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About: Outsourced workplace safety experts for texas
We Believe
The foundation for workplace safety is caring for people. When your policies, procedures, tools and leadership practices show that you care about people and that employee safety is not just a nice-to-have, you develop an extraordinary culture and a highly engaged workforce.
Safety and efficiency go hand in hand – Caring for people means that their work is safe, and their job is secure. Safe and efficient operations mean you can compete and keep people safe.
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing – and you can’t have 500 main things! If you lack safety systems and want to get employees engaged, focus on the STKY (Stuff That Kills You) stuff. Overloading people with reams of procedures or zero-tolerance policies that mandate lids on coffee cups (yes, this is real) will not go well!
Learning should be relevant, fun, and create ownership and action. We use a What, So What, and Now What approach in our safety workshops.
- Answering the “What” question means people have to understand the topic, free of jargon, abstract theories, or impractical concepts.
- The “So What” question is about relevance to them. We provide training that is relevant to their work, using pragmatic tools and hands-on learning approaches. We don’t just tell people what to think, we get people in the classroom working in ways that cause the lightbulbs to come on! The get insight into what they can do to ensure that they are operating safely and efficiently.
- Once people understand the concepts and why they are relevant, it is time for action. “Now What” is about taking the concepts from the classroom to the workplace.
Everyone owns Safety. It is not the job a of department, a leader, or the employees. Safe and efficient operations preserve jobs and lives, which is why everyone should be involved. Even when a job is planned perfectly, things change, and your workforce needs to recognize when it is time to call a Time Out to reassess risk rather than pushing through and hoping for the best.
Managing Partner
Dan Prachar is the founder and managing partner of WorkSafe Texas. His experience over 25 years has taken him to 45 countries to work on safety and efficiency, leadership, and culture. Dan now lives in Austin but splits his time between Austin, Dallas and Houston.
Each company Dan worked for, and many clients Dan worked with had one or two key strengths or focus areas. The focus areas included behavior-based safety (BBS), process improvement, culture development, employee engagement, and human factors. One company was great at making learning, relevant, practical and fun. None of his employers or clients did all these things well, and many over-engineered safety systems to the point of insanity. That is why we formed WorkSafe Texas.
Our experience has been that if you train people on the proper behaviors but have lousy processes or the culture does not support it, you are probably deploying another flavor or the week. The Performance Factors Model® is the framework we use to create a comprehensive approach to workplace safety that gets results and stands the test of time.
The PDR Work Process was created after incident reviews showed that most performance and employee safety failures had their roots in one of three places:
- Poor Planning left people without the tools and materials they needed to do the job, resulting in inefficient work and unnecessary risk.
- In the process of Doing the work, people didn't recognize when they had drifted off task and it was time to call a Time Out rather than push through and hope for the best.
- Finally, people rarely took time to Review and capture lessons learned so they wouldn't have to keep learning them over and over.
PDR or Plan-Do-Review was the simple, practical and memorable set of tools to ensure safe and efficient operations. Dan and the team at WorkSafe Texas use this same "keep it simple" mindset in all of our work.
Do we know YOUR BUSINESS?
Providing the Missing Pieces
Our team is OSHA certified for construction and general industrial safety, and has broad experience across construction, oil and gas, transportation, energy, and mining. Even If your company is not in one of those industries, we can still have enormous impact.
Small businesses tend to focus on safety in two areas:
1. Systems –includes all of the rules, tools, procedures, equipment, and PPE used to keep people safe.
2. Skills – involves training and ensuring competency to execute a job safely.
Your business may use specialized Systems and require Skills that we are new to us. Systems tell you what pulley sized to use when felling a large tree, or how many pounds of explosives are needed to open 8 cubic yards in a quarry.
Our experience tells us two things about safety Systems and Skills:
1. You probably already have the Systems and Skills you need, or you wouldn’t be in business
2. After incidents, we usually find Systems and Skills were in place, but not used or not the cause of the problem.
In other words, Skills and Systems are critical to your safety efforts, but they are just two parts of the larger safety puzzle. To be good at anything: whether it is safety or your favorite sport, you need to build on five key Performance Factors.
Systems – help you understand “How to.”
Skills – Give you confidence that you “Can do.”
Will – is about showing up with mind and body ready for action and up to the challenge. It's a “Want to” mindset.
Culture – Culture (“how we do things around here”) sits at the center of the model and impacts Will, Skill and Systems: for better or for worse. If you have a Culture of optionality, where indifferent people are thrown in to sink or swim, even great Systems and great training to build Skills will be of little consequence. Culture always wins.
In a strong safety Culture, people speak up about risks. They make sure others have the Skills they need to work safely because they want to see everyone get home intact. They follow procedures consistently, even when no one is watching, because that is just how we do things around here. Culture always wins!
Leadership – Leaders are the make-or-break factor in any safety program because leaders:
· Create Systems and ensure their consistent use.
· Ensure that work is only assigned to Skilled people.
· Influence Will by showing their commitment to safety, even when the pressure is on.
· Drive Culture because they decide what gets rewarded and what gets punished.
Leaders are often selected based on their seniority, technical knowledge, or reputation for getting stuff done. Unfortunately, the Skills they need to manage each of the Performance Factors don’t come along with the title!
Long story short, we may not be experts in some particular Systems or Skills required for your business, but we can help you fill those gaps. More importantly we are experts in building Will, Culture and Leadership which are probably at the roots of your biggest safety challenges.