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Operationalizing the Characteristics of High-Reliability Organizations

Mar 3, 2021 8:29:03 AM / by DEKRA

For organizations operating in high-risk conditions, staying safe presents its own set of unique hurdles. What can leaders do to ensure they are fully supporting the technical and operational aspects of effective process safety? What are the key areas of focus, and what characteristics need to be strengthened to protect the enterprise and prevent minor incidents from becoming catastrophic events?

For decades, academics have worked to define what they call the high-reliability organization (HRO). The high-reliability organization is here defined as an enterprise that executes consistent and sustainable operations by creating a culture that anticipates and minimizes variation and implements high-quality decision making and controls.

In our white paper Building the High-Reliability Organization, we introduce a new approach to catastrophic event prevention that seeks to categorize the characteristics of organizations that stay safe despite operating in high-risk conditions. Unlike past attempts to create a meaningful framework of HRO “habits,” the HRO paradigm provides leaders with both actionable and measurable practices they can implement for sustained safety improvement. Rather than focus on individual behaviors found in HROs, which are helpful but hard to operationalize, we have sought to identify organizational practices that systemically mitigate risk. The result of this work is the definition of four measurable disciplines that together support the technical and operational aspects of process safety.

A high-reliability organization is driven by leaders and integrates strong cultural support for the technical processes responsible for catching exposures before they become incidents. Download the white paper and learn the elements to building high reliability in your organization. A safer tomorrow is only a few steps away.

Topics: Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure

DEKRA

Written by DEKRA

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