STEPS to Safety Culture ExcellenceSM Implementation
Workshop Series

Introducing the most effective development series to transform your culture and safety performance.

A workshop series from the pioneers of Safety Culture Excellence® and the authors of the book STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence, the first and only book that instructs how to create a culture of safety excellence, step by step. Based on over 2,000 client engagements and safety excellence workshops since 1993, the thought-leaders and safety excellence experts at ProAct Safety have developed a workshop series designed to strategically engage all aspects of the organization.

STEPS stands for Strategic Targets for Excellent Performance in SafetySM. The term is intended to connote both the steps toward an ultimate goal and as well as the process by which to choose and execute each of the steps. Two of the main sources of failure in safety-improvement efforts are trying to do too much at once and working on unclear goals or focusing on the wrong things. It is critical to take the right steps, at the right size, and in the right order.

To ensure the highest degree of impact and sustainability of results, the workshops are customized to the readiness, maturity, objectives and expected outcomes of the individual organizations.

  • STEPS: For Change Agents
  • For organizations recognizing the importance of enabling change to occur from within, ProAct Safety regularly holds public workshops to train change leaders in the STEPS methodology as well as how to create and execute against a strategic roadmap for safety excellence. Contact us to explore options for private workshops.

    Focus & Outcomes:
    1. Develop a solid understanding of a safety excellence strategy
    2. Learn the leading causes of safety program ineffectiveness and failure
    3. Examine a standard methodology used by excellent safety organizations to identify virtually any type of safety issue or problem
    4. Learn to use statistical tools to prioritize issues by their potential impact
    5. Learn to develop action plans to solve safety problems
    6. Explore innovative ways to measure success and progress
    7. Discover how one process can replace multiple programs and allow for seamless transition of focus without causing a flavor-of-the-month culture

  • STEPS: For Senior Executives
  • Businesses require strategies to capture market share, create shareholder value and provide competitive value for the consumer. Safety, too, competes for market share in the discretionary attention and engagement of the workforce. Safety has both shareholders and customers, and safety excellence is only possible when there is alignment in the belief that safety is less about cost-reduction and more about how it provides competitive value and an improvement in quality of life with the consumers of its efforts. It is vital the decision processes for business and safety objective are aligned and complement, rather than conflict, with one another.

    Strategy is a framework of choices an organization makes to determine how to capture and deliver value. Therefore, strategy is "How will we win?" and not "How will we fail less?" Executives will learn how the best in safety leverage proven business models to develop and execute against a strategy for safety excellence that evolves from a focus on reducing injuries and events, to adding value to profitability, productivity and the customers of the improvement efforts.

    Focus & Outcomes:
    1. Develop a solid understanding of a safety excellence strategy
    2. Understand how organizations ensure their safety strategy supports, rather than
    3. Examine a standard methodology used by excellent safety organizations to identify
    4. Explore innovative ways to measure success and progress
    5. Recognize how zero injuries is the byproduct of a strategy that focuses on capturing and
    6. Learn how other organizations measure the value contribution of safety improvement conflicts, with business strategy virtually any type of safety issue or problem delivering value efforts and, through the right measures, feel confident the results are real, impacting people the right way and sustainable

  • STEPS: For Safety Professionals

  • Safety professionals must think strategically and focus not more and on value-add, than look for problems and programs. To effectively transform a culture and make significant progress in injury-prevention efforts, they must ensure the safety goals align with and support business goals and the overall strategy.

    Focus & Outcomes:
    1. Learn how to perform a Transformational Pareto Analysis
    2. Develop a solid understanding of what a safety excellence strategy includes
    3. Understand the differences between and opportunities for policing and coaching for
    4. Agreement on what safety excellence/success looks like for the organization
    5. Understanding of the need to be strategic regarding safety improvement efforts and for a
    6. Strategic framework to help support getting closer to safety excellence/success. (will
    7. Attendees will understand the differences between measuring activities and the safety performance and improvement true safety excellence strategy to add sustainable value include methodology and key questions to facilitate the creation of a fit-for-purpose plan to engage operational leadership to improve both safety performance and culture) contribution of value from activities, as well as identify some key transformational measurement opportunities

  • STEPS: For Safety Committees

  • To accomplish successful improvement, someone needs to be in charge. We encourage the change agents to be more than one, i.e. a team or committee (whichever terminology fits your organization best) made up of a cross-section of employees to spearhead and steer the change efforts. Not everyone can lead, so it is important that the change agents be viewed as representative of the entire work force and that every employee feel represented on this team.

