Insights into your Safety Culture

Listen to find out what I learned during my time in South Africa. Essentially, it's most important to change yourself before you're ever able to begin helping others.

How can we ensure mask wearing compliance in the work place? Enter the T.H.A.N.K.S. Conversation. Based in behavioral science, it utilizes the practical utility of the simple conversation to reinforce difficult behaviors and shape them to fluency over time.Listen to Dr. Ludwig walk us through a step-by-step example of how one of these behavior-changing conversations might play out.

In this episode, you'll hear from Dr. Ludwig as he explains the importance of ensuring we are instructing our front-line workers how to be ACTIVE in their health & safety efforts and not entirely focus on what they should NOT do.Dr. Ludwig has over 30 years of research and practice in behavioral approaches to safety where he integrates his empirical work into his safety consulting. His writings and insights are found on his website at Safety-Doc.com

What does our global attention to hand washing during pandemics teach us about worker compliance around life-critical and other behaviors required for safety?

In order for a consequence like punishment to be effective, we must come in contact with the consequence. Using threats in an attempt to avoid danger or damage are simply idle threats that can be a dysfunctional practice that kills your safety culture.

In order for a consequence like punishment to be effective, we must come in contact with the consequence. Using threats in an attempt to avoid danger or damage are simply idle threats that can be a dysfunctional practice that kills your safety culture.

By the time workers find themselves in a position to take risks, we have already lost. There were a whole host of behaviors, done by a host of other people, unaware they have participated in perfectly creating the conditions for workers to take risks. We need to discover the interlocking behaviors that lead to risk taking among Front Line Workers.

Twas the night before Christmas And all through the shop Eight elves were busy working Even Snap, Crackle, and Pop

Get this in your head; tattoo it on the back of your hand to remind you.  Behavior is neutral. This simple mantra will set your safety program free of the dysfunctions that kill your safety culture.

It's a tricky thing to grow, this safety culture.  It's more than just an engineered process.  Luckily we have our families to learn from.

WHO HAS BEEN IN A TRAINING CLASS where some consultant is teaching you about “Culture”?  But, in reality, deep down inside where these things are hidden, you admit to yourself that you really, really don't know what this term really means.

Your safety management systems act like the structure of a building aimed at reducing risk. These systems can fail due to lack of participation.  They needed more rebar.  Ask yourself:  What behaviors do you need to build into your safety processes?  What must you reinforce?

The whole program is run by the safety department and few anointed safety enthusiasts who do the observations or supervisors, who have observations cards to complete on top of mounds of other paperwork. Employee involvement is nonexistent.   This may seem the most reliable way to do behavioral safety, but it's creating an undesirable effect inside of the operation. 

Your annual injury rate is a static number. It can define your safety program performance but injury rates can seem random. It's frustrating working so hard to reduce that rate only to have it bounce around arbitrarily.

When the costs outweigh the benefits, the safety-related behavior does not happen.