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Policies & procedures limit your safety performance
Face it. Your policies and a check-in-the-box compliance mentality aren't helping to drive safety performance results. You might have plenty of foremen and all the correct components and processes in place, but the health of your culture - how everyone thinks, believes and acts about your organization's safety reality when no one is looking - is what's going to have a greater impact on your safety performance and success.
And before you start thinking about deficiencies in the labor pool and the effectiveness of your supervisors, consider this: a company's ability to achieve "the impossible goal of zero injuries" is a direct function of management's will to do so. In other words, everyone is responsible for his or her own safety. A safety culture, to quote safety-culture pioneer Dan Petersen, is defined as the way "it is around here." A highly developed safety culture includes involvement and ownership of the relentless pursuit to find a safer way. In this type of "zero" culture, no one tolerates the status quo.
Criteria to make it happen
For a sustainable world-class culture to emerge, consider the following criteria:
1 - Management is respected and viewed as credible because they walk the talk.
2 - Safety practices and behaviors are lived on a...