    For the team to be successful, members must be enabled to make the change happen with provided training, time, resources, and support to make the desired goals a reality. ProAct Safety has designed a series of just-in-time workshops to help individuals create and execute against their safety excellence strategy, effectively communicate and align the workforce, and measure and monitor results and value captured from the improvement efforts.

    • Safety Committee 1: Data Analysis, Hypothesis and Strategic Priorities

    • This workshop begins to develop the 3-5 year strategy roadmap for safety excellence. Information is then collected or leveraged to make the important data-driven priorities, goal and objectives, and make the choices on which initiatives would best support the decisions.

      Focus & Outcomes:
      1. Develop a hypothesis
      2. Define what data will be necessary to analyze
      3. Perform a Transformational Pareto Analysis on both incidents and injuries, and the most commonly tracked variables
      4. Learn to develop a perception survey and assess the culture to collect social data
      5. Determine how to gather data, perception surveys, and assess the culture and starting point
      6. Develop the Safety Excellence Strategic Roadmap

    • Safety Committee 2: Communication, Marketing and Alignment

    • Once the initial tradeoffs and key choices have been made, it is vital to ensure alignment with the rest of the organization occurs with effective communication and marketing. Yes, marketing. You may not have to sell compliance safety to employees, as it is a condition of employment, but you have to market the need for discretionary effort if success and excellence is your goal.

      Focus & Outcomes:
      1. Determine how to create alignment and understanding of the strategy
      2. Develop a plan to market the strategy
      3. Determine where gaps might exist regarding shared definitions
      4. Identify the need for proactive accountability through clear roles, responsibilities and results

    • Safety Committee 3: Monitoring, Measurement and Continuous Improvement

    • Safety excellence is a never-ending journey. Teams and committees should celebrate their successes when results improve, especially when they know precisely what led to the improvement and have a sense of confidence in their continuance. Celebrate when you see the culture evolving and positively shaping the beliefs and behaviors of new members and contractors. Teams will continue to make progress when there is pride in what has been accomplished yet a healthy sense of vulnerability remains. This necessitates a change in thinking of how success in safety is measured.

      At this point, the teams must establish effective measurements and monitoring systems that don't just measure activities and results, but also the precise value captured from the activities, this is what we call, Transformational Safety Indicators. See this article for additional insight.

      Focus & Outcomes:
      1. Have a firm understanding of the differences between measuring activities and the contribution of value from activities
      2. Develop the framework and key, transformational measurements and monitoring methodology for the organization
      3. Feel confident that the results are real, impacting people the right way, and are sustainable
      4. Maintain a mentality of positive discontent, where successes are recognized, yet the team knows they can always be better and continuous improvement is always possible


  • STEPS: For Managers and Supervisors
  • Individuals in formal leadership roles are responsible for both the performance and culture within their organization. They set the tone and priorities, and influence day-to-day decisions throughout the organization. Managers and front-line leaders need to be able to both leverage their role to facilitate discretionary effort output and also learn how to manage, lead and coach safety like any other critical aspect of business performance.

    Focus & Outcomes:
    1. Develop a solid understanding of a safety excellence strategy
    2. Examine a standard methodology used by excellent safety organizations to identify virtually any type of safety issue or problem
    3. Explore innovative ways to measure success and progress
    4. Recognize how zero injuries is the byproduct of a strategy that focuses on capturing and delivering value
    5. Learn how other organizations measure the value contribution of safety improvement efforts and, through the right measures, feel confident that the results are real, impacting people the right way and are sustainable
    6. Collaborate on and define:
      1. What is safety excellence (regarding employee safety) and what would it look like throughout the organization?
      2. How would we define employee engagement and ownership in safety, and what would it look like if achieved?
      3. What are the most important leadership safety roles, responsibilities and results for each major level to make the answers to the preceding questions happen?
      4. What would (behavioral and results) accountability look like for leaders and employees (proactive and reactive)?
      5. What are the most important steps to take and what must be deferred?

