When we hear the words "hazard assessment," we often think of physical and chemical hazards. These are the risks to our employees we can see with our eyes and feel with our hands. But what if the biggest hazard in your organization is the culture? Culture, defined as "the way we do things around here," is created by the people working in the environment. If you can't see culture with your eyes or feel it with your hands, how can you determine if you have a good culture or a bad one? This program looks at some clues that your culture may be contributing to the safety failures. For each clue, we will examine what could be behind it and what you can do to effectively change your current culture into a culture of success.
We define a culture of success as one that maintains a balance of productivity, quality, and safety. Since an organization is made up of individual contributors, we need to look at how the employees in the organization, from top to bottom, maintain this crucial balance. Each individual's balance is influenced by four elements: experience, knowledge, pace, and focus. The four elements either expand or contact our internal risk manager to keep us balanced. As you would expect, the growth of experience and knowledge expands our internal risk manager allowing us to take more risks. However, as experience and knowledge increase, our natural tendency is for focus to decrease and for pace to increase. Problems occur when we get out of balance and due to a lack of knowledge, experience, or focus at an increased pace; we end up outside of our comfort zone and eventually make a bad decision, triggering an incident.
