Safety Culture Excellence

Greetings recording on the road this week in Cleveland, Ohio where Terry and I are leading some advanced safety public workshops. Last week while working in Omaha Nebraska I was interviewed by the host of Leadership-Action.com, Greg Krieser.  Greg states on the site that “Leadership-Action came about through the study and application of various leadership principles.” He interviews several leaders in different areas and posts the video and audio files on the site for both streaming and download. You can also find Leadership-Action on iTunes. 

I have personally worked with Greg, he is a great guy a fantastic leader as well.  I was honored when he asked to interview me about my thoughts on leadership. This past Friday when we completed some work at his facility, we sat down for the interview.  For the podcast this week, I would like to share that interview with you. If you would like to see the video portion of that site please visit http://leadership-action.com/?p=334 . Greg has some great thoughts on that site and I encourage you to take a look.

Have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings everyone! Recording this week in Belle Fourche, South Dakota just outside of Sturgis. When asked how long it takes to change a culture, the predominant answer most of our fellow experts provide, is anywhere from five to seven years. Moreover it is often said that it takes time because you have to implement resource intensive methodical change process and lots and lots of patience. From this you will be able to improve and change the safety aspects of a culture. Well, perhaps if you want to completely change every element of your culture, it could take quite a while, that is true. In this podcast we would like to offer some suggestions of how to go out and have a fast positive impact on and within your safety culture. 

Now consider we are not talking about bad to perfect overnight. We are also not talking about band aid fixes or Hawthorne flashes in the pan. We are talking about getting turned around and facing the right direction and making progress in the direction in a relatively short amount of time. The business realities of today’s world dictate a results oriented approach to change. Respectfully, most business leaders do not have the luxury to recognize a return on investment after patiently waiting for multiple years. I have personally seen multiple sites experience dramatic improvements in both performance and culture within 6 months. Then sustain that improvement and success-seeking mentality, by developing cultural systems to do just that, sustain! If you think about it, early successes themselves creates the drive for continuous improvement, not programs. Programs after programs have effectively created the program of the month perception. Success after success creates what we are after, what we call a Results Driven Change Philosophy. 

There is nothing wrong with the models of positive change over multiple years to create new cultural norms. We just think they need to be tweaked to fit the business realities. So today we would like to share with you what we have been using in practice in over a thousand projects to experience FAST culture and safety improvement.  FAST is an acronym that stands for: Focus, Architectural Structure, Skills of Interpersonal Communication and Transformational Results Orientation. When we look at cultures we often find these four elements are lacking. This is the topic of the podcast this week.  I hope you enjoy!

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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Greetings, this podcast recorded in San Antonio, Texas. Both of my parents were born in San Antonio and I still have a lot of family here, including a family ranch with Texas Longhorns on it. Go figure I’m from Texas and my family has a Longhorn Cattle Ranch, who would of thought. Moreover I bet you wouldn’t be surprised to find my family runs a horse farm and my sister is a Equestrian Hunter/Jumper horse trainer. What is this a Dallas Episode? Anyways sorry for the digression, back to the topic here in San Antonio.

Wikipedia defines a black hole as “a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, including light, can escape its pull. The black hole has a one-way surface, called an event horizon, into which objects can fall, but out of which nothing can come. It is called “black” because it absorbs all the light that hits it, reflecting nothing…” 

In a previous podcast I referred to how a black hole could apply in safety, calling this phenomenon a “Black Hole Safety System”. This is where safety information goes in and nothing comes out. For this week, Terry and I will talk about this topic in more detail. We will provide some examples of what this looks like in an organization, and steps to correct and avoid such an undesirable element of any organizational systems.

I hope you enjoy this week’s podcast!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings recording this week in Omaha, NE.  “In the early 1980s many safety professionals were excited about the possibilities of using new advances in the behavioral sciences to improve organizational safety. Among the technologies being investigated was the idea of behavioral observation. Behavior is by definition “an observable act” and therefore measurable by workplace observation. If a statistically-significant connection could be made between certain behaviors and accident probabilities, measuring these behaviors through observation might provide a more accurate measurement of workplace safety.” – Terry Mathis

In the May 2009 edition of Industrial Engineer, another one of Terry’s articles was published. We received some great feedback from the article, including a request to record it here for the subscribers of Safety Culture Excellence. So the podcast this week is a reading of the recent article “Hard Measurements for Soft Science: Behavior-Based Safety Has Evolved” by Terry Mathis. If you would like to see the actual article please visit either the Industrial Engineer Magazine website at www.iienet2.org or our website at www.ProActSafety.com and click on the Insights tab.

