How complete and comprehensive is your safety strategy? Does it have the right ingredients? Do you even have a safety strategy?
Not paying attention to strategy is expensive. Each year, organizations waste millions of dollars in time, resources, and effort. In our consulting practice, we continue to see confusion: misunderstanding of strategy, real problems not addressed, misdirected effort, lack of personnel alignment, directionless short-term fixes, forgettable training, overcomplexity, poor communication, cookie-cutter programs in place of strategic thinking, muddled motivation, poor incentives, not understanding what an existing organizational culture will tolerate or accept, misinterpretation of data, and attention to results without a clear understanding of how they came about.
And these are just a few of the unproductive situations we encounter in our work. But, most of all, we see a lack of focus on generating and measuring ongoing contribution to value throughout the organization.
After reviewing countless corporate, division and location-specific safety strategies, ten essential considerations were frequently excluded (Fig. 1).