Improvement efforts are consistently more successful if they begin from a known starting point. The purpose of an assessment is to determine that starting point, while exploring feasibility, identifying barriers, and determining optional paths forward.

ProAct Safety® has performed over 1,000 site assessments and has helped many organizations to develop customized perception surveys, interview strategies, and methods to analyze safety data to ground the perception findings. Measuring perceptions alone is an inadequate way to understand a culture.

Let ProAct Safety perform a consultant-led assessment or help your organization to develop your own customized method for assessing your site or organizational safety culture.

Safety Culture Perception Tool

ProAct Safety has a perception survey for safety culture which can be purchased along with its own tabulation and analytical instructions. ProAct Safety can also tabulate and write an analysis of your surveys if you choose to contract with us.

Our perception survey can be used as-is, but we recommend that our survey be used as a template to create a customized survey for your organization. This customization can be accomplished in a one-day meeting between your key personnel and a ProAct Safety consultant. All aspects of the customization including terminology, language translations, and modifications to the analytical tools can be accomplished through ProAct Safety.

Onsite Assessments

A culture is made up of common practices, attitudes, and perceptions of risks that influence behavioral choices at work and away from work. Culture is also influenced by management leadership, supervision, workplace conditions and logistics. Measuring a culture involves a complex metric of perceptions, workplace realities, past accident history, and inter-connectivity of the people.

The assessment process included the following:

• Site tour to determine behavioral and environmental issues
• Review of safety documentation including accident investigation and other reports to determine existing behavioral risk trends, as well as documentation of the traditional safety process evaluated from a high level traditional safety gap analysis approach
• Administering, scoring and interpreting of a customized safety perception survey
• Individual interviews with key site managers
• Group interviews with supervisors, workers and elected union members
• Site preliminary briefing with leadership
• Detailed internally-actionable report

Safety Communication Analysis

Many organizations have never analyzed their safety communication, evaluated its effectiveness, or explored opportunities to improve it. ProAct Safety can help you with all three steps and leave you with an increased awareness and an improvement plan. Much of this work can be done over the phone and Internet with a minimum amount of onsite consultant time. Approaches and costs vary significantly with organizational size and logistical issues.

Incentives and motivational programs cost organizations millions of dollars each year and often actually cause more problems than they solve. ProAct Safety® can perform an analysis of your existing programs and processes and help you to determine what is working and what needs to be changed. A complete plan will be formulated to transform some or all of the elements of your program to carefully avoid common problems and to provide timely results to build momentum for change.

ProAct Safety helps organizations maximize the effectiveness of their leadership development efforts by taking a more strategic rather than programmatic approach. Efforts should not just result in an appreciation for the experience, leadership development should measurably enhance knowledge and capabilities, and align beliefs and behaviors that contribute to business performance improvement.

Successful organizations realize everything rises and falls under leadership responsibility. These same organizations realize leadership development is not an event; it is an evolving process complementing all facets of business operations.

Improving the capabilities of those in a leadership position is viewed as a top initiative in many organizations. Employee morale and behavior, results and culture are all the responsibility of organizational leadership. After all, if the leaders aren't leading, we can't expect the followers to follow, or be motivated to do so.

Most effective executives, when discovering the need to improve leadership capabilities within their organization, demand a quick response because of the realized substantial potential in the investment. There can be a remarkable difference in doing things right versus right now.

Please contact us if you would like to discuss your objectives, range of options, expectations and required results.

Safety Leadership Development

"When the leaders don't lead, the followers don't follow." This is especially true in safety. Leaders constantly communicate priorities and strategies to their workers, whether they intend to or not. With training, leaders can take active control of the messages they send to promote safety as an organizational value. They can set levels of expectation that point everyone in the direction of safety excellence and exert a positive influence on the formation of safety culture.

Safety Cop or Coach?

Most managers and supervisors don't have the latest training and tools for safety performance, rather than policing for safety results. . This lack of training often results in trying to police the workforce rather than coaching, which impacts performance in the absence of the leader. Policing safety has proven to be a less-than-perfect method of improving accident and severity rates and often promotes underreporting. Becoming an effective coach can leverage a manager's or supervisor's influence to make significant gains in accident reductions. Coaching skills also improve other areas of performance including quality and productivity as well as safety. The benefits to the organization impact almost every area of human performance.

