You’ve probably heard the famous quote from General Eisenhower about plans being useless but planning essential. It’s as valid today as it was when IKE first used it but maybe we should ask, “If plans are so useless, why do we bother writing them?” Part of the problem is how we use plans. To many […]
Have you ever wished your workplace safety meetings were more interesting, more engaging, more productive, and more rewarding? Perhaps you desire to improve your work force’s knowledge of office safety or general ethics of safety at work- but you just run out of ideas on how best to do this. Then you need not bother […]
The first stage in improving the level of safety in your workplace is to assess exactly where you are. This is your starting point. Then, you have to recognize the culture that exists in your organization and the factors that have created it. The culture is the sum of the experience, history, belief system, work […]
Setting out to modify or change the safety culture in a workplace is a daunting task. Working against you is the custom, practice and habits that have been built up over the years. However, this is not your biggest challenge. The biggest challenge lies in the belief system that occupies everybody’s mind. Again, this has […]
The direct and indirect accident costs represent the “benefits” (money saved) if we adopt the recommended actions. The benefits are realized because we will not have to pay the costs over the foreseeable future. To help estimate direct and indirect costs, you can use OSHA’s Safety Pays software. This is an excellent software tool that […]
When beginning a journey, the two most important things to know are: where are you now and where do you want to go. Next, you need a map to see how to get from here to there. When building a positive safety culture in the workplace, you must begin by assessing where you are right […]
The first steps are to establish what are you going to measure. What are the measures that you can apply that will indicate the level of safety performance? Firstly, we must eliminate the measurement of injuries and the severity of injuries because they are a byproduct of safety performance. Although they are very popular measures, […]
Before you can introduce a change to your safety culture you have to make sure that you know exactly what it is currently. Remember that a culture is built up over a period through behavior, anecdotes, stories, boundaries of behavior, way of doing things, events that pass without comment, events that cause problems and so […]
Workplace accidents cost companies approx $1 billion weekly in direct worker’s compensation costs, with an estimated $3 billion weekly in indirect costs! A quality accident investigation program can reduce workplace injuries by properly identifying hazards that have caused an injury, and taking appropriate actions to eliminate those workplace hazards. So what does OSHA […]
Part of a quality incident investigation program is properly training for those tasked with investigating after an accident. This training is geared for beginners, to get a foundation in incident investigation techniques. As skills grow I have more advanced investigation trainings available. This training covers fundamentals of incident investigation such as: the importance of root […]