  • STEPS: For Employees

  • A great safety culture is made up of great individuals. But individualism is not enough. Once employees can perform their jobs safely, they must work together to create excellence. This requires their thoughts, beliefs, and actions be aligned. This workshop is designed to achieve the mindset, techniques and skills of Safety Culture Excellence, and teach employees to think and act in ways that create teamwork and synergy in safety efforts. Employees who complete this training are more receptive to leadership and supervision, and safer when working independently. Ensure each member of your safety culture is a contributor to excellent safety performance.

    This highly interactive workshop begins with the basic concepts of individual safety and aligns thinking about how accidents occur and how risks can be controlled. It convinces employees to take precautions consistently, even when the risk is low-probability. Employees watch and identify types of risks, and learn to react to them appropriately. How to intervene when they see other employees at risk and how to form the kinds of workplace relationships that foster teamwork in safety will be understood. Each workshop ends with employees developing their own plan to implement what they have learned. Unlike much safety training that is boring and repetitious, this 2-4 hours is packed with new ideas, challenges traditional thinking, and includes classroom activities that build engagement, buy-in, and retention of new safety thinking and skills.

    Focus & Outcomes:
    1. Understand how injuries are preventable, rather than inevitable
    2. Develop a better understanding and definitions around safe, safety, near-miss, luck,
    3. Influence fellow employees accordingly
    4. Learn how to lead an effective and respectful safety observation hazards and risks
    5. Understand what influences risk-taking and how to recognize it in yourself and others
    6. Understand the role behavior plays in injury-prevention and safety culture
    7. Recognize the difference between low- and high-probability risks, and the tactics to
    8. Identify and develop precautions to address the most frequent types of injuries
    9. Focus coworkers on methods to address safety concerns that are highly effective and
    10. Choose the best form of feedback to shape future actions in coworkers
    11. Develop and internalize a coaching style for providing positive and negative feedback to
    12. Become accountable for behaviors that contribute both to injury-prevention and

  • STEPS for Contractors

  • In this time of strategic outsourcing, many companies utilize contractors to support various business operations. Whether short- or long-term, in several companies these contractors are a business necessity. As organizations bring groups together representing different cultures around safety, new risks emerge. How well the cultural risks are identified and mitigated, and desired beliefs and behaviors improved, will be the new competitive advantage in safety performance.

    Conducive cultures can be the most effective tool in achieving safety results. High-performance organizations realize alignment of safety cultures is becoming the core responsibility of not just the contractor, but those engaging them as well. Organizations leveraging contractors require a culture-conversation framework that initiates dialogue with contractors, creating clarity around what safety excellence looks like in knowledge, beliefs and behaviors, not just results. Safety roles, responsibilities and results need to be collaboratively developed and a positive and proactive accountability system established to influence and achieve excellence in outcomes.

    Focus & Outcomes:
    1. How to improve communication (and the overall relationship) between contractors and
    2. Proven approaches that work well with short- and long-term contractors
    3. How to create a framework of clarity around safety excellence
    4. Understanding the need to look at safety performance (transformational indicators), not
    5. The nuts and bolts of a successful measurement system that provides vital leading
    6. Real-life examples of the tools, methodology, and language that have worked for other
    7. Goal-setting strategies that work: How to accomplish the recommended actions relating address both within their power to control safe and concerning behaviors enhancing the culture your organization just activities and results indicators, showing progress toward expectations organizations to the safety practices of your contractors


    Ready for STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence? Contact us for more information on these workshops and a plan for implementation within your organization.

    Testimonials...

    Spent Tuesday in a work shop conducted by Shawn Galloway (President of ProAct Safety and coauthor of several bestselling books including STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence (2013) and Forecasting Tomorrow: The Future of Safety Excellence (2015). Both of which I've had the pleasure of reading and personally recommend to be added to everyone's library). The amount and quality of the information during the work shop was almost overwhelming. I only wish I had had the ability to bring Shawn in for a two day workshop with our people

    Dennis Leonard, Safety Director , Kiewit Mining Group