Safety committees exist in many workplaces, and the quality of their contributions can vary greatly. In some companies, they fulfill a role of communication, quasi-participation, or perhaps real employee participation — for the few workers on the committee.

For many years accident measures like the number of accidents, frequency rates, severity rates, and dollar costs were used to measure the progress of the organizational unit because practitioners felt comfortable using them. These results measures did not reveal whether the overall safety system was effective, diagnose what was or was not working, or indicate whether the system was in or out of control.

I became acquainted with safety many years ago. My first acquaintance was on my first introduction to industry — an aircraft manufacturer upon my graduation in industrial engineering in 1952.

20 essentials for any program (part two)

20 essentials for any program (part one)

Last month in this column I discussed five factors that determine how much effort employees will put into safety (or any part of their jobs): 1) their opinion of the value of the rewards; 2) the connection they see between their effort and those rewards; 3) effort expended; 4) abilities and traits; and, 5) role perception.

What an employee, supervisor or manager does — for safety or anything else — is determined by his or her perception of “what’s in it for me?”

How the “anointed” influence safety programs

It’s easy to be “led down the garden path” as a safety practitioner. Let me explain. Or rather, I’ll let Thomas Sowell do the explaining. In 1995, Sowell wrote the best-seller, Vision of the Anointed (published by BasicBooks, a member of the Perseus Books Group).