Safety Culture Excellence®

The late Stephen Covey said that one of the habits of highly-effective people is to “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.”  Most safety programs do exactly the opposite and are therefore not highly effective.  Leaders and safety professionals decide what is needed and deploy new programs and processes without consulting the very people who know the issues in the field, and will ultimately determine the success or failure of new initiatives.  Organizations regularly hire consultants to analyze their problems and the consultants get the information to do so directly from the organization’s employees.  A good consultant is a good listener first and a good problem solver second.
 
But listening is more than just hearing sounds.  It begins with setting the right tone for the conversation.  There must be a non-threatening and respectful atmosphere in which the listening can take place.  There also needs to be an honest and frank expectation of how the information will potentially be used.  Skepticism often arises from past interviews or surveys from which no action has been taken.  Enough of this kind of skepticism can render the conversation useless.

Sometimes, the right questions need to be asked to spark the right discussions and discover the underlying issues.  When issues emerge from the discussions, they need to be probed and understood more fully. That means that the right questions need the right follow-up questions as well.  The whole process can build upon itself once those interviewed realize that their input is being valued and can potentially lead to improvements.  Listening is ultimately empowering people by taking them seriously.

-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, TN. I’d like to share an article Terry L. Mathis wrote that was published January 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

Have a great week!


Shawn M. Galloway
ProAct Safety

327 - Applying the Three As of Employee Engagement

Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded in my home in Texas. I’d like to share an article Terry L. Mathis wrote that was published December 2013 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

Have a great week!


Shawn M. Galloway
ProAct Safety

Awareness is an important part of safety, but it is not the only part.  Awareness is simply a step in the right direction that produces nothing without the other steps.  Further, there are also two types of safety awareness:  awareness of risks and awareness of how to manage those risks.  So, when people say that safety is all about awareness, they are missing the big picture.

Consider the following illustration:  Two people are traveling in a car and one is aware of the need for seat belts and the other is not. Neither of them buckle their seat belts.  They have a head-on collision.  Which person hits the windshield hardest, the person who is aware or the person who is not? 

The true definition of safety includes two types of awareness and one type of action.  Awareness of risks is first.  In business we call this risk assessment.  Awareness of the ways to address and reduce the risks is second and we call these mitigation and precautions.  The third step is the action step.  Awareness does not improve safety unless it results in action.

Leaders must mitigate risks where possible.  Workers must take precautions where risks still exist.  Failure to be aware results in inaction.  But inaction can occur even with awareness and can render awareness inadequate to prevent accidents.

-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 Roosevelt, UT. I’d like to share an article I wrote, published November 2013 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

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway
ProAct Safety

In the wide, open spaces with nothing overhead but sky and an occasional bird, a worker gets out of his truck and is required to put on his hard hat.  There is a hundred yards between the gate and the factory door with no apparent dangers, but workers are required to put on all their PPE at the gate.  Production workers must wear steel-toed boots so the company decides to make fork truck drivers wear them also.  
What is the harm?  You can’t be TOO safe after all, can you?  The harm is in separating the rule from the risk.   

Overkill rules (rules that strive for TOO safe) run the risk of causing workers to lose their respect for safety rules in general.  If the rules don’t make sense, are they really about safety or just about authority?  If leaders exert power over workers in ways that don’t add value, workers can lose respect for leaders as well as their rules.  If safety rules don’t truly improve safety, they are not REALLY safety rules at all.

Overkill rules can also actually increase risks to workers.  Wearing a hard hat in the hot sun may offer no protection from overhead risks and actually increase the probability of sunstroke or heat exhaustion.  Wearing steel-toed boots can actually hamper fork truck operation in some instances.  Suiting up at the gate may make the walk to the factory door awkward and more risky.  

All safety rules should be periodically reviewed to ensure that they actually improve safety.  Knee-jerk reactions to accidents are often the source of overkill rules and organizations should adopt a process of careful analysis to make sure any new rule or guideline actually addresses the risk involved and does not create new risks. When the rules make sense and reduce risks they are more often obeyed.  The answer is “Yes, you can try to be TOO safe!”

-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 my home in TX. I’d like to share an article Terry Mathis wrote, published September 2013 in IndustryWeek 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

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway
ProAct Safety

An article in the newspaper reported how many toddlers were backed over in their own driveways by their own parents and relatives.  The closing call to action was for the government to pass legislation making backup cameras mandatory on all vehicles.  While the intention is probably sincere, the method is flawed.  We have progressed farther in industrial safety than we have in off-the-job safety and should take the lessons we have learned and apply them to problems such as these.

