Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in "The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS" three consecutive times. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence (2013, WILEY). http://proactsafety.com
The Senior VP of Marketing at a Fortune 500 company told me he wanted his customers to feel like buying his product was the most logical decision they had ever made.
The medical profession is concerned that the overuse of antibiotics is causing strains of bacteria to become resistant and patients to be less receptive to the most-used medications. The same thing can happen to safety when training is overused or misused.
Human nature involves risk taking; every human takes calculated risks on a daily basis. Safety is about removing risks, and thus competes with human nature. We can address this by trying to change human nature or by increasing the capacity to calculate risks more accurately.
A CEO asked me what the "secret" was to get employee engagement and form the kind of safety culture his organization desired. The answer is quite simple:
Define the vision, values, beliefs and behaviors you want a member of your safety culture to possess;
When new safety programs or processes are rolled out unsuccessfully, there has almost always been a failure to determine either the factors necessary for success, the factors that can contribute to failure, or some combination of both.
When OSHA set quantity requirements for annual refresher training without setting stringent quality requirements, safety training began a never-ending downward spiral.
When you think about the title of this piece, the first thing that comes to most people’s minds is an accident that produced property damage but no injuries. While that is a common example of this principle, it is not the only one.
In the classic movie, Casablanca, whenever a crime took place the police gathered up the “usual suspects” to show that they were taking action. The usual suspects regularly got blamed but were seldom the true guilty parties. At the end of the movie, even when they were sure of who committed the crime, they simply went through the motions to satisfy those in control...
