This Is How I Roll

Someone once asked me where do I get my views on safety. I said, Aside from my candor from my grandmother telling me, to tell the truth, and shame the devil and my persistence caused my grandfather always saying if doing the right thing were easy everyone would be doing it. The rest comes from study and just doing it. To improve safety performance, I start with the following: 

1. Change Management: 

Change is first. In John Kotter's book "Leading Change"  he tells us that change is a multi-step process which includes; establishing need, urgency, developing a coalition with authority, having a clear vision, communicating that vision, empowering action, generating wins, consolidating and reviving the inevitable lull when the initial change surge passes and lastly anchoring the change in the culture..

2. Perceptions:

Dan Peterson in his book "Safety Management: A Human Approach" he talks about how the new paradigm in behavior-based safety is, where we accept that there are some new axioms in safety management. The old principal attempted to boil down incidents to one single factor, but rather than that the new axiom proposes that a single incident can identify many weak points in the entire management system. Additionally, this new model embraces that hard to grasp “perception” or “feelings” both of which principally affect the worker's decision to follow the rules, push back or otherwise exhibit the safe behavior by choice when they hit that crucial moment or that too familiar Y on the road.

3. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): 

This is too often overlooked, a good CSR program offers many benefits which are too numerous to detail in this blog. However where it relates to a safety culture, improving perceptions according to The Social Environment - Boundless, "reputations that take decades to build up can be ruined in hours through incidents such as corruption scandals or environmental accidents. These can also draw unwanted attention from regulators, courts, governments, and media." Building a genuine culture of 'doing the right thing' within a corporation can offset these risks.

4. Safety Culture:

So considering the above I propose that a heart centered safety program, where teams Emotionally Invest in each other will generate a caring culture, interdependent on every member. A culture that fosters an environment where leadership actively seeks ways to understand and engage their workforce. One where everyone accepts their role in preventing every incident and culpability if they occur. All members share the vision of living a safe lifestyle and working safely because living-safe is part of their Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. When this happens, we see significant improvements in relationships vertically and horizontally in the organization. Also, there are positive impacts on worker engagement, quality, operational efficiency, human resource retention and even recruitment.