According to OSHA administrator, Edwin Foulke Jr., OSHA’s current “big issues” are: #1 hexchrome, #2 pandemic flu preparedness, #3 global harmonization, and #4 permissible exposure limits (PELs). Among these big issues, global harmonization is likely to become the biggest problem for most employers.

For many years accident measures like the number of accidents, frequency rates, severity rates, and dollar costs were used to measure the progress of the organizational unit because practitioners felt comfortable using them. These results measures did not reveal whether the overall safety system was effective, diagnose what was or was not working, or indicate whether the system was in or out of control.

I bet most of you have used the term guilt trip when explaining personal feelings or when attempting to understand the behavior of others. What do we mean? Can we use this metaphor to improve safety?
Yes.

Once I had the chance to create a mini work culture. I was to lead a small editorial team out of corporate cubicleland and set up shop in a small suite of offices nearby.

I became acquainted with safety many years ago. My first acquaintance was on my first introduction to industry — an aircraft manufacturer upon my graduation in industrial engineering in 1952.

Training class is into its third day and we have broken into teams to begin identifying all the safe practices and conditions required within each team’s assigned work area. One group is having difficulty determining the safest way to perform a particular function.

Five years ago a major consulting firm sent its clients an e-mail in an attempt to dissuade them from attending the annual Behavior Safety Now (BSN) conference.

In ISHN’s July and August 2006 “Managing Best Practices” columns, we discussed two challenges to protecting pregnant employees from workplace hazards in the U.S.

Going back at least as far as the early 1980s, to the study done by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman in the now classic In Search of Excellence, and continuing today in the work of many management gurus, a small subset of companies have been identified as “best practice” organizations.

For all the talk about safety cultures these days, a reality check might be in order. And we received one last week via email from the Society for Human Resource Management, in the form of the group’s annual employee job satisfaction survey.