If you are interested in a behavioral approach to operational improvement this article will definitely provide a better understanding. So here we go…

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings from The Woodlands, Texas. This week I would like to share a recording of another article by Terry Mathis, recently published in EHS Today in their April 2009 issue. The article can either be found on the EHS Today website – www.ehstoday.com or on the ProAct Safety website – www.ProActSafety.com 

Have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings from Cuijk, Netherlands. This week we will answer another subscriber’s question: “If you have mastered basic safety, where is the next opportunity and where do you start on the road to safety culture excellence? If you think about it there are three common cultural starting points, leadership, supervisors (middle management) and the employee population. This week we will discuss the rationale for starting in the middle. 

Have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Do your supervisors police or coach safety? Both can have their place, yet what is the predominant style most often used? This seminar will give managers and supervisors the background and tools to become effective safety coaches.  They will learn how to focus workers on the most effective accident-prevention strategies, discover and manage influences on workplace behaviors, measure the progress of cultural changes, and coach and counsel effectively to address safety-related behavioral issues with workers.  The use of these skills will greatly improve safety, but more importantly, make managers and supervisors more effective in all dealings with workers and with each other.

Attendees will be able to:

·         Better understand and appreciate worker actions through behavioral analysis

·         Identify the factors that influence workplace decisions and learn how to change them

·         Differentiate between policing and coaching opportunities in safety

·         Clearly distinguish work behaviors with low probability risks

·         Focus employees on behavioral precautions that are highly effective and within their power to control

·         Choose the best form of feedback to shape behaviors

·         Motivate employees to encourage superior performance through positive feedback

·         Coach employees effectively to change unsafe behaviors

·         Align leadership coaching with progressive discipline when needed

·         Synergize leadership coaching with employee-driven processes without conflict or redundancy

For more information including the dates, cost and locations please visit

www.ProActSafety.com 

I hope to see you there!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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Assessing And Developing Your Safety Culture: This intensive session will enable participants to create a customized plan to assess and improve site and/or organizational safety culture.  Common myths about safety culture will be dispelled and a good working definition will be developed to empower understanding and customization.  Assessment methodologies will be discussed and compared and each participant will see how to best determine the cultural strengths and improvement opportunities.  Based on the assessment findings, plans will be formulated to find the most practical and effective strategies to build on cultural strengths and address weaknesses.  Opportunities will be investigated to utilize other site improvement initiatives to aid in the cultural improvement plans.  All plans will conclude with measurement strategies to ensure long-term change viability and early identification of problems.

Attendees will be able to:

·         Define the true nature and characteristics of safety culture

·         Know where to start and what tools should be used to assess culture

·         Identify the weaknesses and strengths within your safety culture

·         Examine the trust between workers, union, supervisors and management

·         Examine what is or is not working in your current safety efforts

·         Identify what the workers/ union will or will not support

·         Identify the formal/ effective communication strategies to facilitate change

·         Learn how to measure cultural change

For more information including the dates, cost and locations please visit www.ProActSafety.com

I hope to see you there!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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Greetings recorded while in Omaha, Nebraska! We have received a lot of feedback about an article (Building a Bridge to Safety Excellence: The Role of Culture) that was published in EHS Today in the Feb 2009 edition. For this week I have recorded the article so it can be listened to at your leisure. You can find all of our published articles at www.ProActSafety.com Enjoy!

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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The fact that perceptions affect safety cultures is undeniable, yet too often organizations pay little attention to existing perceptions and the conditioning affect they have, when new employees become a part of the safety culture, and tenured employees are trained in new jobs.

Very often perceptions become culturally norming beliefs, whether they are valid or not. When these common beliefs are combined with values, attitudes and hypercompetitive priorities, a potentially dangerous mixture of tools are used to solve problems in day to day operations. In addition the more uniform the perceptions are, the more likely they will both positively or negatively, encourage individual and organizational tendencies.

For a systematic approach to safety culture improvement or behavioral change to work effectively, it is important to understand what common perceptions exist within the organization. Moreover if the perceptions are inaccurate, the approach should consider opportunities to change the experiences that create the perceptions, for the safety cultural change or improvement to be sustainable.

A safety culture is made up of common practices, attitudes, and perceptions of risks that influence behavioral choices both at work and away from work.  A safety culture is also influenced by leadership, management, supervision, workplace conditions and logistics. To better understand your safety culture, (certainly a complex metric of perceptions are important) consider also assessing the workplace realities, past accident history, and inter-connectivity of the people at all levels.

Shawn Galloway

President & COO - ProAct Safety, Inc.

Founder & Coauthor – Safety Culture Excellence

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