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Terry Mathis, founder of U.S.  ProAct Safety, writes [1] that it has been found that successful safety improvement initiatives are:

1. Proactive: the successful implementation of reactive safety programmes will inevitably generate the need for the development of proactive safety programmes.

2. Focused: traditional initiatives commonly lead to the development of many rules and procedures, and these tend to overwhelm and to diffuse employee attention. Truly successful safety efforts focus upon the most important dangers and the appropriate ways to avoid these. When employees begin to automatically take precautions themselves then accidents rates tend to drop permanently.

3. Transformational: precautions that have the potential to produce a significant positive impact upon accidents are termed transformational precautions. Truly excellent safety efforts do not seek for modest gains, but for goals that will transform accident rates using minimal and practical levels of effort.

4. Employee Centric: safety improvements are often limited through a lack of worker involvement. Effective safety initiatives must approach risk from both a management and an employee perspective.

5. Clearly Communicated: effective communication is a trademark of successful safety initiatives, and when deeds and words don't match then the message becomes unclear.

6. Results Oriented: some safety initiatives have emphasised process metrics over results metrics. A profound knowledge of safety is found using both process metrics and result metrics along with an understanding of the relationship between the two.

7. Multi-dimensional: successful safety efforts benefit from contributions from quality, technology and behavioural science approaches.

8. Integrated: successful safety initiatives must become integrated into everything that an organisation does. Safety programmes that do not mesh with day-to-day activities are seldom successful, and they are certainly not sustainable. Integrated safety needs to become an organisational value.

9. Practical: safety success can be advanced by theories, but ultimately it can not be achieved if it does not fit the cultural, procedural and the real conditions that are found in the workplace.

10.Humanistic: Successful safety programmes need to win the hearts and minds of the people involved. Ultimately the reasons behind working on safety are just as important as the way it is implemented. Goals dominated by financial targets and benchmarks alone will not win the hearts of the people who are able make initiatives truly successful.

[1] Mathis, T., (2008), What Does Safety Success Look Like?, Occupational Hazards, Vol 70, Iss 8, pp 43-47, Penton Media, Inc., Cleveland

Members may read the full article which provides further advice about successful safety management.

 Not a member? read about our membership benefits , or click here to join now!

Neil Crawford
BPIR

Hi guys,

In a series of posts coming over the next few months, we will be demonstrating how the BPIR.com can appeal to specific industries.

With the broad industry coverage offered by the BPIR.com, some organisations may feel intimidated in joining such a large resource, when they only want industry specific information. We hope these posts will help show our readers that we do have industry specific information!

For today we will be focusing on the telecommunications industry.

Even for non-members, we have resources that can help you. Searching for 'telecom' from the search bar, we get results for 5 management briefs.

Members however can acess a lot more information. Searching the BPIR database for 'Telecom' returned over 200 results:

• 3 Tools & Techniques Articles
• 64 Case studies
• 43 Research Studies
• 11 Competitors analysis'
• 2 Business Periodicals
• 83 Award Winners

Straight away we can see 206 telecom results. Thats a lot of related reading for any telecom business.

But lets look one step further in how the BPIR can help you. The BPIR resource is designed to do far more than to find relevant articles. It can also be used to gain access to comprehensive best practice materials. There are a variety of ways to do this.  The BPIR best practices model is one way to find some useful pointers.

Self assesment -  The first part of the BPIR model involves self assesments. There are 65 assessments in 8 categories. Assesments are sourced from Educational institutes and real world companies, and range from Risk management, to customer orientation assesments, to even assesing your Performance measurment system.  In 3 clicks a self assessment relating to project management can be downloaded and printed. Potential weaknesses or training needs to be evaluated.

Next a research study could be examined concerning project management tools and techniques. The BPIR site has a rich database of best practices conveniently arranged in “snippet” format to enable you to quickly assess the topic matter’s relevance and then to delve further as required.

The following snippet outlines a one of many survey's of the tools and techniques used in project management:

 Source article for members: Link (opens in new window)

 Lets continue with a Kickoff meeting. What is a kickoff meeting you may ask? Searching for this under Strategies, tools, and techniques from the main menu will locate the following description:

Next you might want to research best practice case studies. The following is an example relating to a UK telecommunications Provider, dated october 2008:

 Source article for members: PDF download

Thats all for now folks! We will continue with some similar posts relating to how the BPIR can help your organisation.I hope this has given some insight as to how the BPIR can help your organisation.

 Thanks for reading!

Neil Crawford
BPIR team