The “Safety A La Carte Menu” – Your Recipe For Success!

July 2, 2013 No Comments

Is your workplace safety and health program stagnant?  Are your losses unacceptable?  Are your safety efforts more reactionary than proactive?  Do you strive to have a truly world class program?  If you answered yes to any of these questions you may be a candidate for the “Safety À La Carte Menu” system!

Like ordering a meal off of a restaurant’s menu, my “Safety À La Carte Menu” involves reviewing a comprehensive menu of safety practices, and then selecting for implementation only those individual items that you want.

This new process was developed over my 40-year safety career.  During my lifetime I have had the opportunity to – work for two international corporations with avant-garde EHS programs, perform original leading-edge research to determine what actually drives safety results, and develop professional and personal relationships with four well known experts on safety excellence ( Dan Petersen , D A Weaver,  and  Hank Sarkis ).  It is through these many and varied experiences that I have been able to subjectively determine for myself the specific behavioral, operational, organizational, cultural and risk management practices that differentiate the top safety performers from the rest.

In 1995, Dr. Dan Petersen told me this about “world class” safety –

“When you look at the research; when you examine companies with world-class safety records; and when you look at companies that have made real step-change improvement; you can identify elements that are present that other companies do not have. While each company will do their safety system differently, they all seem to have certain things in place.”

It is these core elements that are the universal drivers of safety success!  Large multi-national companies are already familiar with them.  Now I will share them with you.

I have identified and organized these essential core elements into an easy to use system that I call “The Safety À La Carte Menu” ( see below ) .  This new protocol can be used by any safety professional in any country to evaluate their safety program and to pinpoint its’ underlying strengths and weaknesses.

My methodology involved building a framework containing these strategic core elements.  This framework is then intended to be used as the foundation upon which the more traditional, technical, and compliance oriented policies ( e.g. PPE, lockout tagout, hearing protection, machine safeguarding, fire brigades, etc ) are built upon.

Over the last two years I published dozens of articles on many of these core elements on my website www.SafetyAwakenings.com.  On the below “Safety À La Carte Menu” I installed hyperlinks ( bold blue type ) that will enable the reader to go back to my previously published article for additional information on that subject.

“The Safety À La Carte Menu” is divided into four sections –  Hazard Free Work Environment, Optimum Safety Culture, Holistic Safety Organization, and Safety Management Systems.  I encourage you to review each section, identify which elements you already have and which ones you need.  Then, prioritize the importance of those on your to-do-list and develop a timetable for their implementation.  The Safety À La Carte Menu should work for any company at any time, regardless of where they are at in the evolution of their safety program.

For example, a few years ago a manufacturing company hired me to come in and develop their  technical/compliance-oriented policies.  I did not have access to senior management and therefore was not able to significantly impact their core safety elements.  I went ahead anyway and developed their many technical/compliance-oriented programs.  I soon learned that while my efforts did help with governmental compliance, they did little to improve the company’s terrible accident record.  I now realize my efforts were doomed to failure from the start because the technical programs I developed were not based upon a solid foundation of the core elements.  If I initially had been given senior management’s support in implementing the essential core elements (below), my later efforts focused on compliance oriented programs would have been much more effective in preventing injuries.

The Safety À La Carte Menu

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A. Hazard Free Work Environment

1. Comply with government safety and health regulations
2. Focus on preventing the vital few types of disabling injuries that are the most common at your company and in your industry
3. Adopt special safety processes to identify and control extremely hazardous exposures ( e.g. falls from heights, trench collapse, vehicle accidents )
4. Perform risk assessments to identify, evaluate, quantify and prioritize safety and health risks
5. Practice operational, maintenance, and engineering excellence by adopting industry leading best practices and technology
6. Establish policies for managing change
7. Be fanatical about housekeeping and organization
8. Go beyond regulatory compliance when additional protection is needed

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B. Optimum Safety Culture

1. Develop a culture for safety & reliability
2. Use modern management techniques to motivate todays’ employees and solicit their active participation in the safety process
3. Conduct perception surveys to determine if your employees perceive your safety program positively and to learn where the true strengths and weaknesses of your program are (e.g. Employer Finds Conflicting Safety Perceptions)
4. Cultivate worker trust, respect and cooperation by following these twelve maxims
5. Job satisfaction and having a cheery workplace reduce injuries
6. Apply behavior based safety principles
7. Establish open formal and informal communications ( with feedback ) at all levels of the organization
8. Implement a workplace job observation program as a means of coaching employees to performance excellence

 

C. Holistic Safety Organization

1. Top managers must visibly demonstrate that safety is a high priority 
2. Actively involve middle management in the safety process
3. Make sure that supervisors do something about safety regularly ( an integral part of their daily activities )
4. The safety manager should report directly to the top person at the company
5. Determine if your organization has an adequate staff of safety and health professionals
6. Hire third party, outside safety and health experts to supplement in-house staff when additional expertise is needed
7. HR should hire employees who are – technically qualified, fit for duty, alert, not risk takers, and drug free
8. Employees should understand and embrace designated safe work practices and submit safety suggestions

 D. Safety Management Systems

1. Establish a comprehensive safety & health policy manual ( OSHA VPP 54:3904-3916, BS 8800, SHSAS 18001, ILO-OSH 2001, ISO 14001, ANSI/AIHA Z10 )
2. Measure safety performance and hold executives, managers and supervisors accountable for meeting predetermined safety goals ( e.g. accident records, safety  audit scores, performance of specific safety activities )
3. Charge-back accident costs to locations and profit-centers
4. Address the special safety and health needs of vulnerable employee subgroups such as:  accident repeaters, young workers, older employees, shift workers, phobias, lone workers, handicapped, and women
5. Provide comprehensive safety training  to –  managers,  supervisors,  new hires, regular refresher training, and whenever an employee is assigned to a new machine
6. Focus attention on hazard identification and reporting
7. Investigate near-miss accidents as thoroughly as lost-time accidents
8. Employ ad hoc investigative teams to evaluate all recordable accidents ( use TOR – Technic Of Operations Review ) and share the group’s findings

1. SafetyAwakenings.com’s safety search engine ( free )
2. OSHA’s general safety and health references and other Internet sites ( free )

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