"Safety for everyone” is the tagline of a 60-second Honda commercial you might have seen this fall. It tugs at the heart strings. A series of images is accompanied by voice-overs:
We sat down with Matthew Elson, CEO of SHE Softwares to discuss implementing safety programs, and a positive safety culture for workers. Below are excerpts from that conversation.
The total cost of safety cannot be underestimated. A life is priceless. Direct costs such as worker’s compensation, medical and legal expenses, and indirect safety costs such as training, accident investigation, implementation of corrective measures, lost productivity, equipment and property repairs add up quickly.
In our previous two columns on this subject, developing an actionable safety plan is covered in three parts. First Actions was explained in Part One (October 2017 ISHN) and Core Actions detailed in Part Two (January 2018 ISHN). The rest of this column focuses on Sustaining Actions.
Your plan must be based on your organization's vision for future safety performance. Frame it as a set of actions that will: Further a safety culture change from reactive to proactive, provide the functioning capability to lead the change, and provide governance requirements to sustain the change.
Practices to improve safety performance and culture have and will continue to evolve, due to advances in thinking born from a continuous pursuit to challenge the status quo.