Safety Culture Excellence®

Going Out on a Limb for Safety

I thinned some trees in a thick, forested area on my lot hoping the remaining trees would grow more wide limbs and spread their canopies.  It didn’t happen.  I asked my tree expert why not and he explained that new limbs on a mature tree were only growing out of the bark and not the core of the tree trunk.  They were weak and seldom reached large size without breaking off in the first strong wind. Many safety programs likewise are add-ons and have no real connection to the core values and strategies of the organization.  We hope they will provide extra coverage and fill the gaps, but they seldom survive for very long.  The strong limbs of our safety programs are connected to a solid strategy and designed to provide specific coverage.  They are not afterthoughts, but the result of solid planning. It is crucial for organizational leaders to think of the tree and the limbs as one unit.  If safety is a core value of the organization, there are no safety goals; only business goals related to safety.  The strategy of the organization includes safety-related strategies that connect to the core.  Leaders might fertilize the soil and stimulate the roots, but they don’t try to artificially graft on limbs that aren’t firmly connected. Many safety programs and processes are attempts to compensate for a lack of core strategy and seldom survive the winds of change. -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.

Computer-Based Training is Bad for Your Safety Culture

Many organizations have adopted Computer-Based Training (CBT), especially for the OSHA-required annual training.  It has some advantages but also has some very serious disadvantages. Advantages:  CBTs provide exactly uniform information to each worker.  The learning is self-paced so each worker can complete it at their own learning and comprehension speed.  It allows workers to take training a few at a time to minimize interruption to normal work flow.  It does not require a classroom or meeting room; only a computer work station.  If a worker can demonstrate competence through a test, they don’t have to take the training again.  It allows for easy record keeping to track who has taken the training and who has not. Disadvantages:  It tends to foster cheating.  Workers can keep their answers and skip the training all together.  In some cases workers pass the answers to newer workers who never take the training.  It can become extremely repetitive, monotonous and boring.  However, the most serious disadvantage of CBT lies in the fact that it isolates workers for training and denies the interaction common in traditional classroom training. It completely eliminates discussion of topics and collaboration among employees.  Best practices cannot be shared during training and real questions about application to the workplace cannot be adequately answered.  Training becomes a lonely process and the opportunities to build culture around learning and application are lost. Organizations can compensate for CBT with other culture-building activities, but training becomes an anti-culture activity.  The acquiring and renewing of key workplace skills becomes a siloed and isolated individual process.  The opportunities to build a “can-do” culture are largely lost.  Smart managers will consider these advantages and disadvantages and decide if CBT is a good decision for their organization or not. -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.

285 - The Transformational Leader - A ProAct Safety Workshop

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

284 - Avoiding the 10 Common Pitfalls of Behavior-Based Safety

Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Billings, MT. I’d like to share an article I wrote that was published December 2012 in BIC Magazine.  It was titled, Avoiding the 10 Common Pitfalls of Behavior-Based Safety. 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

277 - Leadership Safety Coaching - A ProAct Safety Workshop

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

275 - Developing Leadership Safety Roles, Responsibilities and Expectations-A ProAct Safety Workshop

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

273 - Developing A Custom Perception Survey - A ProAct Safety Workshop

The fact that perceptions affect safety cultures is undeniable, yet the best intending organizations often pay little attention to perceptions and the conditioning affect they have on new employees or the company. Whether accurate or not, perceptions become culturally-norming beliefs. When these common beliefs are combined with unclear values, potentially negative attitudes, and hypercompetitive priorities, a dangerous mixture of influences is placed on individuals attempting to solve problems in day-to-day operations. The need to understand perceptions and what drives them is critical.

Many organizations measure perceptions, but few effectively manage them. There are two types of perceptions: accurate and inaccurate. Which ones are you responding to? Perceptions are influenced by multiple sources, both internal and external. Unmanaged perceptions negatively affect safety communication. Even worse, they have been identified as contributing factors in multiple catastrophic incidents.

Culture is made up of common practices, attitudes, and perceptions of risks that influence behavioral choices at work and away from work. Culture is also influenced by management, leadership, supervision, workplace conditions, and logistics. Measuring a culture involves a complex metric of perceptions, workplace realities, past accident history, and inter-connectivity of the people.

Perceptions are an important consideration when determining methods to improve safety or other aspects of performance. Perceptions affect behaviors, and they should be measured to determine a starting place for cultural modification efforts. Perception surveys can help identify areas for improvement and can serve as a baseline for measuring the effectiveness of improvement efforts.

The workshop focuses on how to measure, understand, and manage the perceptions that either facilitate or impede achieving and sustaining safety excellence. Attendees will be provided with extensive examples of perception survey report templates and detailed examples of different reporting styles.

During this workshop you will learn how to:

• Build Support
• Define the scope
• Determine the goals
• Define the users and audience
• Define terminology
• Determine categories and appropriate statement
• Tools to analyze and categorize findings
• How to administer electronically and manually
• How to maintain trust in the survey process and hidden pitfalls to avoid
• Categorize the results by focusing on internally-implementable action plans

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

269 - Assessing Your Safety Culture - A ProAct Safety Workshop

As a leader, you may have heard someone at your company say something like the following - usually after an accident or near-miss: "We need to improve our safety culture." The problem is, a "safety culture" isn't something you can just pick up like a new batch of hard hats or ear plugs. It's something that needs to run deeply through your organization at all levels - something that goes beyond mere lip service and inspirational "safety first" posters. So how do you go about getting, or improving, a true culture of safety at your workplace? In this workshop you'll learn how.

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

267 - Advanced Cultural and Behavioral Tactics - A ProAct Safety Workshop

Use the latest Behavior-Based Safety Technologies for spearheading safety process improvement, borrowing proven techniques from Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and experiences from over 1,500 successful implementations.

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.

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

264 - The Chess Game of Safety

Greetings everyone, this podcast recorded while in Grand Forks, ND. For the podcast this week I’d like to share an article written by Terry Mathis, published in August 2012 in EHS Today Magazine. It was titled, The Chess Game of Safety. The published article can either be found at www.EHSToday.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 contact us at podcast @ ProActSafety.com.

Have a great week!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc