Safety Culture Plus

Ideas and thoughts adapted from my very old US Army leadership card:

SUPERVISION IS: The art of checking on the progress of actions and job assignments without harassment or taking on the job yourself.

LEADERSHIP IS: The art of influencing and directing personnel to obtain willing teamwork, confidence, respect and cooperation to accomplish the daily task assignment. Leadership is essential in developing a solid safety and health attitude among personnel

INDICATIONS OF LEADERSHIP:

• Morale – The morale of my area is high (How do I know?)
• “Esprit De Corps” – My personnel act as a Team (How do I know?)

• Discipline – My work areas and personnel clearly show quality and orderliness (How do I know?)

• Proficiency – My personnel know how to properly do their tasks (How do I know?)

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By Linda Bashwiner and Steven Galeotti

Our guest bloggers today are Steven Galeotti and Lydia Barbara Bashwiner.   Steven Galeotti, ARM, Principal of SRM Consulting, sgaleotti@srmconsulting.net. Steve has over 32 years experience in risk management and risk control consulting with significant expertise in risk assessment and Enterprise Risk Management.  He has developed a methodology for assessing business risk in organizations.  He has made presentations to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, the Risk and Insurance Management Society and other national organizations.

Lydia Barbara Bashwiner, Esq. is the General Counsel and Claims Manager for Otterstedt Insurance Agency, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. She is a licensed New Jersey attorney, and a licensed property and casualty producer. She holds the professional designations of Certified Workers’ Compensation Professional and NJ Workers’ Compensation Professional.

Do you have any unpaid students working within your organization? If so, are they working toward a degree? Do you have any unpaid workers who are not students? Regardless of whether the unpaid worker is a student, what are risk management consequences of having unpaid workers in your facility?

While the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled in 1999 that unpaid workers are not employees because they do not work for compensation or the expectation of compensation, the Department of Labor (DOL) has recently issued several opinion letters regarding volunteers and students. These opinion letters state when volunteers and students are considered employees and subject to minimum wage and overtime laws. In order for an employer to avoid paying a student or volunteer, six requirements must be fully met (see sidebar on next page).

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As a Professional we have an opportunity to conduct training. And when you do conduct training and quiz the trainees on the subject manner, some trainees got the message you were trying to convey, while others just did not get it. Does this mean that you are a poor trainer? Or is it my technique? We all, from time to time need to step back and ask ourselves the following questions:

• Could it be the way my training program is developed?
• Did I deliver the training in a logical and consistent manner?
• Was the training provided in a good learning environment?
• Do we tend to know our subject so well that we have a hard time conveying our message to others?

I challenge everyone to think about these statements for just a minute.

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April 28, 2009

Scott Gaddis

Operating an illness- and injury-free facility is no longer a dream. In many workplaces, it has become a reality—and not just for one year but for several years running. To achieve this success, a company must make one crucial decision: It must commit itself to making safety a core value. Better yet, it should make safety the organization’s chief value.

Safety Cultures Comes from the Top Down

In the past, companies have viewed safety as a line-driven activity that must first be implemented at the bottom and work its way to the top.  In fact, just the opposite is true. Safety must start with an organization’s senior management and leadership team that demonstrate their own active commitment to safety with a passion that permeates through the entire organization.  To read the rest of the story click on the link below.

The Effort to Build a Safety Culture Starts at the Top | SafetyXChange

If Peter Drucker were to sit down with your organization these five questions because they go to the very heart of an organization, why it exists, and how it will make a difference.

• What is your mission?
• Who are your customers?
• What does the customer value?
• What are the results? and
• What is your plan?

These are  five most important basic questions because they are the essential to understand the organization.

– The Drucker Foundation Self Assessment Tool by The Drucker Foundation

This is a great publication from Oregon Safety OSHA on Management Systems.

The Foundations for a Safe Workplace (4755) has a new look. We have added new photos and condensed the material so that it is easier to read and speaks more specifically to the subject matter. The text in the old publication is still relevant, but you will definitely want to check out the new version when you get a chance. You can view it online here or go to www.orosha.org, click on the A to Z list and then “S” for “Safety and Health Management.”  You will find it listed under “Publications.” We have taken out the CD in the new version, but you can find all the forms that were on the CD online.

This article is a guest post by Dan Schawbel, the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 09), and owner of the award-winning Personal Branding Blog.

Any intelligent company understands that employees are their greatest asset.

That’s particularlly true now. The Bureau of Labor Statistics just announced that the unemployment rate is now 8.5% and that there are 13.2 million people unemployed individuals in the US (16% of the population).

Companies are cutting back, and they have to make the resources they do have go further.

To read the rest of the story click on the link below.

Five Reasons Businesses Should Support Their Employees’ Personal Brands

What Constitutes “a problem?”

In “traditional thinking” a problem is something which disrupts output. It is something serious enough that it cannot be ignored.

In a true continuous improvement mindset, anything that causes variation from the plan, in any way, is “a probolem.” Any barrier between the current condition and the idealized world is “a problem.”

To read the rest of the story click on the link below.

The Lean Thinker – How Do You Look At Problems?

Time! – with each training class, consulting session, program audit and follow-up,  one theme is constant – the push back on taking on new activities, discussions on lack of time, pressure due to time constraints – a universal issue.   Time management books are must reads and can offer many insights – the classic work by Steven Covey, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” is a must read and provides thoughts on keeping the focus on the most important aspects of life.   Books like “Managing the Paper Tiger”, “Organizing from the Inside Out” and “File, Don’t Pile” provide ideas on keeping clutter down, files in place and by this means, find, you guessed it – more time to do that which is most important.

David Crenshaw’s book is an interesting read with the plot of a time consultant helping a time-deprived executive review where her time goes and what should be done.  The theme is obvious – Computers can multi-task – actually flipping back and forth between operations.  We have unknowingly used the term to justify our flipping between e-mails to cell phones to blackberries back to projects to interruptions in a complex cycle – convincing ourselves we are getting many things done thereby being “effective” and “saving time”.

Crenshaw provides comment and data about the damaging effectives and ineffectiveness of multitasking.   We are actually doing what he calls “switch-tasking” and with each switch losing focus and quality.   The restart after each interruption or e-mail check or blackberry response is hidden in our everyday activities and takes a severe toll on our quality of life. A very high percentage of each workday is lost!!

This is a quick and good read with techniques that can be used to reduce “switch-tasking”.  Time is well spend on books like this. Old habits can quickly reappear as the pressure to respond to all the electronic devices that we communicate through – believing in the myth of that we are effective when we multitask.

Nathan Crutchfield

N_crutch@comcast.net