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Introduction Among the companies and institutions we have worked with, many have demonstrated what we would call excellent safety performance. They consistently apply their efforts and sound safety practices to achieve substantial safety outcomes. We have also seen that among these organizations there is a distinct set of "extraordinary" performers; organizations that take their safety performance to a discernibly higher level. These organizations tend not only to surpass the outcomes achieved by their counterparts, they are distinct for another reason; for them safety occupies a wholly different, and some would say unconventional, place in the organizational scheme. They see safety as a performance leader, and actively engage it as such. This paper examines the difference between excellent and extraordinary safety performance, the importance of creating extraordinary safety, the requisite factors for achieving that level of performance, and the implications it has for organizations. Exhibit 1. Data from a meta-analysis involving 73 organizations showing safety improvement results (available in full paper). Background A five-year meta-analysis of 73 long-term clients revealed an interesting trend in improvement in incident rates. While all sites involved in the study showed remarkable improvement each year, the top 25% of these sites showed a yearly incident rate improvement that was significantly higher. This raised a question: what is it about this group that accounts for such a difference in improvement rates? What does the subset have or do that accounts for such accelerated improvement? In other words, "What is the difference behind excellent and extraordinary safety performance?" Excellent safety performance protects an organization's employees and assets. Extraordinary safety performance uses excellent safety as a starting point for high-functioning generally. Extraordinary safety performers tend to sustain a zero-harm workplace culture, effectively prevent work-related fatalities, and leverage safety as a vehicle for creating a high-performance organizational culture. Interestingly, the road from excellent to extraordinary need not be a long one; once they have done the hard work of becoming excellent safety performers, organizations have acquired the requisite raw materials needed to become "extraordinary" performers. What's needed to make the transition is, first, forming the intent to become extraordinary and, second, developing an understanding of what that means and how to get there. Why Aim at Extraordinary? Achieving excellence in safety performance in the first place is not easy. It requires a concerted effort to align safety objectives with organizational resources and will. In our experience, this forms the foundation for extraordinary performance. Both excellent and extraordinary performers share a common starting point; they see good safety as the right thing to do. The question then becomes not so much why should an organization aim for extraordinary safety, but why not? Extraordinary performance is an extension of the work already begun, it is the work of optimizing the existing quality and reach of safety performance, and as a result, it is a way of solidifying the place of safety in an organization.
Introduction For many decades, the industry has used the Injury and Illness Incident Rates used by OSHA to measure the effectiveness of their safety programs. These rates represent the number of recordable injuries and illnesses occurring among a given number of full-time workers over a given period of time. They help in determining the injury and illness recurrence, over time, in your facility and to compare your company's record with that of the industry as a whole. They also help you in identifying problems in your workplace as well as trends of improvement in your safety performance. Three separate, but similar, incident rates are regularly calculated throughout the industry:OSHA Recordable Cases, Cases with Days Away from Work, and Total Days Away from Work. In order to calculate these rates, a simple mathematical formula is used:Formula (available in full paper). where, depending on what the incident rate is that you need to calculate, X could be:the number of OSHA recordable cases for the facility, the number of cases which involved days away from work, or the total number of days away from work. The 200,000 figure in this formula provides the standard base for calculating the incident rates and represents the number of hours worked by 100 employees during 50 weeks per year at 40 hours per week. Although these rates provide each employer with a good idea of their safety performance at any given moment during the year, the results are only a reflection of what has already occurred in the workplace and does not provide you with a tool to proactively identify existing risks in the workplace. Safety Index: A Leading Indicator The Safety Index is a concept that was developed as a tool to proactively measure the effectiveness of the safety programs implemented in the Baxter Healthcare Corp. operation in Jayuya, Puerto Rico. The concept was created in 2002 as an effort to keep improving the safety performance of the facility and to generate more consciousness and accountability at all levels throughout the facility. This Index is based on the concept of leading indicators, rather than on lagging indicators, and its purpose is to identify any existing risks and eliminate them before they cause an accident. Leading indicator is a term used to describe metrics linked to track actions that need to be taken to prevent accidents. On the contrary, trailing or lagging indicators (e.g. incidence rates) are measurements related to events or accidents that have already occurred. The Index is not a safety program, but an excellent tool or system to measure the effectiveness of the program. It is based on individual safety elements aimed at driving a site's safety performance while achieving changes in the safety culture.
