Toolbox Talks

“Safety Excellence”

Safety Excellence, Who cares?

• Worker’s Care

• Client’s Care

• Communities Care

• Families Care

• Companies Looking For a Competitive Advantage Care

• Companies Who Truly Care About Their Employees

Commitment Required: Excellence requires commitment by all of those who are part of the endeavor 

• Executive Management

• Project Management

• Supervisors

• Employees

• Owners and Clients

Safety excellence is like business success, it does not occur naturally. Safety Excellence Has Many Challenges. The better you know the challenge, the better your ability to find the solution or develop an effective strategy

• Time

• Money

• Resource

• Change

• Human Factors

• Motivation

• Passion for Success

The Critical Few: The “must have” ingredients for safety excellence

• Leadership

• Management Sincerity and Believability

• Investigate the Things That Go Wrong

• The Discipline to Learn From Mistakes

• Sound Decision Making

• A Focus on Prevention

• Regular Self Assessments

• Effective Communication

• Performance Measurement and Goals

• Employee Involvement

Lessons Learned Space Shuttle Columbia. Disaster in spite of rigor, process, and warnings

• Space Shuttle Columbia flew from April 1981 – February 2003

• Columbia – First Shuttle to reach earth orbit

• 28 flights for Columbia – 113 NASA Shuttle flights in total

• Columbia experienced no “mishaps”

• One mission cut short due to a “mission anomaly”

Key Lessons:

1. Well-intentioned people and high risk organizations can become desensitized to deviations from the norm

2. Past successes may be the first step toward future failure

3. Organizations, like people, must always be learning, especially from past mistakes

4. Poor organizational structure can be just as dangerous to a system as technical, logistical, or operational

factors

5. Leadership training and system safety training are wise investments in an organization’s current and future

health

6. Stick with the basics

7. High-risk safety programs cannot remain silent or on the sidelines, they must be visible, critical,

empowered, and fully engaged

8. Leaders must demand minority opinions and healthy pessimism

9. Leaders must ensure external influences do not result in unsound program decisions

10. Safety efforts must focus on the “front end” of mishaps (prevention), not the “back end” (investigations)

It is not impossible!

• How many individual tasks have we completed without incident?

• How many times have we performed an entire day without incident?

The Attitude of Excellence. Be excellent today and repeat it tomorrow. Zero Incidents Occurs One Task at a Time, Time After Time.

“It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living”. Oliver Wendell Holmes

Thanks, TO