DEKRA OSR blog image

Weak Signals and the Importance of Speaking Up

Mar 9, 2021 1:02:47 PM / by DEKRA posted in Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure, process safety

1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went out for lunch with friends. When we drove up to the restaurant, we noticed our friends had just arrived and were getting out of the car. This also meant they could see me struggling to wiggle my car into one of the tiny parking places. When we got out, I was expecting some comments on my parking skills, but the first thing one of my friends said was: "Filip, the engine of your car does not sound right. That is a sign something's wrong. You have to take it to the garage."

Read More

Strategic Safety: Overcoming the planning blind spot

Mar 9, 2021 12:19:22 PM / by DEKRA posted in Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure

2 Comments

When done right, safety can transform company culture and produce dramatic results in employee engagement, production, and other corporate goals. Organizations better at safety tend to perform better in other business areas and produce bottom line results everyone can get behind. The benefits safety offers the enterprise, however, are often overlooked in boardrooms where the company’s most important decisions are made. Corporate leaders often fail to recognize the advantages that can be gained by including safety in strategic planning or the ways business functioning can be improved with a comprehensive safety approach. In other words, at the highest levels of planning, safety falls into strategy’s blind spot.

Read More

Operationalizing the Characteristics of High-Reliability Organizations

Mar 3, 2021 8:29:03 AM / by DEKRA posted in Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure

2 Comments

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?

Read More

The Power of Feedback – When and How to Get It Right

Mar 3, 2021 8:20:14 AM / by DEKRA posted in Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure

0 Comments

Feedback is one of the pillars of performance management. Leaders adept at feedback are better able to influence behavior, redirect performance, build understanding of organizational objectives, and demonstrate leadership.

Read More

Safety Leadership: Decision-Making and Safer Outcomes

Feb 23, 2021 9:22:54 AM / by DEKRA posted in Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure

0 Comments

This article was first published in the February 2017 issue of Safety+Health magazine.

Sometimes a single decision can make the difference between going home safe and not. We’re good at identifying a single poor decision (for example, failure to alert the next shift of an offline pump or missing a specific step in a complicated procedure), but few understand what it takes to make a safe decision. Advances in human factors, technology and neuroscience are changing that. The challenge is understanding what safe decision making looks like and how to develop and deploy it systematically.

Read More

Motivating Managers to Lead Safety

Feb 23, 2021 9:08:24 AM / by DEKRA posted in Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure

0 Comments

In most organizations, managers have few opportunities to think about the underlying principles of safety, let alone know how to apply solutions for reducing injury exposures in the workplace.

Read More

How Generation Gaps Can Impact Your Safety Experience at Work

Feb 13, 2021 1:57:46 PM / by DEKRA posted in Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure, analytics

0 Comments

I was there with a 50-something year old supervisor and an 18-year-old front line worker.” That’s how DEKRA Consultant Erika Gwilt begins her story demonstrating the difference between the generations in safety. “And we were talking about how things have changed and the supervisor said, "Well, you know back when I started out with the railroad, they taught us how to get on and off moving equipment. That was something we got trained to do. Today there's a rule against getting on and off moving equipment. You're not allowed to do it. And my knees are the reason why! My knees are pretty much wrecked and part of that is jumping off stuff. That's why the rule has changed the way it has.”

Read More

The 4 Measurable Safety Disciplines of High-Reliability Organizations

Feb 13, 2021 1:50:00 PM / by DEKRA posted in Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure, analytics

3 Comments

Since the 1980s, academics have worked to define the practices and methodologies of high-reliability organizations (HROs). These are enterprises that execute consistent and sustainable operations by creating a culture that anticipates and minimizes variation and implements high-quality decision making and controls.

Read More

DEKRA's Employee-Led Safety System Transforms Performance

Feb 5, 2021 1:23:03 PM / by DEKRA posted in Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure, analytics

0 Comments

Keeping workers safe is an organizational priority, and one of the most effective ways to protect frontline employees is behavior-based safety (BBS). While some so-called BBS processes masquerade as true employee-driven safety systems, they are in fact little more than behavioral checklists that fail to integrate organizational elements essential to sustained success.

Read More

Short-Term Project Safety and Reliability on Time and on Budget

Feb 5, 2021 1:13:05 PM / by DEKRA posted in Serious Injury and Fatality, safety, organizational safety, DEKRA, workplace injuries, Workplace safety, safety leadership, culture, exposure

0 Comments

Traditional safety programs are designed for the long haul. They build safety into the organizational culture in layers over time. But for short-term projects like turnarounds, shutdowns, and on construction sites, the traditional approach isn’t fast enough. In the time it takes traditional programs to make gains in the culture and reorient the organization around exposure control and safe work practices, the short-term project has typically run its course. Moreover, because of their harried pace, high-risk jobs, and disparate groups of contractors, short-term projects can face more exposures than steady-state operations do in years.

Read More

Subscribe to Email Updates

Recent Posts