- Government > Regional Government (0.76)
- Health & Medicine (0.71)
Introduction Throughout the 1990's many organizations focused their safety efforts on the front-line employee - and many became good at engaging the field and the shop floor in active safety roles. In recent years, we've seen the focus shift to the safety leader - including the safety manager, the plant manager, the head of HSE, and even the CEO. As organizations expand the scope of safety, what happens next? Is it possible to integrate these methods into one comprehensive process that engages all employees and provides motivation for safety improvement at all levels? The active inclusion of leaders in safety activities raises new questions about what engagement means; what it is, how to achieve it, and what sustains it across diverse functions and locations. While workers are present at the point of exposure and are critical to safety improvement, they are limited in the scope of their impact. Leaders, on the other hand, can make decisions about resources and organizational direction, but are limited in their ability to enact the particulars of day-to-day work at the front line. Getting safety right means engaging the right levels in the right way. This article discusses the safety interests and perspectives that are shared by senior leaders, supervisors, labor representatives, and board members, and how to motivate employee engagement at each level. Understanding Motivation The closest thing to magic in organizational change is getting individuals excited about what is going on. Most organizations have multiple competing priorities at all times. There are relentless cost and production-efficiency pressures. There are fewer people and more things to do. Time is at an absolute premium. Under these conditions, motivation can make the difference between success and failure. In safety, motivation opens the door to fluency in critical systems, the ability to detect patterns in leading indicators, and the vision to accelerate and advance performance beyond the status quo. Simply speaking, the problem of motivation is one of generating motion. Derived from the Latin movere ("to move"), we use motivation to describe of state of being in motion toward a goal. In safety performance, we say the motivated employee (or line manager or CEO) is one who is actively pursuing the goal of safety improvement. He or she is engaging in the work of improving safety; using safety systems, talking about safety performance, advocating the interests of safety in light of other priorities, and so on. In this sense, the motivation we are talking about is an active state. Motivation is also spoken about in another sense; the internal drive or interest someone has for working toward an objective. In this sense, motivation can be active (the leader is interested in safety and is actively engaging in it) or inactive (the leader is interested in safety, but is not engaging in it.)
Introduction Organizations face numerous barriers preventing them from attaining safety performance excellence. One of the barriers is the fact that senior managers aren't demanding excellence and therefore are not committed to or involved in the safety management process. As a result of this, the organizations managers and supervisors don't accept responsibility for worker and workplace safety and are not held accountable for performance. One of the largest barriers is that rules aren't being rigidly or consistently enforced. Those same organizations do not communicate consequences for violating rules and procedures. Consequently, employees challenge compliance regularly. In most organizations, managers, supervisors, and employees are not involved in constant hazard recognition and remediation. Employee risk-taking is condoned/encouraged and employees aren't held personally responsible for their own performance. Another barrier is that the root causes of hazards and accidents are rarely identified and addressed. Finally, goals, objectives, and accountability measures are ineffective or non-existent, and poor organizational safety performance is tolerated. In these organizations, work output, quality and cost issues strongly overshadow safety performance. However, the biggest hurdle for most organizations is finding a way to fix all of those things that is successful, sustainable, and achievable. Many organizations know what they must do to improve their safety culture, but have difficulty making it happen. When attempting to improve their safety culture, most organizations get stuck somewhere between theory and application. For