One of the great benefits of having co-workers is that they represent a “second set of eyes.” They can see what we are doing; they can see things we don’t see ourselves…
This month Paul explores another lesson to be learned about stopping the job and the decisions-maker’s choice. There are lessons about taking action or choosing not to that can be useful sending people home alive and well at the end of each and every day.
On the subject of the Coronavirus: yes, or no, are you taking precautions? Have you seen others taking the kind of precautions they would not normally take?
This month Paul discusses that the risks that scare us and the risks that kill us are different. He examines the lessons to be learned from the Coronavirus and how those lessons can help leaders like you send people home alive and well at the end of each and every day.
The process of hazard identification never stops. As to where it should begin…
Near-miss. Near-hit. Close call. Call it whatever you want: something happened; it wasn’t good; fortunately, nobody got hurt.
In this edition Paul poses some important questions anyone who ever works alone needs to ask – and answer – for themselves.
This month Paul examines lessons learned from a fatality doing a “Simple” clean-up job at a restaurant. The discussion is central to understanding how we perceive hazards and take risks. He provides some very interesting insight into the things that can get someone hurt, hurt seriously, or worse.
Recognizing what can hurt you is a constant and never-ending process. No matter who you are, where you are, or what you happen to be doing, you need to be on the lookout for what can hurt you.
Making assumptions may make work and life easier, but it does not make life and work safer. In fact, it often works in exactly the opposite way.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
