Many years ago Hawaiian Cement employees designated four main values their organization would uphold: Trust, Excellence, Aloha and Adaptability. Today the organization is using Caterpillar’s effective communication tools, Speak Up!, Listen Up! and Recognize It!, to fortify each of its core values by building a proactive safety culture.
As a famous cliché reads: the devil is in the details. I often get asked about the details of a viable safety accountability culture. An example of visible executive involvement is personal commitment to safety accountability (S/A), to be involved in a review and discussion of appropriate actions for all significant incidents and near misses.
H. W. Heinrich changed the world of safety fundamentals forever with his pioneering work in the 1930’. One of his concepts that continues to make me think is his accident triangle (pyramid), a concept that we all are familiar with.
I use a concept called the Six Levels of Safety Performance as a practical model that takes an organization from a fundamental safety regs approach all the way through to an organization that is passionately engaged in leading the relentless pursuit of a zero-incident safety culture.