Developing a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 3

Introduction In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we laid out the reasons for having a written Safety Improvement Strategy, why an early objective is likely to be to improve the organizational and safety culture, and how to approach the measurement aspect. In this section, we’ll finish with objectives and start on the…

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Developing a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the importance of having a carefully planned strategy for how your organization will approach safety improvement. We pointed out that many great organizations who are serious about safety improvement, surprisingly, don’t have a coherent, over-arching Safety Improvement Strategy. Here we go on to Part 2: What…

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What Is a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 1

What Is a Safety Improvement Strategy and Why Do you Need One? It always surprises me when I see leading organizations who value safety lacking a comprehensive strategy to attain their objectives. The situation is usually something like this: “We are doing a lot to improve safety performance. Our leaders are serious about preventing Serious…

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Safety, Culture & Business Risk: What’s the Connection?

When Dr. Thomas Krause and Kristen Bell wrote 7 Insights into Safety Leadership, we were explicitly writing about personal safety within the workplace. We recognized that the insights would apply very well to other types of risks, but we did not focus on those applications directly. We didn’t treat the broad topic of business risk…

Connecting the Human Resources Function to Your Organization’s Safety Strategy

In some of my client work, it quickly becomes apparent how well, if at all, the Human Resources (HR) function is connected to the overall safety management strategy for the organization.  Too often the two are not well connected.  It’s rarely an issue of motivation in my experience, but more so an issue of capability:…

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Building Capability in SIF Prevention Through Data-Driven Innovation

It’s been nearly a decade since our first SIF study explained why so many companies were seeing recordable injuries improve while fatal injuries were level or increasing. Dr. Tom Krause, with collaborators from 9 global organizations studied the problem in 2010. They concluded that the disturbing trend was the result of differences in the situations…

Safety as an Organizational Improvement Strategy

If a client came to us saying, “We know we have some leadership and culture issues: Communication is poor, skill level of supervisors and managers in inconsistent, our people don’t un­derstand system thinking, and behavioral reliability is sketchy. Performance is suffering and we need an organizational improvement strategy. How should we approach it?” Our answer…

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Safety Leadership: This CEO Had One Core Mission

Paul O’Neill was the CEO of Alcoa from 1987 to 2000. Under his leadership, Alcoa’s market value increased from $3 billion in 1986 to $27.53 billion in 2000, while net income increased from $200 million to $1.48 billion. O’Neill began his first speech to Alcoa shareholders in 1987 by saying, “I want to talk to…

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How Senior Leaders Lead Safety Improvement

One of the most difficult things for a leader to understand is how we influence the safety, health, and wellness of an organization. It’s easy to know the outcomes we want – zero injuries and a thriving workforce. It’s much more difficult to know what individual leaders do on a day-to-day basis to achieve those…