Safety Meeting Topics
About Awareness
In this edition of the Flash, Paul raises some interesting questions about what being aware of a hazard actually means.
January 16, 2023
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Execution
On Further Review
This month Paul reflects back on the annual tradition of reflecting back during the holidays about what matters most and sending people home alive and well at the end of the year. He discusses the value of reflecting back on incidents and near misses — the root cause of root causes. And he shares his thoughts on the flaws in most investigations, but I am going to stop there and let him have the last word.
December 16, 2022
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Leadership
Seeking Understanding
This month Newton Scavone, one of our senior teacher/consultants, who was born and raised in Brazil, shares his thoughts on many aspects of understanding and why it matters to sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. He shares his journey seeking understanding and explains the difference, in his terms of art, between “square feet” and “cubic feet” of understanding.
November 30, 2022
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Safety Meeting Topics
A Little Doubt
Doubt is a feeling of uncertainty; a lack of conviction. Feel unsure, you’ll be reluctant to commit and take action. Thinking that sounds like a bad thing, but it that really true – for safety?
November 16, 2022
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Leadership
Owning Safety
This month Paul steps aside so that Gary Rivenes, one of our senior teacher/consultants, can share his thoughts on the responsibility of leaders to own safety — theirs and that of those who work for them. Gary makes the case that owning safety is critical to getting great safety performance but that owning it, without acting on it, is not enough.
October 31, 2022
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Safety Meeting Topics
A Reset
This month Paul takes a moment to hit the reset button when it comes to running effective safety meetings, and revisits the simple approach of asking the right questions to help you make the most of yours.
October 17, 2022
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Hazard/Risk
Recognizing Hazards
This month Paul does a deep dive into understanding hazards — what can hurt us – and hazard recognition. Actually, that is not exactly correct, he does a deep dive into understanding the failure to recognize hazards and getting to the truth about what really happened. As long as I have known him, Paul has had a fascination of trying to understand what really happened when things go wrong. He puts the “axe of truth” to the reported findings. He has done Root Cause of Root Cause investigations analyzing the findings of reports in his organization and those in the public domains. Whatever your role in your organization, understanding what he shares this month can make a difference sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.
October 3, 2022
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Safety Meeting Topics
Knowing And Understanding
There’s a world of difference between knowing something and understanding it. In this edition of the Flash, Paul gives some insight as to how we come to understand, as well as what might be done with that important knowledge.
September 15, 2022
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Execution
The More Things Change
This summer Paul has locked himself in his hut, affectionately known as “The Cave”, working on the Second Edition of Alive And Well At The End Of The Day. Last week Paul finished the task and has reemerged from The Cave. This month he shares some of what he was thinking about while writing. He reflects on making change happen, accountability and culture while discussing recent headlines. He’s included some insight into the writing process as well.
September 6, 2022
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Hazard/Risk
Hazards, Everywhere
In this month’s edition of the Flash, Paul lends some advice on where to look for hazards and some perspective about the environment around us.
August 17, 2022
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Popular Topics
Popular Articles
Your Safety Meetings
In this month’s Flash, we’re giving your safety meetings a checkup. Instead of another idea for what to talk about, we’re taking a closer look at how your meetings are going—and what makes a good safety meeting good.
Reliability and Safety
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Newton draws on four decades in pulp and paper manufacturing to explore the relationship between reliability and safety. When equipment fails, production falls behind, and the pressure for results builds, does improving reliability necessarily improve safety?
Real-Time Decisions
In this month’s Flash, we explore real-time decision making, what to do when urgency and pressure push us toward making faster decisions, and how to recognize when it’s time to slow the process down to make a better decision.
Running Red Lights
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul takes running a red light and turns it into a much larger lesson about safety, leadership, human behavior, and execution. He starts with a company vehicle that ran a red light near his house and connects that incident to the tragic runway collision at LaGuardia, where technology, procedures, radio communication, and red runway entrance lights were all in place. The system had controls, but the outcome still depended on execution at the point of contact.
Appreciating Feedback
In this month’s Flash what might get in the way of intervention, why feedback matters, and how a simple “thank you” can encourage the conversations that help prevent injuries.
Coaching Leaders
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Gary Rivenes explores what effective coaching looks like when safety leadership moves from the classroom to the field. Gary writes from experience: before joining Balmert Consulting, he spent more than thirty years in mining leadership roles, from supervising a seventy-person crew to serving as Chief Operating Officer. In those roles, coaching leaders was not a theory or a program. It was part of getting the work done safely and sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.
All “Those” Rules…
In this month’s Flash we discuss “dumb rules”, and re-visit an easy way to put on great Tool Box Safety Meetings. Unfortunately those sorts of rules are often unwanted and seen as unnecessary, here’s one idea to help you reduce the chance a new one might be needed in the first place.
A Case Study
This month Paul explains that investigation reports are valuable leadership tools not simply because they identify technical causes, but because they reveal how familiar execution challenges—such as limited training, inexperience, weak supervision coverage, fatigue, time pressure, and inconsistent use of PPE—combine to produce serious outcomes. The primary purpose of an investigation is to help ensure an event does not happen again, but equally important is the Performance Visibility investigations provide: a clearer understanding of what is actually happening where work is being performed.
Situational Awareness
In this month’s Flash we look at static hazard recognition. Knowing and understanding where stored energy exists, which might not always be obvious, helps us ensure everyone goes home alive and well.
Looking In The Mirror
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, guest contributor and Balmert Consulting senior teacher Van Long reflects on a simple but powerful idea: the most effective safety leadership begins with self-reflection.