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

David Libby

Aug 9, 2018

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

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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: HR professionals don’t understand how to get involved or with what to get involved. Let’s first look at the ‘how’ of engagement.  If the organization’s leadership team is strategically governing the safety improvement agenda, HR needs to be a key part of that effort.  As...

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

Tom Krause

Aug 8, 2018

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

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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

Tom Krause

Kristen Bell

David Libby

Jul 28, 2018

Categorized under: Safe Decision-Making, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: , , , , , , , ,

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

Tom Krause

Jul 25, 2018

Categorized under: Safety Leadership

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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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Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention

Tom Krause

Kristen Bell

David Libby

May 29, 2018

Categorized under: Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: ,

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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How to Accelerate Safety Performance Improvement

Tom Krause

Mar 4, 2016

Categorized under: Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: ,

Most of us know there is no off-the-shelf game-changer that will “fix safety." It can be seductive to think otherwise, and of course there is no shortage of consultants out there who have all the answers. But the reality is that any single solution generally addresses only a sliver of the real issue. Safety performance improvement can be accelerated, but creative, innovative, hard won battles have to be fought in order to make lasting, sustainable gains. So, how to approach it? Do we work from the inside out or the outside in? Do we gather internal resources or look for...

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Raising the Bar for Leading Indicators

Kristen Bell

Feb 26, 2016

Categorized under: Leading Indicators

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Over the past several years many safety organizations have focused in on leading indicators. The idea is that OSHA rates are too far down the pipe to guide preventative action, so metrics reflecting earlier activity are needed to guide safety action. In concept this makes sense, but in actual practice can be flawed. A panel of experts convened by the National Safety Council’s Campbell Institute recently surveyed a group of companies asking them how they approach the development of leading indicators. Much good work has been done by these organizations and it is helpful to see it summarized. But it...

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