We addressed backing issues in industry successfully as much as 30 years ago, long before we ever started putting cameras on vehicles.  We solved these problems through training and new procedures rather than through conditional fixes.  The problem begins with the fact that driving has become so routine for most Americans that they have lost their sense of vulnerability.  They view driving as a chore, a convenience, a necessity of daily life and not as the dangerous activity it actually is.  Driving-related injuries and deaths still outnumber industrial ones by about a ten-to-one ratio.  But we do not publicize this fact nor do we adequately train or prepare drivers to appreciate and address the risks of driving.  

Certainly we should make conditions as safe as possible.  Cars can be better equipped and driveways and roadways can be better designed for safety.  But there will always be the need for more, and that more is for operators of vehicles to make sure they know what is in their path before they drive.  The problem is not backing, it is checking before you back.  Until drivers take personal responsibility to change their pre-driving routine the problem will persist regardless of the gadgets we attach to vehicles.  We learned this already in industry and should not need to repeat the learning cycle before ending these tragedies.

-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.

This workshop will focus on the attributes that are needed to form a successful Safety Committee.   It will also help explore what the Safety Committee will be responsible for to create and sustain a successful safety program. The objectives for this workshop include: 1. Develop a focus on transformational opportunities. 2. Teach the team how to accomplish a Transformational Pareto Analysis that identifies the significant few behavioral and variable leverage points for safety improvement. 3. Develop the committee's capability to focus, develop and prioritize action plans and effectively communicate status and success of efforts. 4. Help the committee to discovery-learn the most important items to focus on and develop ownership needed in a behavioral approach to safety. 5. Create a culturally-shared perception that the site safety committee is successful and worthy of volunteer effort. 6. Create a successful committee that prompts other employees to seek out opportunities to become involved. 7. Create a sense of self-accountability among the team for what they need to do to create the desirable results. 8. Create a team capable of driving internally-led change that produces a significant reduction in incident rates and exposure to risk, but also increases shared-ownership for safety excellence. For more information contact ProAct Safety at 936.273.8700 or info (at) ProActSafety.com 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, available through WILEY (publisher), Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Shawn M. Galloway ProAct Safety www.ProActSafety.com

The fact that perceptions affect safety cultures is undeniable, yet the best intending organizations often pay little attention to perceptions and the conditioning affect they have on new employees or the company. Whether accurate or not, perceptions become culturally-norming beliefs. When these common beliefs are combined with unclear values, potentially negative attitudes, and hypercompetitive priorities, a dangerous mixture of influences is placed on individuals attempting to solve problems in day-to-day operations. The need to understand perceptions and what drives them is critical.

Many organizations measure perceptions, but few effectively manage them. There are two types of perceptions: accurate and inaccurate. Which ones are you responding to? Perceptions are influenced by multiple sources, both internal and external. Unmanaged perceptions negatively affect safety communication. Even worse, they have been identified as contributing factors in multiple catastrophic incidents.

Culture is made up of common practices, attitudes, and perceptions of risks that influence behavioral choices at work and away from work. Culture is also influenced by management, leadership, supervision, workplace conditions, and logistics. Measuring a culture involves a complex metric of perceptions, workplace realities, past accident history, and inter-connectivity of the people.

Perceptions are an important consideration when determining methods to improve safety or other aspects of performance. Perceptions affect behaviors, and they should be measured to determine a starting place for cultural modification efforts. Perception surveys can help identify areas for improvement and can serve as a baseline for measuring the effectiveness of improvement efforts.

The workshop focuses on how to measure, understand, and manage the perceptions that either facilitate or impede achieving and sustaining safety excellence. Attendees will be provided with extensive examples of perception survey report templates and detailed examples of different reporting styles.

During this workshop you will learn how to:

• Build Support
• Define the scope
• Determine the goals
• Define the users and audience
• Define terminology
• Determine categories and appropriate statement
• Tools to analyze and categorize findings
• How to administer electronically and manually
• How to maintain trust in the survey process and hidden pitfalls to avoid
• Categorize the results by focusing on internally-implementable action plans

For more information contact ProAct Safety at 936.273.8700 or info (at) ProActSafety.com

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety

www.ProActSafety.com

www.SafetyCultureExcellence.com