"Safety for everyone” is the tagline of a 60-second Honda commercial you might have seen this fall. It tugs at the heart strings. A series of images is accompanied by voice-overs:
Last issue, we discussed whether it was hazards or is it hazardous energy. The conclusion is that it's really hazardous or potentially hazardous energy… which can move. People can also move, which means that eyes and mind on task are very important, which means that human error is important whenever people are moving or things around them are moving.
A rather simple description of culture is: That’s just the way we do things around here. From a safety & health perspective, the way things are done stays the same until someone or some group, with the competency and power to make change, becomes dissatisfied with the S&H status quo.
What’s relevant in 2019 cannot be neatly captured in a news story. We’re talking about issues with origins that stretch back years if not decades, and will have no ending this year.
The term “Safety culture” has become like the term “engagement” in popular management writings. There is no common agreement on the term. We are left with (mis)interpretations of terms like “safety culture,” which lead to haphazard attempts at changing organizations toward improvement.
A decade-old standard developed to help companies with risk management has been revised and adopted as a U.S. national standard. The new version reflects the evolution of risk management from a separate, departmentalized activity to an integrated management competency.
The hard part is getting teams to buy into the team vision to play selfless and trust that if they focus on all the intangibles, the scoring will come and at the end of the game the scoreboard will reflect their efforts.
The Federal Advisory Council on Occupational Safety and Health (FACOSH) – the group that advises the Secretary of Labor on all matters relating to the occupational safety and health of federal employees – will meet on Sept. 8, 2016, in Washington, D.C.
Recently, someone who is engaged in the DC political scene for safety told me that the failure of the current administration’s OSHA to issue an injury and illness prevention plan standard (or I2P2) was an historic lost opportunity for OSH professionals and ASSE members.
