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The Case for Safety

Kristen Bell

Mar 15, 2019

Categorized under: Safe Decision-Making, Uncategorized

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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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The Leader’s Mandate: Prevent Serious Injuries and Fatalities

Laura Fiffick

Mar 5, 2019

Categorized under: Serious Injuries & Fatalities

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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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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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