In this month’s Flash, we take a moment to appreciate the difficulty of the work done “on the farm”, and the importance of ensuring that every job ends in a way where no one could have gotten hurt.
This month Gary Rivenes shares a personal story about the perception of choice, and the importance of making the right choices when it comes to safety.
In this month’s Flash Paul shares some perspective on recognizing and managing hazards, and the importance of not taking “the easy way” when it comes to safety for jobs that might not seem particularly hazardous.
In this month’s edition of the Flash Paul discusses the basic principles of Hazard Recognition, and why keeping your “Guard Up” is so important in going home unharmed every day.
In this month’s edition of the Flash Paul looks into leading in a crisis and shares two important principles every leader should understand. Crisis or not, these principals are a critical foundation to any communication between a leader and a follower when it comes to safety.
In this edition of the Flash, Paul raises some interesting questions about what being aware of a hazard actually means.
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?
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.
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.
In this month’s Newsflash Paul discusses performance feedback – good and bad – and the important role good and honest coaching plays in sending everyone home safe.
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.
