Safety Culture Excellence®

I would like to suggest an update to some basic safety terminology.  As ideas evolve the language used to describe them should also. The first term is provocation.  The word has several meanings including to “incite to action.”  It also means to irritate, enrage, anger, or exasperate.  The negative side of this word tends to outweigh the positive and there are many other words that work better with fewer bad side effects (depending, of course, on your intent).  If your intent is to further the pursuit of safety excellence, it seems that words such as advance, motivate, progress, and innovate would provide a call to action without burning bridges behind it. Underlying this term is the assumption that beating and kicking the locked back door of the mind will somehow open the front door to new ideas and opportunities.  In my experience, attacking ideas almost always results in a defensive rather than a progressive response.  If your goal is to stir things up without any real progress, the old word works just fine. The second term is confrontation.  I can no longer count the number of times I have heard it espoused that workers must be trained in how to confront each other about safety issues or how supervisors must not be afraid to confront workers.  Confrontation also has several meanings, but it overwhelmingly connotes attacking and creating enmity. Attacking creates defensiveness which tends to minimize openness to change.  It also tends to damage relationships and cultures.  I think the term coaching is a far superior term and concept.  Coaching is helping another person to perform better.  It does not require attacking or demeaning.  It does not require the destruction of old ideas to form new ones.  It tends to promote progress via evolution vs. revolution. It is what friends do for each other and what parents do for their children.  It is what experts do for aspiring athletes, dancers, singers, and others desiring to develop excellent performance.  Why not call this what we do for each other as we aspire to create excellent safety performance? They are just words; but words create meaning and meaning can direct actions.  If we want the best actions, why not choose the best words? -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 both 2010 and 2011. 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.

Health, Safety, and Environmental (HSE) professionals face an increasing challenge, one that intensifies with each new hypercompetitive priority. It is little wonder why organizations strive to move safety from a priority to a value. To create these shared values within an organization, they must be reinforced at or near the point of decision. In principle, this always holds true. In practice, accomplishing this grows increasing difficult. Simply stating that safety is a value at an increasing frequency and passion does not make it so. The successful HSE leader of tomorrow cannot simply work towards value creation; they must become a transformational leader. Key Issues Addressed During Workshop • The challenges facing future HSE leaders • Redefining safety excellence • Transformational opportunities for further cultural and performance improvement for organizations already leading in safety efforts • Best practices of top performing organizations in safety and operational excellence • Strategies to self-diagnose for transformational opportunities within your organization that will put you onto the path to safety excellence • Proven elements of the safety culture excellence model and behavior of the best companies to sustain this desirable goal • How to engage employees in safety, solicit discretional effort, and create a workplace culture that is committed to sustaining safety excellence • Updated safety models and approaches that have resulted in millions of annualized savings • A review of the better practices of excellence cultures • A review of the elements of Safety Culture 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

What is the best measure of safety performance? Is it the traditional recordable rate, severity rate, cost of accidents, near-miss numbers, physical audit scores, behavioral observations, percent safe, or perception surveys? The best answer may be "All of the above." Achieving safety excellence has taught us that most safety executives are not getting the results they want because they are not measuring what they want. Moreover, it is easy to forget that sometimes an imprecise measurement of the right thing is better than a precise measurement of the wrong thing. This enlightening workshop explores the misconceptions that currently hinder the best and brightest safety leaders from achieving and sustaining measurable safety excellence. Gain insight into a better-practices approach to safety measurements currently being utilized by many of the best in safety. Learning Objectives: • Learn how to measure what is important in safety • Move from lagging to leading indicators • Evolve from leading to transformative indicators • Learn how the current measurements demotivate discretional performance • Learn how to use transformational measurements to motivate performance • Learn how to measure and manage performance, rather than results • Principles of effective measurement systems • A conceptual overview of a Balanced Scorecard for Safety Metrics 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

Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Bethesda, MD. I’d like to share an article I wrote that was published October 2012 in Occupational Health & Safety Magazine.  It was titled, Measuring Safety Excellence: A Practical Framework. 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, available through WILEY (publisher), Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Have a great week! Shawn M. Galloway ProAct Safety, Inc

Many efforts for improving safety performance include rewards or incentives. While the theory of incentivizing safety is well intentioned, the practice varies from effective, to ineffective, to harmful. Additionally, there are many new discoveries about how incentives and rewards really work and new thinking on how to best use them. If you already have a program of rewards or incentives for safety in place, don't suddenly stop it. This can do more damage than good. The best approach is to transition your existing program into a more effective program over time. The correct use of motivational strategies for safety is critical to the accomplishment of safety excellence in any organization. If you are like many companies, you have probably experienced widely differing results with many of the off-the-shelf programs available. Consolidating these various strategies into a coherent and effective set of best practices is becoming increasingly important because of the tendency of incentive programs to either fail or go horribly wrong. Some incentive programs have simply become a waste of resources because they have not improved motivation or performance. Others have done serious harm to the safety culture, to safety results, and to relationships with represented workforces. Avoiding these problems is possible by following some basic guidelines which is well worth the effort in terms of results. Improvements in the effectiveness of safety motivational programs is possible regardless of whether you have existing programs, past attempts, or have never tried. The guidelines shared in the workshop are designed to help make the best use of safety motivational strategies. 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

Supervisors constantly communicate priorities and strategies to their workers, whether they intend to or not. With training, supervisors can take active control of the messages they send to promote safety as an organizational value. They can set levels of expectation that point everyone in the direction of safety excellence and exert a positive influence on the formation of safety culture.

Most supervisors don't have the latest training and tools for coaching workers to perform their jobs safely. Becoming an effective coach can leverage a supervisor's influence to make significant gains in accident reductions. Coaching skills also improve other areas of performance including quality and productivity as well as safety. The benefits to the organization impact almost every area of human performance.

The training contains the latest behavioral coaching techniques and directly applies them to improving safety. A model for counseling problem employees or addressing serious safety situations is also included. The design of the training utilizes advanced learning techniques and helps attendees to apply the models in the classroom to reality-based scenarios right out of the workplace.

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

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

Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Memphis, TN. I’d like to share an article I wrote that was published November 2012 in my column BIC Magazine. It was titled, A.W.A.R.E. – Five Steps To A Successful Safety Observation. The published article can either be found at www.BICAlliance.com 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.

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc

Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Orlando, FL. I’d like to share an article I wrote that was published October 2012 in my column BIC Magazine. It was titled, I’m Sorry I Almost Killed You. The published article can either be found at www.BICAlliance.com 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.

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc

Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Bethesda, MD. For the podcast this week I’d like to share an article written by Terry Mathis, published in September 2012 in the MN Department of Administration Risk Management Alert Newsletter. It was titled, The Primary Tool of Organizational Excellence. The published article can 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 contact us at podcast @ ProActSafety.com.

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc