Safety Culture Excellence®

I recently heard a supervisor say to a manager, “Do you want me to knock out this job or do you want to play the safety game?”  Is that really the choice that leaders have to make in the workplace?  Is safety something that gets in the way of productivity?  I believe that people who think safety and productivity are the two opposite sides of a coin, don’t really understand safety. Safety isn’t simply doing a job more slowly and it is not other things you do besides the job; safety is the way you do the job. It is not just the safe way to do the job; it is the RIGHT way to do the job.  Almost anything that increases the chance of an injury also increases the chance of a defective job.  Failure to plan, short cutting steps, rushing and all the things that make a job unsafe, also make it a poor quality job.  We don’t design processes to produce defects or accidental injuries.  When they do, our processes have failed and need to be modified.  When we think about safety correctly, it almost disappears into the real issue; how to do our work right. -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.