Forecasting the 2007 EHS climate - Favorable winds for stable careers
Here’s the forecast for the environmental health and safety field heading into 2007: Professionals will find mostly favorable winds at their back for career security and stability, according to the 23rd annual White Paper survey conducted by Industrial Safety & Hygiene News.

This month, in the first of a series of columns on people-based leadership for safety excellence, I want to “LEAP” in — the acronym Steve Farber used to discuss leadership in his address at the 2006 Professional Development Conference for the American Society for Safety Engineers (ASSE) last June.

We all face career choices. Perhaps you’re a young EHS pro entering the field, or a mid-career pro downsized out of a job. As always, there are options. Put aside starting your own EHS business or joining a consulting firm. If you want to stay in private industry, your career can take four paths.

This past September I enjoyed my fourth business trip to Australia, appreciating another opportunity to teach Aussies the principles and procedures of People-Based Safety (PBS).

Action plans, response plans, contingency plans — all of these plans do the same thing: spell out how a business will provide an uninterrupted flow of products or services during an emergency.

America runs on Dunkin’,” goes the slogan for Dunkin’ Donuts. And much of business runs on too little sleep. The same could be said of many safety and health managers

A hundred years ago “The Jungle” was self-published by 27-year-old Upton Sinclair, after rejections from publishers uninterested in a grim novel dedicated to “the workingmen of America.” To research his exposé of squalid working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking factories, Sinclair conducted his own hazard recognition walkarounds. Dressed in shabby clothes and carrying a lunch bucket, he wandered the vast Armour facilities unquestioned by what little security existed at the plant.

The answer to the question in the title is “yes.”
When we perceive an event as a challenge or potential threat, a physical and psychological response is triggered by the autonomic nervous system. Whether the stressor is external (an oncoming car swerves into our lane) or internal (an anxiety-arousing thought), its onset abrupt (a sudden emergency) or gradual (a long-term unresolved problem), this automatic reaction is essentially the same.