Safety Culture Excellence®

Hello, welcome to the Safety Culture Excellence podcast, brought to you by ProAct Safety, the world leader of safety excellence.

Hello, welcome to the Safety Culture Excellence podcast, brought to you by ProAct Safety, the world leader of safety excellence.

Hello, welcome to the Safety Culture Excellence podcast, brought to you by ProAct Safety, the world leader of safety excellence.

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

As more and more leaders and safety professionals realize the limitations of reactive safety, they search for leading indicators to help them manage safety more proactively.  This thinking fueled the concept that lagging indicators alone, are not truly representative of safety performance, nor are they predictive or prescriptive.

 The first round of so-called “leading indicators” was little more than a measurement of safety-related activities: hours of safety training, attendance at safety meetings, participation in safety programs, etc.  OSHA’s crackdown on incentives that could potentially suppress reporting of accidents drove many organizations to base their incentives on these activity metrics rather than simply not having an accident.  

When behavior-based safety became the rage, the measurement of behaviors from observations came to be thought of as a leading indicator. As safety culture became a buzz phrase, perception surveys gained in popularity and came to be considered another potential leading indicator.  The search for meaningful leading indicators goes on because no one of these has proven adequate in predicting and preventing injuries.

Where none of these alone succeed, all of them together potentially can.  A balanced-scorecard approach in which the metrics not only complement, but predict each other has proven quite effective in proactively predicting how to prevent accidents.  When you measure how much activity it takes to change perceptions, how much of a change in perceptions it takes to change behaviors, and how much behavior change it takes to change the lagging indicators, you begin to truly measure the effectiveness of safety efforts.  Just as balanced scorecards have revolutionized strategic management, with our most successful clients, balanced scorecards for safety have proven to have a transformational impact on safety management. How balanced are your measurements? 

-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.

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