Investing in safety is the best financial decision a company can make. A common lament among safety professionals—if I heard it once, I heard it a few dozen times over the course of EHS Today’s 2019 Safety Leadership Conference in Dallas—is that senior management constantly has to be convinced that investing in safety is a smart decision.  It shouldn’t take much convincing for the top brass to agree that having a safe workplace is a good thing, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. Even somebody as highly placed in the management tiers as Jana Gessner, vice president of EHS ..read more

Create a system to transform frontline workers into safety leaders. In the past, employee training mostly took place during the onboarding process. New hires were showered with information and expected to retain it well enough to apply it correctly on the floor. Not surprisingly, this “spray and pray” method has proven less effective with time, as today’s learners experience the world visually and digitally, with one topic rapidly moving to the next. These days, learning programs that focus on reinforcement for continuous improvement are becoming the industry standard becau ..read more

Companies that are at the top of their safety game obtain the best improvement information from their workers. Safety perception surveys are essential safety performance measurement tools. For more than 40 years renowned safety leaders such as Dan Petersen have advocated their use. Many times Petersen has been quoted as saying, “there is no better predictor of safety performance than a safety perception survey”. Surveys reveal information critical to safety improvement that is not revealed by other methods of measurement such as auditing. The purpose of this article is to explai ..read more

To get their best work, Gen Zers say they need direct and constructive performance feedback, hands-on training managers who value their opinions and the freedom to work independently. If you thought you had figured all you need to know about how to attract and retain millennials, well there is another generation you must master. Generation Z, which are early 20 year-olds and teenagers, has their own ideas about what they want from employers. “If you want to be an employer of choice for Gen Z, compensate them fairly, ensure that they genuinely care about the job you're hiring th ..read more

Three EHS Today-hosted webinars, sponsored by Avetta Date: Thursday, December 12, 2019 Time: 11:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m and 3:00 p.m. EST (GMT -5, New York) Duration: 3 - 1 Hour Sessions Event Type: Live Webinars Cost: Free Register Today for One, Two or all Three of These Sessions!  Session 1 – 11:00 a.m. EST | Issues Facing Women in Construction | Kathleen Dobson Session 2 – 1:00 p.m. EST | How EnTrans Uses Error Reduction Tools to Improve Incident Investigations: An America’s Safest Company Success Story | Karen Czor Session 3 – 3:00 p.m. EST | Building a Safety Culture in the ..read more

Culture change is a continuous journey. Do a Google search on the words "zero harm," and the results that pop up are not entirely rosy despite what on the face of it sounds like a worthy workplace safety aim. While the concept has its proponents, it also has detractors. Critics suggest the concept can drive reporting underground or that a pure focus on zero accidents can be damaging. Siemens' Scott Kinderman acknowledged the ongoing debate about the words "zero harm" during a presentation at the Safety Leadership Conference, held earlier this month in Dallas. But, he asked, wh ..read more

Amazon’s employee involvement in safety is reflective of ISO 45001’s mission. Safety culture often is used as a buzzword or phrase. What really defines safety culture? In actuality, safety should be part of a company’s culture, and the two shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. Everyone from C-suite to HR to professionals on down should have the same core vision, values and beliefs when it comes to maintaining a safe workplace. It should be integrated into a company’s mission and everyday operations.  Carletta Ooton, Amazon’s vice president of Health, Safety, Sustainability, Secur ..read more

Implementing three key strategic decisions can help improve every measured safety process in your organization. What is your focus? Is it safety? Operations? Can it be both? Most organizations demand absolute safety across the entire range of operations. That devolves into easy slogans: “Safety First,” “Safety is our Number One Priority,” or “No Safety, Know Pain.” If you shift your collective aimpoint toward precision in your daily operations, not only will you achieve and retain the level of safety we all desire, you will also improve the performance of your team. A Navy air ..read more

Reducing workplace risk requires leadership and action, not just data collection. Moving from data to action is a step many organizations struggle with on their journey to a world-class ergonomics process. Providing the right people with the most effective education and setting clear expectations will make this step much easier. This conclusion was drawn from a recent conversation we had with a group of like-minded safety professionals from various industries looking to benchmark their ergonomics process. At the 2019 Humantech User Summit, as best practices were being shared ..read more

Decisiveness is overrated as a strength, as it doesn’t factor in individual bias. The “trait theory” of leadership posits that good leaders are born with certain traits. The theory says that if we can identify those traits, then identify people who have those traits, we can select good leaders. The trait theory of leadership is time-worn and has been thoroughly discredited, but its principles still echo in much of current thinking about what makes good leaders and managers. This is, perhaps, nowhere more evident than in the notion that good leaders are decisive. Take a moment a ..read more