Serious Injuries & Fatalities

7 Insights into COVID-19 Prevention

Categorized under: Behavior-Based Safety, Safe Decision Making™ Articles, Safety Culture, Safety Leadership, Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Long before COVID-19 upended life as we know it, there were organizations demonstrating exceptional safety leadership. We are proud to have worked with countless safety professionals and leaders, from small companies and major global organizations alike, who ‘Get It’ when it comes to safety. We even wrote a book about what distinguishes a leader who is very successful in safety from one who struggles, called the 7 Insights into Safety Leadership[1]. Then came COVID -19 which threatened us all and changed everything.  Every leader and every worker, in every company we knew, turned their full attention to maintaining business continuity,...

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The COVID-19 Challenge — When Complexity Overcomes Capability

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safety Culture, Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: Insight 4

In my nearly 40 years of Supply Chain Management I have seen and managed plants and operations with considerably different performance levels.  Some struggled to deliver the basics while others were able to tackle just about any challenge and excel.  This pattern was evident in every company I worked for, regardless of the industry, technology or product line.  Over time, I began to appreciate the need to better understand an operation’s capability, complexity and culture.  Fully understanding each of these three critical components is the key to assessing the current state and essential to improving performance.  Performance excellence is achieved...

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Making the Workplace Safe from COVID-19

Categorized under: Safe Decision Making™ Articles, Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: Insight 2

Making the Workplace Safe from COVID-19: Let’s Apply Learnings and Strategy from SIF Prevention Over the past 40 years working with global organizations of all sorts on EHS improvement, I’ve never seen anything like the situation we face today. We have less knowledge to go on, more uncertainty and a larger threat than anyone saw coming. At the same time we have unique capabilities, in data and organizational understanding, leadership and culture, and we have unprecedented reason to be highly motivated. Mitigating the impact of COVID-19 is of special interest to every organization but of even greater significance for organizations...

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3 Questions Board Members Should Ask About Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention

Categorized under: Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: Insight 2

It was 1993 and Paul O’Neill was attending his first board meeting as a Director at one of the largest companies in the world.  Just as the meeting was coming to a close, O’Neill asked, “Where is the safety report?”  As the story goes, no safety report was planned but the question had profound effects. It set the company on the path to creating safety excellence and embedding safety as a cultural value. Board member influence can do that — uniquely — and it saves lives while creating business value. Powerful Questions Here are three powerful questions board members should...

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Serious Injuries and Fatalities Remain Level – Part 1

Categorized under: Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: Insight 2

In this video, Dr. Tom Krause discusses a disturbing trend. While most companies have seen recordable injuries decline, serious and fatal injuries have been level.  Further, strategies that reduce smaller injuries don’t have the same impact on serious injuries.  We must rethink how we approach safety improvement in general, and the prevention of serious injuries and fatalities in particular. Learn more about our approach to serious injuries and fatalities

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The Leader’s Mandate: Prevent Serious Injuries and Fatalities

Categorized under: Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: SIF potential, SIF precursor, SIF prevention

In 2017, the number of fatal workplace injuries in the United States dropped—but only by one percent. According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a total of 5,147 workers suffered a fatal injury in their workplace that year. That was an improvement compared to the previous four years, but in the big picture the workplace fatality count is still significantly higher than the lowest recorded numbers set back in the year 2013. The non-fatal incident rate continues to decline, yet the fatality rate has stagnated. As safety leaders, we still have a lot of work...

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Preventing Serious Injuries and Fatalities (SIFs) Requires Organizational Learning

Categorized under: Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: Behavior, Insight 2

About ten years ago a global client asked why SIFs weren’t declining at the same rate that recordable injuries were. That led to a study drawing on the data of six large organizations. The answers were revealing in many ways. We found that SIFs were structurally different than smaller injuries, precursors were identifiable, and effective prevention required a new strategy. As is often the case with original research, we confirmed an insight we already had, and we also found a new one. We confirmed that studying incidents as a series yields understandings that are not apparent in single events. We...

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Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: Innovation, Insight 2, SIF prevention

It’s been nearly a decade since our first study on serious injury and fatality prevention 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 precursors which lead to serious injuries and fatalities compared to other types of injuries. This work demonstrated that the traditional approach to safety improvement is ill-advised. For decades, the strategy was to reduce exposure at the bottom of the safety triangle...

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What is the Single Most Important Thing You Can Do as a Safety Leader?

Categorized under: Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: Safety Leadership

In this third part of Dr. Krause’s talk to a group of senior leaders, he emphasizes the importance and strategy for reducing SIFs. https://youtu.be/A2WlR3oksfw

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New Knowledge In The Safety World

Categorized under: Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Dr. Tom Krause speaks on safety leadership, to a live audience of senior corporate executives.  In the first of four videos, Tom emphasizes that new research has changed the way the safety community thinks about Serious Injuries and Fatalities. https://youtu.be/SF4c4K9WNJE

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