The American Society of Safety Professionals 2018 Professional Development Conference, June 4-6, in San Antonio, Texas, was attended by well over 4,500 people who came together to learn, share and network. There were many papers and large session presentations.
The rapid growth of active shooter incidents was one of the main areas of concern. The FBI and other experts gave talks about this, with their main focus on the active shooter incident itself. Most active shooter situations are conducted by men. Most of these occur in places of business. There is no typical profile for these people who come from all walks of life.
All the presenters emphasized the need for having a strong plan of action so that the organization is ready if this terrible situation occurs. Most organizations have good plans in the event of a fire and practice fire drills. Something similar to this is needed in the event of an active shooter incident.
Claire and I made a presentation on Partner-Centered Leadership: Reducing Workplace Violence and Eliminating Waste. We looked at workplace violence from a whole systems perspective, beginning with the lack of respect which leads to harassment, bullying, workplace injuries, violent behavior, and deaths from murder and suicide. Our workplaces that tolerate the lack of respect and these other behaviors are incubators for violent behaviors and, at the minimum, for hostile workplaces.
We at Nagele, Knowles and Associates, want to engage with organizations to look at the whole range of behaviors and develop together, an effective plan that is suitable for their particular situation. This is a complex, messy problem requiring us to help the people to solve this complex problem. We use a focused dialogic process that brings everyone together to build the best plans possible.
The elimination of workplace violence saves the organization a lot of money by reducing arguments, grievances, absenteeism, and high turnover. It also opens up new potential by opening up the free flow of information among the people. Ideas can be exchanged and developed, new and safer procedures created, and more problems can be solved. People create better, healthier relationships other than looking out for each other’s wellbeing. New potential for the business often emerges from the open conversations. All these things lead to the potential for higher profits.
When an organization uses a whole systems approach to the elimination of workplace violence, the people win because it is a good place to work, and the organization wins because they stop wasting money and open up new possibilities for better earnings.
If you are interested in receiving our blueprint booklet for reducing the risk of workplace violence (from the inside or the outside), please contact us at NageleKnowlesAndAssociates.com. We’ll be happy to send you a copy.
What People are Saying…
On May 18, 2018, we (Nagele, Knowles and Associates) held a workshop in Tampa. It was billed, “What You Need to Know about Reducing the Risk of Workplace Violence.” Feedback was excellent. What we found is that people do have some burning questions, and came away with new learning from this session.
Here are some reflections:
- I did not realize how much the “culture side of the organization” is involved in preventing workplace violence. The continuum of incivilities to bullying to harassment to vengeful acts to even murder is an eye-opener. Especially because supervision must know how to intervene.
- I realize now, how employee engagement fits. I’m anxious to learn more about having in place an integrated, constructive dialog process for our in-tact work groups to use to stop bullying and harassment while having a positive engagement approach.
- More and more I see how important it is for the every-day interactions we have to be keen on lifting up the concerns around employees that may be showing warning clues…so we pay attention…and do what we need to do, quickly.
- I think every workplace needs to have some Active-shooter training (at the minimum).
- Why are so many supervisors “weak in their leadership?” Why do they ignore bad behaviors? (Yes, we do know the answer to that!)
Almost every day I see people post on LinkedIn, engaging in awful safety practices. Some are so ridiculous that they could be funny – except that people are getting hurt. Some workers seem quite content to endanger their lives and co-workers seem to be so unaware of the risks around them – that it is unbelievable!
A recent Gallup study conducted over several years, covering about 150 countries, revealed that only about 15% of the people were actively involved in their work and that another 15% were actively opposing their managers and supervisors. The other 70% must be just doing as little as possible and not helping or looking out for each other. We are better in the USA, but not by much.
Recognize Einstein’s Words of Wisdom: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.“
In 2001, Jim C. Collins wrote the best-selling management book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t. It described how companies transition from being good companies to great companies and how most companies fail to make that transition. The author found that focused leadership, clear expectations and alignment, and staying true to their field of major competence was key. There were other factors about greatness that showed up too – like Leaders being humble, and high employee engagement – employees being in tune with the company’s purpose, mission, endeavors, goals – not just the business side of things, but on the people side of the enterprise. Line organizations integrated information; people were involved, included and respected – because getting the right people in the right places was deemed as essential too. Entire organizations were communicating, collaborative, and cooperating.
Changes in our workplaces keep coming fast and furiously. A recent report released by Price-Waterhouse-Coopers indicates that by 2030 the pressure on workers to perform will be huge. Organizations will be using all sorts of ways to track performance…even putting chips under their workers skin to look at location, performance, health and wellness! They may be tracking safety performance as well. Managers will need to be having “mature conversations” with the people about all this change and the feeling of threat this creates for their people and their jobs. The pressure to keep improving skills and performance continues to increase.
The American Society for Safety Engineers (soon to be The American Society for Safety Professionals) in Denver, Colorado, on June 19-22, 2017, was attended by about 5,000 people. This was a record for attendance. There were lots of papers and a huge trade show exhibit. I never saw so much safety equipment and other offerings.
As the snow begins to melt and the spring winds arrive, it is time for cleaning up the place. Mud season is upon us as the snow melts. All sorts of curious things emerge from the melting piles of snow; stuff that was covered up and lost. (Just imagine: Years ago the settlers kept their animals sheltered next to their houses or barns attached to their houses so that they could care for them when the winter cold set in. They really had to do the spring-cleaning!)
Our new year is full of opportunities, dark clouds and unknowns. The world is full of strife of all sorts. Our political situation here in the U.S. is full of hope, tension, noise, and unknowns. So many people are screaming about their opinions that it is almost impossible to hear. I get so tired of it that I often just quit trying to listen. That is probably a mistake for me to do that; we are all connected and I can’t just go away and hide. None of us can do that.
As we bring this sort of thinking and being together into our workplaces, we can seek ways to improve our safety performance and business results. I have found over and over that we can vastly improve our safety and business performance when we share information together, listen for understanding, develop trust among us and see how well are all contributing, solutions emerge. When we help to change the behavior of bullies of get them out of the work place, we get even better.
As this year comes to an end, we will be looking at our overall performance to see how we did and to plan for 2017. We will usually look at our injury statistics like the total recordable injury rate and try to determine how we performed. Often quite independently, others will look at other performance indicators to see how they came out. We act as if these are independent of each other, but in our organizations everything is connected so all aspects of performance influence each other. Everything happens through the people. All the parts are interconnected. Excellence in safety performance is strongly related to our total performance because it all works through the will of the people.
Work-as-imagined and work-as-done are ideas developed by Erik Hollnagel in his book, Safety-I and Safety-II (2014. Ashgate Publishing Ltd., UK). Safety I is our traditional top-down management approach to safety management where rules and procedures are issued by those far from the actual work. This is like the approach discussed in the proceeding paragraph. I think that a lot of people are trying to do good safety work from the Safety I perspective, but the results are not improving fast enough.
