Basic and Advanced

July 03 2016
By: Terry L. Mathis

We constantly get questions from clients about how to take safety efforts to a whole new level. The paradigm is that excellence is a tweaking of basic safety efforts. Unfortunately, we haven't found that approach to work. Excellence involves a two-pronged effort: to maintain and continuously improve basic safety efforts, and to add the four elements of excellence to these existing efforts. Abandoning basic safety when moving on to excellence can be catastrophic.

Some of the elements of safety excellence are already in practice at some sites and only need to be expanded. At other sites, all four must be implemented in sequence. The four elements are the topic of several articles I published in EHS Today over the past year. They are (in the sequence in which they must be implemented)

1. Strategy
2. Assessment
3. Coaching
4. Engagement

These four elements not only add what is needed for safety excellence but synergize with each other to achieve what none of them alone can achieve. Excellence is not an impossible dream. There is a formula that has produced it in a wide variety of industries.