Training Leaders to be Safety Coaches

The training contains the latest behavioral coaching techniques and directly applies them to improving safety. A model for counseling problem employees or addressing serious safety situations is also included. The design of the training utilizes advanced learning techniques and helps attendees to apply the models in the classroom to reality-based scenarios right out of the workplace. It is important that this training be customized to fit your culture, existing leadership styles and work environment for relevancy and rapid results.

Results

Organizations that have implemented Leadership Safety Coaching have experienced accident reduction up to 55% the first year. Some organizations have used this training to prepare for employee-involvement safety strategies such as Behavior-Based Safety or OSHA's VPP and others have used it after such initiatives. Whatever your current status, providing these skills to your leaders can have a significant impact on the overall safety culture within your organization.

Since 1984 Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) has proven to be an effective tool for the reduction of workplace accidents. While the business climate has changed dramatically since 1984, Behavior-Based Safety has changed little. Even a proven technology or any pre-defined methodology with documented results eventually must evolve or become obsolete.

Lean Behavior-Based Safety (Lean BBS) is an enhanced approach and improvement to traditional Behavior-Based Safety, utilizing aspects of performance and quality systems to drastically reduce the typical internal resource requirements of a Behavior-Based Safety process. Lean Behavior-Based Safety focuses on leveraged (efficient and effective) use of resources. This leaner model is as easy to implement and provides greater and faster return than the resource-intensive, wait and see approaches. Every methodology that produces results must continue to evolve or it will fail to produce new value.

Whether you have an existing process or exploring a new approach to safety improvement, there are many different methods to internalize this capability (i.e., public and private implementation and improvement workshops, hybrid-implementations, fully-supported implementations). Contact us to discuss which approach would produce the most value for you.

Failing less, reducing injuries, implementing programs, and improving performance or involvement are not strategies, they are desirable destinations. Without a clear purpose, vision, goals and measurements of progress, how does an organization know results are being accomplished because of the initiatives or luck? Organizations executing initiatives to improve and achieve safety excellence must ensure their activities are deploying against a strategy.

Excellence is the ability to duplicate and sustain success. Strategies to achieve this desirable outcome will be elusive if the information flow is compromised, decision rights are vague, proactive accountability is absent and if the motivational impact of visible progress is forgotten. Moreover, if you, the leader, are unable to describe in vivid detail what excellence looks like and your strategy to achieve it, don't expect others can. Visions, missions, goals and strategies are only as effective as the population's ability to repeat them, believe in them, and the leader's ability to measure leading-indicator progress towards achieving them. Absent a detailed vision and strategy, your results will fluctuate, with sustainable improvement being only an elusive dream.

ProAct Safety®'s Strategy Practice assists organizations to develop and execute a safety excellence strategy, obtaining breakthrough results in culture and performance. Contact ProAct Safety to discuss and explore a range of path strategies to fit your organization.

ProAct Safety can bring any of our existing workshops to your site or preferred location and customize the content for your organization. Custom workshops can also be developed to help meet specific needs.

Additionally, we publicly host our most demanded workshops a few times each year for organizations that cannot justify their own workshop or for to send those who missed private workshops. These public events are also excellent opportunities to preview the workshops to see if they fit your needs.

Public Workshop:

• Lean BBS Internal Consultant Certification
• STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence^SM Workshop
• Leadership Safety Coaching
• Safety Excellence Master Class
• Inside Strategy

Additional Private Workshops:

• Contact Us to discuss scheduling a private workshop for your company.
• Advanced Cultural & Behavioral Tactics
• Assessing & Developing Your Safety Culture
• Behavior-Based Safety 101
• Developing a Custom Perception Survey
• Developing Leadership Safety Roles
• Forecasting Tomorrow
• Incentives, Rewards, & Recognition
• Pareto Analysis & Action Planning
• Private BBS Conference
• Safety Committee Development
• Safety Culture Excellence 101
• Safety Metrics 101
• The Transformational Leader
• Using Near-Miss Data