Articles & Blogs About Safety Culture

The Case for Safety

Categorized under: Safe Decision-Making, Uncategorized

Tagged as: Safety Culture, Safety Leadership, SIF prevention

Those of us who have devoted our careers to safety do it because we want to make a positive difference in peoples’ lives. Full stop. That’s the reason. But we also have a duty to our employers and clients to help them make smart business decisions. The good news is that we can do both – it is not an either or situation. The challenge is demonstrating the value that investment in safety delivers in a world so focused on the bottom line. This article is about the business case for safety and how time and investment in safety delivers...

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Developing a Safety Improvement Strategy as Part of Your Safety Management Plan: Part 2

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Safety Culture, Safety Leadership, safety management, Serious Injuries and Fatalities

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 should your improvement strategy for safety look like and how do you prepare yourself and your organization for successful execution of the strategy? Approach answering these questions with some caution. It would be easy to inadvertently undermine your objective by getting this off your plate...

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Safe Decision Making for Safety Leaders: Part 2

Categorized under: Safe Decision-Making, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: organizational safety, Safety Culture, Safety Leaders, Safety Leadership, Serious Injuries and Fatalities, serious injury and fatality prevention, serious injury or fatality, SIF prevention, Thomas Krause

Safe Decision Making for Safety Leaders Part 2: Organizational Improvement Strategies Introduction In the first part of this series, we introduced new research findings that point to site leaders having the greatest potential to impact serious injuries and fatalities (SIF).  Part 2 reviews the most significant situations and types of decisions for effective safety leadership. It also presents a new perspective on incident causation leading to improvement strategies aimed at SIF prevention. Let’s examine one case from the study of over 600 decisions leading up to 60 life-altering and fatal events. In 2010, a metal dust explosion, inside a metal...

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Dr. Thomas Krause Discusses Safety Leadership and Safety Culture

Categorized under: Safety Culture

Tagged as: Dr. Thomas Krause, Safety Culture, Safety Leadership, Thomas Krause

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What Is a Safety Improvement Strategy and Why Do You Need One as Part of Your Safety Management Plan? (Part 1)

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: BBS, Behavior Based Safety, preventing SIFs, Safety Culture, Safety Leadership, safety management

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 Injuries and Fatalities, and (we think) we’ve done the things thought leaders have recommended. We’re doing a long list of things aimed at safety performance improvement in general, in fact, our people sometimes tell us they suffer from ‘initiative fatigue’. In spite of all this our leaders don’t think we have attained the ‘strong safety culture’ we...

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Safety Management

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Insight 1, Safety Culture

Putting a solid safety management process in place, in any organization—much less sustaining it—can be difficult to wrap your arms around. One thing I think we can all agree on, however, is that you must start with a desire and commitment to having one. A case in point: not long ago, a prospective client (that subsequently became a client), reached out to me for help. He expressed concern that his organization had a recordable injury rate significantly higher than the industry average. He wanted to know what we might be able to do to address their safety management process, so...

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Plenary Session at ASSE Safety Expo 2018

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Leadership Attributes, Safety Culture

What is the role of senior executive leadership in the reduction of Serious and Fatal Injuries? And what is the skill set the EHS leader needs to get this role across to leaders? Yes, we want to reduce Serious Injuries and Fatalities (SIFs), and yes, our senior leadership is supportive. This is a necessary start, but not a sufficient one. Senior leaders need to know the important things they can do, what their role is; and EHS leaders need to know how to teach it to them. It is rare to see these both happening within one organization, even among...

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Portrait of an Effective Safety Leader

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Leadership Attributes, Safety Culture

You know it when you see it. But it isn’t always easy to articulate clearly, especially to those who don’t understand it to start with. What does effective safety leadership really look like? Here is a start: I know that safety is good for our business; for quality, productivity, culture, and profit. My most important priority within safety is the prevention of serious injuries and fatalities. To achieve safety excellence I must assure that I and the leaders around me are excellent safety leaders, extending to the shop floor through every level. I recognize my role in creating the culture we...

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New Thinking on Safety Performance Improvement: How Leaders Influence Effectively

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Safety Culture

Four segments with Dr. Tom Krause speaking to a group of senior executives. Leading edge thinking, serious injury and fatality prevention, the role of the senior leader, and how leaders create safety culture. https://youtu.be/HoC8XOns8N8

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Should Your Organization Integrate Worker Safety and Patient Safety?

Categorized under: Patient Safety

Tagged as: Safety Culture

After many years of safety consulting with organizations of all kinds, including those in health and medical care, I’m struck by the division in healthcare between ‘patient safety’ and ‘worker safety’. In most healthcare organizations these two types of safety have separate staffing, metrics, prevention initiatives and systems, and overall leadership emphasis. I believe this division grew naturally for reasons that made sense along the way, but for many organizations it is now time to re-examine the issue. Much is to be gained by integrating these kinds of safety and having them share resources and methods. Doing that effectively requires...

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