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.

Survey Reveals Drop In Pressure; Fewer Cutbacks For Cleaning Industry

This is an excerpt from a Today's Facility Manager article.

The cleaning industry has become somewhat more efficient with operations and keeping costs down in the last two years—and in the wake of an improving economy—a tone of cautious optimism is apparent. This is according to the 2013 Cleaning Industry Insights Survey from P&G Professional™.

According to survey respondents, cutbacks on luxuries have been reduced and pressures have eased. However, loss of business and customer dissatisfaction are the leading causes of worry, keeping key decision makers on their toes to ensure continued improvements and efficiencies.

The survey results were based on the responses of more than 400 cleaning industry professionals and key decision makers across healthcare, food service, commercial, and hospitality sectors. This study follows the inaugural survey which was released in late 2011.

The full article is available at todaysfacilitymanager.com.

What You Don’t Measure You Don’t Manage: Taking the Guess Work Out of FM Performance

This is an excerpt from a Facilities Management Journal article.

At a recent breakfast briefing held at the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) HQ to discuss the benefits of benchmarking FM performance, the very clear message from the speakers was “What you don’t measure you don’t Manage”.

According to the event speakers, the implication of neglecting to measure, is, at best, that you are not in a position to outline ways of improving your performance, at worst, your decision is a guess which can simply end up costing your organization more money.

Whether you are using in-house or a third party FM provider, the need to benchmark remains the same. It allows you to identify the value for Money you receive from your FM provider or to develop the business case to make any internal investment.

During the event all the speakers had a variation on the same message, to drive up standards and drive out inefficiencies you had to first know your current status, which means measure how you are currently performing. This also allows you to identify your objectives and formulate your strategy for delivering on your objectives.

The full article is available at fmjdata.com.

Competitive Safety: Breaking the Mold

This is an excerpt from an EHS Today article.

Organizations that compete for market share in products and services tend to cooperate and collaborate on safety. This mindset has led to a cooperative, kaizen environment in which the only winner is the one who can do the same things better than everyone else. Sure, we look for those tiny improvements and efficiencies and we are open to the next big program that can create a step-change, but we basically are all operating safety with the same strategy (or lack thereof).

It is the lack of safety strategy that is concerning. Few organizations have one. They have goals and wishes and programs designed to improve workplace conditions and enhance the cognitive and behavioral factors in workers that tend to lower accident probability. They have safety departments that focus on compliance, training and reactive safety activities. Since these mirror other organizations' safety efforts, there is an assumption that these are the right (and only) things to do. There are very few key processes in business that are managed with such basic lack of strategy.

At the core of this thinking is a more basic paradigm: business is what we do and safety is just a nagging problem that can keep us from doing it if we are not careful. Business is full of strategy. Rolling out a new product or service involves massive strategic thinking and planning. We seek competitive advantage and market share. How can we do things better, cheaper, faster, more fun or efficient than our competitors? We even look for products and services that don't yet exist. We do market research to determine feasibility and we test the new stuff on potential customers before we roll it out to the marketplace. After we enter the marketplace, we analyze competing products to make sure we maintain competitive advantage and look for further improvements we can make in our next generation of product.

The full article is available at ehstoday.com.