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Safety Culture Excellence is a weekly series designed to support your efforts towards excellence in performance and culture. For more information or to contact the host, visit www.ProActSafety.com.
Episodes
Wednesday Jan 07, 2015
Wednesday Jan 07, 2015
Seeking out and addressing root causes of problems is the ultimate fix for machines. If you simply repair the obvious failure, it may recur. People are not machines! Using root cause thinking with humans can actually make you miss the best solutions, especially in safety. It is extremely limited thinking to look exclusively at human contribution as the problem or failure in accidental injuries.
Human behavior is based on a complex mixture of influences and projections. Past experience, training, analyses of job hazards, projections of what could cause injuries, and the overriding pressures to complete the work all influence behavioral choices. A change in the weight of any of these or other influences can tip the balance of influence and change the logic of the choice. Failure to identify risks due to low-probability or other factors play into the equation. Simply underestimating risk probability is a growing problem. Distractions to concentration at work are also growing as work gets more complex and technology increases the availability and amount of communication.
Rather than viewing human performance as a mechanical process, we need to see it more like a weather pattern that can be changed by multiple factors, something that needs to be forecast rather than fixed.
-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.
Monday Dec 29, 2014
Monday Dec 29, 2014
Greetings all, here is a short video for this week's podcast. I hope it gets you thinking!
Shawn M. Galloway
President, ProAct Safety
Monday Dec 22, 2014
Monday Dec 22, 2014
Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Akeley, MN. I’d like to share an article Terry Mathis wrote that was published 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
Wednesday Dec 17, 2014
Wednesday Dec 17, 2014
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
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.
Monday Dec 15, 2014
Monday Dec 15, 2014
Greetings all, here is a short video for this week's podcast. I hope it gets you thinking!
Shawn M. Galloway
President, ProAct Safety
Wednesday Dec 10, 2014
Wednesday Dec 10, 2014
The only thing more amazing to me than the number of programs organizations adopt to improve safety, is the fact that the majority don’t have a metric to determine if the program worked or not.
Using lagging indicators to measure the effectiveness of a new safety program is fraught with inaccuracies. So many factors impact TRIR and severity rates that one new program might or might not have had an impact. Add to that fact the concept of Hawthorne Effect (that any focus of effort might impact results short term) and you have a totally unreliable metric of program success.
First, all programs should fit into an overarching safety strategy. Second, the program should have internal KPIs to determine if it is doing what it is designed to do. Third, the organization should have intermediate indicators to determine if the program is changing perceptions and organizational behavior. Lastly, there should be a division of lagging indicators into categories directly impacted by the program to see if they are responding to the combination of program impact, changes in perceptions and behavior, and if the costs of the program create an ROI worthy of the effort.
-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.
Monday Dec 08, 2014
Monday Dec 08, 2014
Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Nashville, TN. I’d like to share an article I wrote that was published in ISHN 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
Monday Nov 24, 2014
Monday Nov 24, 2014
Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Freeport, TX. I’d like to share an article I wrote that was published 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
Wednesday Nov 19, 2014
Wednesday Nov 19, 2014
The talk about “zero injuries” has ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime. Yes, you should not have a tolerance for accidents, ergo set a goal of zero. Yes, it is not acceptable to hurt ANYONE, ergo set a goal of zero. However, a goal is not a strategy. A goal is not a call to action nor a roadmap to success. Bottom line, zero injuries is a reactive definition of excellence. Zero is not what you should do nor is it what you should not do. It is the desired outcome, not the game plan. It is the coach telling the team at half time, “Don’t lose!”
True safety excellence is not a lofty goal or dream of perfection. It is a strategic approach to a specific challenge. The approach must be prescriptive and predictive. It must involve specific approaches to foster greater knowledge, skills and involvement. It must communicate and inspire discretionary effort from those involved. It must include meaningful metrics that are leading indicators and give each worker a way to rate his or her own performance on a daily basis.
Simply saying “Zero Injuries” is none of these. It is just a good sounding slogan which is temporarily accomplished by luck or normal variation more often than it is permanently accomplished by solid strategy and execution.
-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.
Monday Nov 17, 2014
Monday Nov 17, 2014
Greetings all, here is a short video for this week's podcast. I hope it gets you thinking!
Shawn M. Galloway
President, ProAct Safety