management and employees at all levels to engage in any safety improvement process, it must be simple and cannot be overly time-consuming. Time is a most valuable commodity in any organization.Management-Based Safety is a simple process designed to help organizations get beyond theory and into practical application of safety management system concepts. The Management-Based Safety is a comprehensive streamlined safety management system designed to support: OSHA's Voluntary Protection Program Criteria, ISO 18001 certification and ANSI Z- 10 Safety and Health Management System compliance. In 2005, U.S. scheduled air carriers had 10.9 million departures. They flew more than 18.7 million flight hours. During this time they experienced a remarkable safety record of 32 total accidents with 3 related fatalities. That translated to 0.171 accidents per 100,000 flight hours and 0.0016 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours. Conversely, in 2004, U.S workplaces experienced 4.2 million OSHA Recordable Injury & Illness Cases. U.S. workers had 1.2 million Lost Workday Cases and suffered 5,702 traumatic workplace fatalities. Tragically, four of every 100,000 workers died on the job in 2005. 4.6 of every 100 workers suffered OSHA recordable injuries and 2.4 employee injuries per 100 were classified as lost time. Furthermore, it is estimated that tens of thousands of other workplace deaths can be attributed to chronic occupational diseases each year. Although traditional workplaces have improved their safety performance over the years, they are still considerably worse than the in-flight safety performance logged by U.S. air carriers.
- Transportation > Air (1.00)
- Government > Regional Government > North America Government > United States Government (1.00)
Introduction Traditionally, we measure the success of our safety program with injury and illness rates - failure rates. This session reviews some of the many leading indicators of safety program performance, but will focus on how to measure some of those leading indicators, such safety inspections, management performance, and employee perceptions. This session will also discuss a variety of software programs that allows expedient completion of leading indicator tasks, numerically weighted reports, and production of a scorecard. The Dark Ages In the past, and many of us in the present, measure the performance of our safety and health management programs based on our failures. Let's take a look at how that is done. We use the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics Incident Rate to measure ourselves against our prior performance, against others in our industry, and against the nation-wide incident rates. As defined by the U.S. Department of Labor, the "Incidence rate (Safety and Health Statistics) represents the number of injuries and/or illnesses per 100 full-time workers, calculated as follows: (N/EH) × 200,000, where: N = number of injuries and/or illnesses, EH = total hours worked by all employees during the calendar year, and 200,000 = base for 100 full-time equivalent workers (working 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year)." (Number of incidents / Total Hours Worked) × 200,000 = Incident Rate We use the same basic formula to measure severity incident rates, how badly we failed to prevent injury or illness per 100 full-time equivalent employees. (Number of lost days / Total Hours Worked) × 200,000 = Severity Rate Many organizations, both private and public, such as school districts and government entities, have large numbers of salaried employees whose hours are not recorded. These organizations select a constant number by which to develop their incident rates, such as the average salary per employee. Therefore, their formula might look like this:(Number of incidents / Total Payroll) × $100,000 = Incident Rate When measuring program success, some entities calculate their incident rate based on the number of OSHA recordable cases and while others calculate their incident rate based on the number of workers' compensation claims. Another method of measuring the performance of a safety and health program is to measure the average Costs per Claim. The costs of claims include: paid medical costs; paid indemnity; paid vocational rehabilitation; paid special costs, such as California's "4850" for fire fighters and police officers, where certain types of illnesses, such as heart & lung diseases are presumed to be work-related.; paid expenses, such as legal costs and mileage; and the amounts reserved for the future costs in each of the previously stated costs.
