Practices to improve safety performance and culture have and will continue to evolve, due to advances in thinking born from a continuous pursuit to challenge the status quo.
Perhaps the best thing about working in Organizational Development is that I don’t hang around any one industry for protracted periods of time; I basically am called into solve a problem, that, once solved, eliminates the need for my services.
When someone dies in the workforce through no fault of his or her own it’s undeniably a tragedy. But in many people’s minds, line of fire injuries—those injuries that result when a worker places his or her body in the direct path of a serious hazard—the injured worker must bear at least some culpability for his or her injury.
It is hard to tell when observation processes first came on the scene. Maybe they came in back in the 1930s with H. W. Heinrich as he developed his ever so controversial injury pyramid.
To stay relevant, silence distracters and continue to help organizations eliminate death on the job, behavior-based safety (BBS) processes need to experience a “step-change.”
I was in an industrial facility speaking with a mix of workers and managers trying to figure out why personal injuries kept cropping up with some regularity.
It’s been awhile since I blogged about the role of behavior in worker safety. Truth be told, despite the tonnage of digital ink I have devoted to criticizing Behavior Based Safety, I am a firm believer in an organization’s need to address worker behaviors that cause injuries, but I differ with many BBS devotees on the best way to do so.
Many of us, if not most, like to see ourselves as independent-minded, willing to stand up for what we believe, not automatically going along with the crowd.
