The Holy Grail of Safety: A Single, All- Encompassing Safety Leading Indicator


First, the bad news: A single, all-encompassing safety leading indicator is like the fountain of youth – it probably does not exist. However, there is some good news: There is a single leading indicator that seems to stand above all the rest with regard to its ability to explain and predict workplace injuries. This leading indicator is the information that is derived from conducting safety inspections and observations.


A research study conducted in partnership with a team from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) found that 75 percent of the variation in the frequency of safety incidents can be explained by the information derived from safety inspections and observations. Further, this team was able to build a computer model that could predict future incidents with accuracy rates as high as 80 to 97 percent.


How‘d they do this? You guessed it: using inspection and observation data.


Source: http://ehstoday.com/ Read more


A Zero-Injury Culture Starts and Ends with Leadership


Jim Spigener a senior vice president at consulting firm BST Solutions, has discovered three universal truths based on extensive research:


1. Culture is the ultimate predictor of safety performance.


2. Senior leaders make or break the culture of the company.


3. ―Very few leaders are born great leaders. They make themselves great leaders.‖


Spigener urges leaders to rethink their notion of ―culture.‖ He asserts that companies need to create cultures that place a premium on managing risk exposure rather than on avoiding injuries. ―How do you know when you‘re succeeding in safety? People don‘t get hurt,‖ Spigener said. ―


In his analysis of 1,700 workplace fatalities and his interviews with thousands of injured workers, Spigener has found that none of the workers expected to get hurt. However, all of them were aware that they were exposing themselves to risk levels that exceeded their employers‘ standards. ―Any time you let the exposure rise above what the organization has systematically put in place to protect you, you‘ve lost control of the outcome. You‘re gambling. ―So the culture that I‘m talking about is a culture where you can get people to


begin to value [managing risk exposure] and not the injury that might occur as a result of that [exposure].‖


―Safety is not some abstract thing,‖ he said. ―It‘s not about numbers. It really is about your connection to the sanctity of human life. Because that is the most important thing that we own as a human race – nothing else comes close to it.‖


Source: http://ehstoday.com Read more


Have the Workplace Violence Conversation Now by Chris Brown –


“When an incident of violence occurs in a workplace its’ a good time to address workplace violence —a subject that gets little attention before an incident has occurred.”


In October a UPS driver supervisor and his co-worker were murdered at the hands of an ex-employee, a driver. The shootings were somewhat overshadowed by the now more infamous ‗beheading‘ and gruesome workplace murder that took place two days later at a food processing plant in Moore, Okla.


While the UPS murder hits a little closer to our world in fleet, both perpetrators had just been fired from their jobs and had returned to their workplaces to take lives.


When is the right time to talk about violence in the


workplace? Perhaps now is a good time. After an incident, two of the many questions asked are: Did we see the signs, and could we have prevented it? ―The warning signs are important, but what is equally important is knowing what to do if you observe [the signs], and how to intervene,‖ says Barry Nixon, executive director of the National Institute for the Prevention of Workplace Violence, a research and training company.


The first step, Nixon says, is to simply get to know your employees and co-workers better. ―If you do that, when they‘re acting out of the ordinary, you can understand that something is going on.‖


That‘s not easy in the real world, where management must balance genuine concern with the perception of intrusion. It‘s easy for management to fall back on the attitude that the employee‘s home life is not management‘s concern, Nixon says. Or they may think they know their 20-year employee well enough and ―he would never do anything like that.‖


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