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Safety By Design: Leadership and Employee Involvement

In the first part of this six-part series, I discussed the reasons why it’s important for utility organizations to develop safety systems that align their safety initiatives. This article will address employee involvement, an often overlooked yet fundamental component of any effective safety system. According to ANSI/ASSP Z10, “Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems,” the phrase “employee involvement” refers to the active participation of workers in the planning, implementation, evaluation and improvement of an organization’s occupational health and safety management system...

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Safety By Design: A System Approach to Organizational Safety Initiatives

Let’s kick off this new series by considering a simple question: Why do we need safety? Here’s my answer: Safety is a must because hazards and threats exist in our work environments that could cause harm to both our employees and our organizations. Any initiative designed to protect workers from danger falls under the umbrella of safety. If we were to use minimum approach distances as an analogy, safety is the air gap that insulates an organization. When severe injuries and fatalities occur in our industry, weak safety initiatives – that is, initiatives that do not provide the insulating...

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