Google “safety culture” and you get about 1,600,000,000 results in 0.95 seconds. Safety and health managers have long known the importance of culture – the organization’s values, beliefs and leadership - on safety, morale, productivity, engagement, presenteeism and absenteeism. Culture has been at the top of safety and health issues for the past ten years at least.

Our company has been roofing/remodeling injury-free since inception in 2004. The behavior of people is the predominant cause of accidents and the variable that is most easily changed. Although this article is based on our roofing experiences, the principles are easily applied to any industry, especially those that involve hard labor, high turnover, or dangerous conditions.

Most readers are familiar with the common phrase, “The errors of our ways.“ So why am I talking about the intention of our ways -- not errors – in this article?

You can’t deny the critical role of human dynamics when analyzing contributing factors to a workplace injury, or when developing interventions to prevent injuries and improve occupational safety and health.

Training companies include cloud-based training, eLearning, streaming video, classroom lectures, blended learning, behavioral observation training, coaching, comprehensive training processes for teams and workforce materials.

Not many people walk around throughout their day with a risk assessment in hand. We should, however, always have an informal risk assessment tool in our mind that allows us to perform at least a cursory assessment until we can dig deeper or in a more formal way.

It wasn’t until recently that we started understanding that people with different personalities tend to naturally pay more attention to safety attributes like work environment, people, equipment, processes, etc. based on their personality tendencies.

Allergan plc, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, is a global pharmaceutical company. ISHN asked David Eherts, PhD, CIH, Vice President Global EHS, based in Madison, NJ, to explain how the company is implementing the “New View” of safety.

Most organizations, especially those that manage higher risks, have a “requirement” for the workforce to stop work and get help when they are “unsure.” When you talk to managers, they believe this empowerment is what is needed to get people to stop.