Thought Leadership

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I recently received the following inquiry: “We're getting ready to perform safety coaching sessions with some of our frequently injured employees. Do you know of anyone who might have a script to outline the dialogue?”

When Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis resigned her position, the talk became what might happen to OSHA’s planned Injury/Illness Prevention Standard (I2P2). Secretary Solis had announced this initiative in early 2010. The stated purpose was to require employers to establish a plan that would prevent violations of OSHA standards and that would protect workers from violations of their workplace rights.

If you’ve made even the most cursory read of my articles and blogs you probably already know that I don’t hold much stock in Behavior Based Safety (BBS).  I believe that except for the odd statistical outlier nut-job, nobody WANTS to get hurt and unless they were designed by the Marquis De Sade you processes aren’t intended to hurt people.

Recognition for doing things correctly seems to be a lost art.  Over the years, I have assessed perception surveys for hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of employees.  As I tally the results, recognition for performance of doing things right is the lowest scoring safety management process. Interestingly, discipline (i.e., correcting people when they do something wrong) scores as the sixth lowest of the 21 safety management processes measured by the Caterpillar Safety Services statistically validated survey. 

Senior leadership is an easy target for most any complaint. Politicians, hourly workers, organized labor, front-line supervision and middle management all seem to blame ‘rich, uncaring upper management.’