Reality Checks

We offer expertise to perform assessments for five dimensions of safety performance: Safety Culture, Management Systems, Behavior-Based Safety, Work Tasks, and Non-Routine Events.

An assessment compares the current situation with an implementation model. Our models were developed using the data from over 575 occupational health & safety management systems.

Our assessments uncover core issues and identify insights that organizations can translate into action plans. This way an organization learns not only what to change, but why and how.

Safety Culture is an abstract concept because it tends to have a different meaning within every organization.

Our view of Safety Culture is how an organization values safety in relation to its risk. Whether a large or small organization, the top leaders) influence a proactive safety culture with their safety leadership.

The confidential assessment evaluates the organization’s safety leadership and how employees perceive it.  Then we help the leadership team understand how to demonstrate safety leadership.

Using safety culture case studies from the notorious BP Horizon and NASA Challenger accidents, we engage leaders to explore how a safety culture can erode, which helps leaders visualize why and how to keep a safety leadership strong using five leadership behaviors.

A Management System is a group of processes that work together to control risk.

The assessment evaluates the effectiveness of the processes that comprise the management system. Then we determine how well the management system makes work tasks safer.

We can also evaluate how a management system compares to ISO 45001, including how well the processes influence safe behaviors during work tasks.

The value of Behavior-Based Safety is that it measures safety performance before accidents happen, rather than waiting for injuries to occur to measure safety solely based on injury rates.

We evaluate the organization’s processes for influencing how safely people perform their work tasks. The assessment looks at how people cue on danger, safety margins for routine and non-routine tasks, the frequency and types of safety contacts, and the rate of safe behaviors occurring during work tasks.

Work Tasks are the epicenter of how organizations can improve their safety performance.

As organizations try to break injury trends or make their work tasks safer, they often ask us to evaluate the safety margins for work tasks. Task Safety Analysis is the method that makes work tasks safer through better task design. Task Safety Analysis defines a safety margin for a work task.

Our data shows that Task Safety Analysis is a pivotal process in an organization’s overall approach to safety. Organizations applying Task Safety Analysis combined with Safety Observations experience higher rates of safe behaviors and lower injury rates.

The assessment evaluates how well this process provides safety margins for frontline employees, especially if Task Safety Analyses are actually designing safer work tasks. We can also evaluate the effectiveness of safety margins for specific work tasks.

A Non-Routine Event is a series of infrequently performed tasks, which are high-risk, tightly coupled in a series, and completed under time constraints. Non-Routine Events are a common source of organizational accidents and lost time injuries.

The assessment evaluates the effectiveness of an organization to adapt its safety program or management system to the hazards and risk associated with a Non-Routine Event.

Using our proven, 15-component model, we provide insights about how to control hazards and to increase safe behaviors when an organization faces a Non-Routine Event.