- Information Technology > Software (0.49)
- Information Technology > Communications (0.46)
What is the STS (Safety Trained Supervisor) Certification Program and who should be participating? STS is a certification program of the Council on Certification of Health, Environmental and Safety Technologists (CCHEST). The STS certification program has national accreditation from the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA). It has international accreditation through ANSI/ISO/IEC 17024 and national standards through ASTM E1929–98 Environmental. CCEHST is a joint venture of the Board of Certified Safety Professionals and the American Board of Industrial Hygiene. The STS in Construction was first offered in 1995. Its creation came from a joint request by the ASSE Construction Practices Division and NSC Construction Division for BCSP to provide a technical level certification in construction. OSHA recognizes the STSConstruction credential through a voluntary agreement between OSHA and CCHEST that was signed May 21, 2002 at the 12 Annual Construction Safety and Health Conference in Chicago. STS is intended for non safety individuals who:Are managers at all levels. Are first line supervisors of work groups or organization units. Have a safety responsibility for a work group that is part of other duties. Safety Trained Supervisors are not safety specialists or safety practitioners. Typical candidates have a safety responsibility that is adjunct, collateral or ancillary to their job duties. Their main job duties are in a craft or trade, in leadership, supervision or management, or in a technical specialty. Qualifications require 30 hours of safety and health training and two years experience in their industry, a minimum one of those years in a supervisory capacity. The typical certified STS helps an employer implement safety programs at the worker level through supervisory, safety committee or similar safety and health leadership roles. Safety tasks often include monitoring for job hazards, helping ensure regulatory compliance, training employees in safety practices, performing safety recordkeeping tasks, coordinating corrections for safety problems within or among work groups, and communicating with safety specialists or management. The STS safety responsibility is a part-time responsibility, usually less than 1/3 of the total job duties. If safety responsibilities involve a greater portion of job duties, the role is more likely to be that of a safety technician/technologist or safety professional. The STS establishes a minimum competency in general safety practices. To achieve the certification, candidates must meet minimum safety training and work experience and demonstrate knowledge of safety fundamentals and standards through a 100-question, computer-based examination. The test questions emphasize 10 tasks expected of supervisors with safety responsibilities and 14 knowledge areas that are demonstrated by the certification test. The approximate distribution of test question topics is shown in the following tabulation.
- Law (0.68)
- Government > Regional Government > North America Government > United States Government (0.59)
Introduction The purpose of this paper is to help safety professionals, owners and construction company supervisors attain zero injuries on construction projects by providing a guideline for implementation of a behavioral safety process. The author's experiences overseeing project safety as Corporate Safety Director in a large industrial construction company are the basis of the information herein, in addition to the information sources in the bibliography. Numerous studies have shown that 85 - 95% of all occupational injuries are caused by unsafe worker behavior; therefore it is critical that managers understand the importance of implementing a behavioral safety process on construction projects after other safety elements are established and OSHA requirements are fulfilled. Behavioral safety is not just an observation system. There are many preliminary activities that must take place before construction workers will participate in such a system. Management must first demonstrate to workers that their welfare is paramount and that everything is being done to make their workplace safe. Since the early 1990's, many large industrial firms have established a behavioral safety process that included a behavioral observation system. In the late 1990's, behavioral safety became a more widespread element of industrial safety processes, but rarely has it been attempted by construction companies, especially with the implementation of a behavioral observation system. Not even in the latest Construction Industry Institute (CII) study to identify the nine industry best practices was behavioral safety identified as key to safety performance in construction. However, although behavioral safety was not specifically named, those best practices that contribute directly to behavioral modification are highlighted in bold type.Demonstrated management commitment Staffing for safety Planning: pre-project and pre-task Safety education: orientation and specialized training Worker involvement Evaluation and recognition/reward Subcontract management Accident/incident investigations Drug and alcohol testing First, the Basics In "The Psychology of Safety" a book written by Dr. Scott Geller in 1996, he defined Behavioral Safety as a continuous process where target behaviors are defined, observed and when needed, intervention is undertaken and subsequently tested. But on construction projects, behavioral safety takes on other, more basic meanings. For instance, before any manager implements Geller's version of a behavioral safety process, the quality of work life on the project must be assured and leadership training for each supervisor must be completed and supervisors who do not have eadership skills must be demoted or given additional training. Dr. Geller advises that before a behavioral safety process is attempted that all other safety elements be completely functional. It must also be recognized that behavioral safety is just one element of a safety process.