Safety 2013: How to Sell Safety to Difficult Employees and Managers

This is an excerpt from an EHS Today article.

Odds are, you’ve worked with a difficult employee or manager at some point throughout the course of your career. At the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) Safety 2013 conference, J.A. Rodriguez Jr., CSP, offered attendees tips to find common ground with difficult colleagues.

“I see the room is full today,” Rodriguez, senior manager with Raytheon Technical Services Co. LLC, said to the standing-room only crowd at Safety 2013. “Do we know some difficult people?”

If so, these audience members were in the right place. Rodriguez leaned on his 30 years of experience to outline how to turn “difficult” people into your biggest advocates. “It takes work, commitment and involvement, and it takes power within you to say it’s going to happen,” he said.

The the full article, including Rodriguez's strategies to help sell safety strategies, is available at the EHS Today website.

Healthier Workforces May Lead to a Healthier Bottom Line

This is an excerpt from an ISHN article.

Companies that build a culture of health by focusing on the well-being and safety of their workforce may yield greater value for their investors, according to a study published in the September issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM), official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM).

The stock market performance of companies that had received ACOEM’s Corporate Health Achievement Award (CHAA), which annually recognizes the healthiest and safest companies in North America, was conducted at HealthNEXT LLC and analyzed by lead authors Raymond Fabius, MD, and R. Dixon Thayer, and colleagues. Companies that receive the award must be engaged in demonstrable and robust efforts to reduce health and safety risks among their employees.

To read the full article, visit ISHN.com.

FM Pulse: Despite Challenges, Job Satisfaction Stays High For Facilities Managers

This is an excerpt from a Building Operating Management article, which provides details on the publication's annual FM Pulse survey results. This year, 2,591 facility managers responded to the survey.

These should be the worst of times for facility managers. After two decades of steady pressure on resources, the Great Recession brought a whole new level of budget pressure to bear on hard-pressed facility departments. Staff was cut, retirements were delayed, demands rose, the working day often got longer, and raises were deferred and deferred again. But through it all facility managers have been resilient. Perhaps the best indication of how resilient is the job satisfaction ratings in Building Operating Management's annual FM Pulse survey.

From 2008, before the full force of the recession had been felt, through the depths of the recession, to this year, those job satisfaction numbers have remained remarkably constant. ... Those who indicated that they were satisfied ranged from 88 percent to 91 percent. Within that group, those who called themselves very satisfied ranged from 44 percent to 48 percent. The most striking change came in 2009, when the number who said they were very dissatisfied jumped from 1 percent to 8 percent, before falling back to 2 percent in 2010.

But those job satisfaction numbers don't mean that facility departments somehow escaped the Great Recession unscathed. Just the opposite.

The full article is available on the Building Operating Management website. (Links are below.)

From: FM Pulse: Despite Challenges, Job Satisfaction Stays High For Facilities Managers, Building Operating Management

Constant Improvement

This is an excerpt from an ISHN blog post.

What are you doing to be the best at what you do? Take a few moments and try the following exercise, which is a great process to improve areas in which you are already proficient.

What Activities Improve Safety The Most?

First, ask yourself what activities do you do that improve the safety of others in your area of responsibility. Really give this some time. Think of all the activities you do each day, week, month or year. Ask yourself which of these activities have the biggest impact on safety or have the potential to have the greater impact.

Write down all the activities you do that fit the criteria listed above. Take that list and do your best to prioritize it. Once you have done this, ask yourself which of these you do the best. The ones you are most competent in and feel comfortable doing. Now, look to see how you can become better in those areas.

The full article is available on the ISHN website.