Improving Safety Performance and reducing employee injuries, measured by both leading and lagging indicators, is a fact of life for many safety professionals. Everyone is always looking for new and creative ideas to make improvements. This session will give proven, real-life, innovative implementation strategies and ideas that attendees can take back to their organization to implement or revitalize and improve a near miss/safety concerns reporting program that they may already have. The ultimate goal is to prevent injury through awareness, relationship building and communication.
Why are we still having injuries even though we are doing all this safety "stuff"?
Sometimes you are too close to a situation or "you don't know what you don't know" and it takes a fresh look. The City of Fort Collins took the initiative to bring in some experts to help.
Through a series of site visits, interviews and focus groups to better understand the true safety culture of the City, it was evident there were several missing pieces but failure to identify, report and act on near misses and safety concerns, jumped to the forefront and seemed like a likely, fruitful step. No longer was the City going to focus on how many days it had been since the last lost time injury, the focus will be how many near misses were reported, corrected and most importantly, shared.
Some areas of the City already had a process for recognizing and reporting near misses and safety concerns. Learning from those areas, their processes were gathered, taking the best of all worlds and combining them into one robust, city-wide program. Due to the scale of the City, a decision was made to start with a pilot program. One department in the City was chosen that had a current program to build upon. Information was gathered through focus groups, attending meetings and just simply observing their everyday work environments. Our regular interaction helped build trust and relationships with the employees and ultimately a lot of buy-in. Deploying the actual program with the department helped identify opportunity for improvements.
