Not all safety rules are followed the way they’re supposed to be. Board an airplane, and there is one that is followed 100% of the time. Every single time a flight takes off.
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul turns his attention to diagnosing the problem of hazard recognition. You could attribute Kettering’s quote, above, to my father or Paul. Both masters of — solve the right problem! Sometimes you have to think differently, they did/do. When it comes to hazard recognition Paul’s message is critical to sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.
Here’s today’s question about hazards: things that can hurt you.
Think back in time to all the times you got hurt – including the minor cuts and scrapes, bumps and bruises, and the close calls where you almost got hurt…
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, as you rightly assumed, Paul has turned over the reins to one our consultants, Wayne Pignolet. Wayne shares his story about deers and safety leadership.
Some companies have a rule about working under a suspended load: in a word, DON’T.
Every company safety rule on the planet exists for a simple reason: something bad happened, and the rule will make sure it doesn’t happen again.
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, as you probably assumed, Paul discusses the assumptions we all make… and don’t assume you know what he is going to say. You might be surprised.
When it comes to our personal safety – at work and at home – we make a huge number of assumptions about things and people every day. Little ones and big ones.
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, Paul starts with an investigation into a fatality, sure there’s a lot to learn about getting meaningful investigation findings, but don’t stop there this is really about navigating a very large ship, in a very narrow channel, with lots of cross current and other traffic — changing direction. In the end it is about getting great safety performance. They say there is no silver bullet for getting great safety results, that may be true, but there are a few key fundamental things that are the difference that make the difference. Paul reveals them this month. I’ll be interested to hear what you think after you finish “Common Practice”.
Culture is best defined as “the way things really are around here.” That means every operation everywhere in the world has a safety culture.
In this month’s Managing Safety Performance News, from a restaurant in Siberia, Paul examines the differences and similarities of the challenges supervisors and managers face leading people to work safe the world over, including one very important challenge.
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.
