.com
Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in ‘The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS in 2010, 2011 and 2012-2013. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence, 2013, WILEY.
The medical profession is concerned that the overuse of antibiotics is causing strains of bacteria to become resistant and patients to be less receptive to the most-used medications. The same thing can happen to safety when training is overused or misused. Workers can tune it out and workplace accidents can become resistant to it.
Regulatory mandates require a quantity and content of safety training, but more or less neglect the quality of that training. This has resulted in some of the dullest, most monotonous and least-effective safety training that the world has ever seen. The use of Computer-Based Training (CBT) has further aggravated the problem. Required safety training in many organizations is viewed at best as a necessary evil by any worker who has taken it more than two times. When safety training quits being an asset to the organization, it can damage the effectiveness of other safety-improvement efforts as well.
If this state of safety training were not bad enough, some organizations actually use training or re-training as a punishment. When a worker is injured or is caught failing to follow a safety rule, they can be sent back to training. The assumption that the training did not impact worker behavior is valid enough, but the assumption that more of the same, ineffective training will magically work the second time is borderline absurd. Also, if safety re-training is viewed as a form of punishment, how will that impact the overall perception of the value of safety training?
Organizations need to view safety training as a tool to meet worker needs rather than a painful requirement that can be re-used as punishment. The opportunities for good quality safety to improve safety performance has been demonstrated. It is time to use it to its full potential instead of going through the motions! -Terry L. Mathis
Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in ‘The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS in 2010, 2011 and 2012-2013. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence, 2013, WILEY.
Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Clinton, IA. I’d like to share an article I wrote that was published April 2014 in BIC Magazine. The published article can either be found on the magazine’s website or under Insights at www.ProActSafety.com.
I hope you enjoy the podcast this week. If you would like to download or play on demand our other podcasts, please visit the ProAct Safety’s podcast website at: http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com. If you would like access to archived podcasts (older than 90 days – dating back to January 2008) please visit www.ProActSafety.com/Store. For more detailed strategies to achieve and sustain excellence in performance and culture, pick up a copy of our book, STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence - http://proactsafety.com/insights/steps-to-safety-culture-excellence
Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Morgan City, LA. I’d like to share an article Terry L. Mathis wrote that was published February 2014 in EHS Today Magazine. The published article can either be found on the magazine’s website or under Insights at www.ProActSafety.com.
I hope you enjoy the podcast this week. If you would like to download or play on demand our other podcasts, please visit the ProAct Safety’s podcast website at: http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com. If you would like access to archived podcasts (older than 90 days – dating back to January 2008) please visit www.ProActSafety.com/Store. For more detailed strategies to achieve and sustain excellence in performance and culture, pick up a copy of our book, STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence - http://proactsafety.com/insights/steps-to-safety-culture-excellence
The goal of many safety programs is to get all workers and the workplace into compliance with applicable rules and regulations. This is a necessary and foundational step in any effective safety effort. However, if the goals and progression stop at compliance, this can cause crucial problems for the future. Once the workplace passes muster and workers know and adhere to the rules, then what? The next steps in safety must take the organization beyond the performance levels achieved through compliance. These steps require much more of workers than simply following the rules.
Beyond compliance is excellence through safety culture. An excellent safety culture is one in which workers are engaged, not simply conforming. Worker engagement in safety is seldom accomplished with the tools of compliance. A new set of tools that challenges workers to belong, participate, and expend creative energy is needed. The tools of compliance cannot be used or even adapted to meet these challenges. In fact, the tools used by many organizations to accomplish compliance can actually hamper or kill employee engagement. A work force can be policed into compliance but must be coached into excellence.
Failure to change from safety cops to safety coaches can stop the progression of safety performance in its tracks. Workers will develop a “good enough” attitude toward safety if there is no reason to go above and beyond. They will not buy in if there is no compelling rationale. They will not feel part of the effort if there are no involvement opportunities. They will never own the safety-excellence effort if they are not allowed to help create it. Recognizing the point at which compliance needs to give way to excellence is the key to continuous improvement in safety.
-Terry L. Mathis
Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in ‘The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS in 2010, 2011 and 2012-2013. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence, 2013, WILEY.
