Does your organization have the capacity to achieve sustainable excellence in safety performance and culture? For excellence to become a reality in any important area of operations, especially safety, there are five vital capacities organizations must develop, monitor, and synergize to adapt and thrive in a fast-paced and ever-changing world: system, leadership, engagement, cultural, and strategic.
System Capacity To Prevent and Recover
For a long time, safety efforts primarily focused on preventing unwanted events and gave little room for what happens if things do not go to plan.
Mistakes should be expected to occur in complex environments. Knowing and preparing for this, organizations pursuing safety excellence create the capacity to prevent unwanted outcomes and the capacity to recover when deviations and mistakes occur.
Leadership Capacity
Organizations focused on safety excellence invest in their people leaders at all levels, especially on the front line. This is done to develop and continuously improve their competency and confidence in aligning their teams and crews with the occupational and safety culture and the systems necessary to prevent and recover from unwanted events.
Engagement Capacity
Engagement is the desire to perform that workers bring with them each day. It's their attitude toward their work, peers, boss or bosses, the organization, the objective at hand and so forth.
On the journey to safety excellence, leaders building this capacity monitor what might either demotivate or motivate their people.
Cultural Capacity
Culture can be defined as the common beliefs that govern common behaviors. It is more than the "way we do things around here." It is also the why. Leaders developing a culture of excellence are intentional about the culture they pursue. A vision of safety excellence is created that includes the most important beliefs and behaviors that would be common when their ideal culture is achieved.