Safety Leadership

“There is no silver bullet for eliminating all error from the workplace,” says Michael Mangan of DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability. “However, organizations can put strong defenses in place.”

“Simply requesting that employees ‘remain situationally aware’ is not a strategy informed by science and will always be met with skepticism and flawed execution,” says Rajni Walia of DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability. “We need to consider how we can improve situational awareness when it matters most.”

OSHA’s serious injury and fatality reporting requirements have been in effect for four years. Don Martin of DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability looks at the numbers and offers suggestions for improving the reporting system.

Controlling workplace exposures requires understanding the elements that lead to that exposure, says William Bozzo of DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability, who identifies seven.

“Companies that fail in safety often are those that limit their strategy to ‘quick-fix’ approaches with no long-term vision of what they’re aiming to achieve,” says Guillermo Díaz of DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability, who poses five questions to safety leaders.

“Safety planning isn’t exclusive to the workplace. Safety must also be practiced at home,” says Don Martin of DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability, who says employers should encourage employees to “practice behavior at work that reinforces safety at home whenever potential risk is at play.”

“Organizations that implement oversimplified BBS systems are shortchanging themselves and their people,” says Jim Spigener of DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability, who encourages the use of system-focused BBS.

“Confirmation, overconfidence, sunk cost and optimism biases all are the results of the pleasure we feel when we’re right and the pain we feel when we’re wrong,” says Michael Mangan of DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability. So what can leaders do to overcome them?

“What if the human vision system itself is a hazard within the workforce?” asks DEKRA Organizational Safety and Reliability’s Rajni Walia, who says that “despite the fact that so much of our brains are devoted to seeing, there’s no guarantee that we see correctly.”

“As with most seemingly simple questions, the answer is more complex,” say DEKRA Insight’s Don Groover and Rick Smith, who contend that “one important point to understand … is where the organization is on its safety journey.”