Sharon Lipinski, Author at Incident Prevention

Does Positive Feedback Improve Safety?

Written by Sharon Lipinski on June 20, 2022. Posted in Leadership Development.

Our client is an international utility company with more than 10,000 employees that provides electric and natural gas to 20 million U.S. customers. Their vision is to achieve a generative safety culture in which both employees and leaders are actively engaged. Characteristics of a generative safety culture include proactively resolving issues, focusing on leading indicators, and welcoming bad news as an opportunity for improvement, not for implementing discipline. The company is well on their way to that destination, and it’s due in no small part to their employees’ dedication to their jobs,...

‘But I Don’t Wanna’: 6 Sources of Employee Resistance

Written by Sharon Lipinski on April 19, 2022. Posted in Leadership Development.

“I forgot.” “I don’t want to.” “It’s not that serious.” “It won’t happen to me.” If your employees are forgetting, ignoring, pushing back against or actively resisting the protections you’ve put in place to ensure their safety, then you know how frustrating it can be to get them to follow the rules. Crafting a safety initiative so that you end up with employees who want to follow your safety procedures depends on addressing the driving causes of their resistance. Following are six sources of potential resistance and strategies you can use to help overcome each one. They don’t know. The...

The Biological Basis of Complacency

Written by Sharon Lipinski on April 15, 2021. Posted in Safety Management.

The adverse effects of complacency in the workplace have long been an ongoing source of concern in the safety community. What is not agreed upon is the reason for this problem. In my own experience, I have noticed that safety professionals use the term “complacency” in different ways to refer to different kinds of events.

The Antidote to Complacency and Familiarity

Written by Sharon Lipinski on December 13, 2019. Posted in Leadership Development.

Safety managers know that when an employee has done a particular task many times, that individual can become so familiar with the action that they no longer have to pay close attention while performing the work. As they become complacent in their ability to successfully complete the task, the risk of accident increases. But familiarity is not an emotional state. It’s a physical condition. Familiarity is the byproduct of habit, and a habit is a neural pathway created in the brain through repetition. How Habits are FormedWhen the brain does something for the first time, the prefrontal cortex...

Author: Sharon Lipinski

Does Positive Feedback Improve Safety?

‘But I Don’t Wanna’: 6 Sources of Employee Resistance

The Biological Basis of Complacency

The Antidote to Complacency and Familiarity

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