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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.
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.
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:
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.
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