In the past year, six books by well-known authors have been published on the subject of goal-setting. Setting goals is a popular business topic and a popular focus for self-help books. In safety, goal-setting is a critical piece that many companies unfortunately don’t seem to understand.
Here’s the rub: either companies set unreasonable goals that everyone knows are not serious (e.g. “zero”) or they pay lip service to the goal and emphasize other priorities (such as productivity) so strongly that achieving the goal is impossible. The result: employees don’t bother trying. They may still try to be safe for their own benefit, but the value of the goal setting and pursuit process is wasted.