Workplace Safety Culture

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From OSHA’s final rule for electric power generation, transmission and distribution: Before each job, (i) In assigning an employee or a group of employees to perform a job, the employer shall provide the employee in charge of the job with all available information that relates to the determination of existing characteristics and conditions required by paragraph (a)(4) of this section.

The last few weeks I have been focused on the difficult task of drafting and analyzing comments on the draft ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 standards. This has caused me to focus on the issue of making commitments.
 

Next week I will be conducting the activities surrounding “safety day.” As leader and as a safety practitioner I was the logical selection. The notion of me getting up in front of a group of associates and trumpeting on about safety one day a year may seem laughable to some of my more loyal readers and downright hypocritical to my devoted detractors.

What a wonderful time I had with my wife, my daughter, my awesome son-in-law and our two grandchildren for 11 days in Orlando, Florida. We, of course, did several days at Disney World and one day with my friends at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the Kennedy Space Center.

As I was growing up, my Papa would sit me down to discuss reality, philosophies and other aspects of life. He would often pose questions that forced me to think through to a conclusion.

In 1980, Dov Zohar addressed various implications of assessing safety climate through a 40-item questionnaire in order to improve safety-related outcomes. Zohar wrote one of the first scholarly works pertaining to safety climate and I was intrigued.

Everything we “know” is retrospective. Humans have unlimited hindsight but limited foresight. This is most apparent in the preoccupation with counting injury statistics. Statistics in themselves don’t tell us the “story” of what they mean; significance is subjectively determined.

When all attendees understand their roles and responsibility before, during and after the meeting, a positive synergy is created. The group process technique focuses on the goals of the safety committee and creates a shared vision to achieve success effectively and efficiently by its members.

Who knows how many thousands of books and articles have been written about leadership? In contrast, blog articles written on leadership typically have 500 or fewer words. So, here is a short version that deals with my interpretation of material taught at West Point and applied in a practical manner by many individuals (with editorial license here and there on my part).