According to OSHA, businesses spend almost $1 billion per week on costs related to occupational injuries and illnesses. “In today's business environment,” according to OSHA, “these costs can be the difference between operating in the black and running in the red.”

A safety culture expands beyond the confines of physical walls and core hours. To effectively manage ever-evolving regulatory requirements, increasingly flexible work arrangements, and rapidly changing business demands, modern-day safety programs must be as adaptable as the individuals who maintain them.

We sat down with Matthew Elson, CEO of SHE Softwares to discuss implementing safety programs, and a positive safety culture for workers. Below are excerpts from that conversation.

The number of people getting fatally injured has not reduced significantly for a number of years. This plateauing of workplace deaths suggests that the strategies to achieve progress in preventing major accidents are providing diminishing returns. And so calls for new approaches to safety management have grown.

High-reliability organizations create the safest and most effective operations and then constantly re-assess for any possibility of failure before an incident occurs, including near-miss events.

Our safety programs, if they exist at all, tend to focus on participation and completion, rather than transformation. To be fair, the chief obstacle stems from a preponderance of wrong assumptions and dangerous misconceptions. Identifying some of these (see below) may help us as safety professionals become more effective in our mission.

We all love our spreadsheets. For years, EHS professionals have relied almost exclusively on spreadsheets to collect, analyze, and share data. We can do just about anything we want with our spreadsheets, and if you know visual basic, you can really have fun with them.

Being a safety professional is not black and white like what you learned in university, college or what a safety enforcement officer will tell you. It is in fact, different shades of gray. This you will learn as you grow as a safety professional.