Turnarounds

Reduce a High Injury Rate

A high injury rate leads to compounding problems, such as:

Low employee morale
Managers’ abilities questioned
Thumbs down from customers
High insurance costs
Scrutiny from external parties

When an organization experiences a high injury rate, we usually find a frustrated staff. The staff is usually committed to safety, but upon discovery their conversion of effort into safety performance needs attention. In this turnaround situation, solving the injury trends quickly and managing injury cases with a reputable occupational physician are essential.

Next, we help the onsite staff improve its conversion of effort, focusing on proactive safety processes and learning skill sets that can make a difference. Many organizations we’ve assisted with high injury rates go on to win safety awards for better safety performance.

Overhaul Safety After an Accident

A bad accident can take an organization by surprise. We usually find:

Leaders were over-focused on safety metrics to tell the story.
Staff were missing early warning signs and employees concerns.
Safety staff favored compliance rules over processes.
Supervisors and their teams experienced risk-taking patterns, such as complacency, freelancing, or pressing.
Groupthink reinforced weak safety processes.

When an organization deals with a bad accident, it’s important for the leaders and staff to undergo a reality check. Instead of placing blame, we assist the organization with overhauling the weak or broken safety processes, completing safety stand downs, applying behavior-based safety to increase situation awareness, and implementing effective safety verifications.

In several turnaround situations, our solutions have significantly reduced OSHA penalties, won the confidence of boards and executives, and closed external parties corrective actions.

Implement Safety Inside an Acquisition

Many organizations grow by acquiring businesses. The strategy is to invest capital, apply expertise, and turn the business into a money-maker. Acquisitions can present safety challenges:

Undiscovered safety issues from brief due diligence.
Immature safety practices.
Deep-seated safety complacency.
Older machinery with inadequate safeguarding.
Inadequately trained supervisors and employees.

It’s common to acquire a company whose safety mindset and processes necessitate modernizing. We’ve helped clients improve the safety culture quickly, implement new safety processes, and earn employees’ trust with aggressive safety management plans and execution.

Get Out From Under a Microscope

A business unit or work site can land under the corporate microscope for a variety of reasons:

Deteriorating safety metrics.
A sudden rash of injuries.
A significant near miss.
An audit reveals the real story.
High staff and employee turnover.

Taking on the role of a mediator, we have helped corporate safety departments and business units diffuse tensions, find common ground about how to improve safety performance, and execute a safety management plan.

Regain Control After a Workplace Tragedy

A workplace tragedy can happen and devastate an organization from top to bottom. We’ve been called upon to assist two organizations after a tragedy. The main recovery issues were:

Dealing with the legal aftermath.
Restoring shattered confidence.
Overhauling the safety management system.
Replacing non-contributors.
Completing intensive re-training.

After a workplace tragedy, it’s imperative the organization voluntarily undergo a comprehensive and confidential evaluation of its management system. This evaluation is difficult for the organization because we explore the organizational failure while emotions are raw. We conduct this evaluation to assure everyone’s dignity, but we deep dive into the issues and how to objectively fix the safety processes.