The Critical Importance of Worker Feedback in Safety
A number of companies lean on their staff to create and enforce safety policies based solely on injury data and OSHA standards. These same companies wonder why they experience high employee turn-over rates and lower reported employee engagement. This is because they...
The 3 Most Overlooked Safety Requirements
There are many incentives for employers to stay on top of safety requirements and safe working habits. Avoiding costly fines, safeguarding workers’ lives and limbs, and ensuring work continues efficiently without broken equipment are all legitimate reasons for...
Recordkeeping: Is THAT Recordable?
Safety data and metrics are invaluable performance indicators for employers. Recording and mapping the variety of incidents, events, and initiatives creates powerful insights for companies to leverage. But not all data is equal and not all records should be recorded...
Lockout/Tagout: Three Critical Factors To Drive Employee Engagement
Employers need to understand how important lockout and tagout procedures are to ensure safety on the job and that these procedures are only effective when employees follow through on all the steps in the full lockout/tagout process. Workers may skip steps when they...
6 Simple Ways to Bolster Safety Compliance
Compliance is a scary word for many companies. It creates ideas that companies must delicately walk a safety tightrope, or one slip-up or incident can drop companies into boiling pot of OSHA violations and fines. But compliance doesn’t need to be a scary word around...
5 Tips to Boost Your Safety Culture
Companies committed to supporting safety in their workplaces understand the critical role their culture plays in reinforcing safe working habits for their workers. Because a strong safety culture guides workers through the influence of their peers, supervisors, and...
Help Your Culture Survive Through Turnover
Companies of every size and industry are feeling the crunch from high turnover and hiring woes. The churn puts additional stress on company resources to hire, onboard, and train up workers or take on extra work as some positions remain open. The increased pressure put...
Safety Assessments: Get Real to Get Better
Perspective is a valuable tool. But evaluating anything from the same viewpoint over and over will only ever yield the same picture. Which is why gaining a full, well-rounded perspective from multiple angles is so important to achieve real progress. An issue many...
Safety Training: The Cost of Safety Per Employee
Creating an annual budget often requires being cut-throat. Or at least that’s the line told to every department head at the beginning of the fiscal year. But how valid that line of thinking is doesn’t really matter when being asked point blank to justify the current...
The Importance of Safety Committees in Your Organization
People take a stronger interest in decisions when they have a say or vote in the outcome. This is true for simple choices like daily lunch orders, colors of uniforms, or what to get a boss during the holidays. It’s also true in situations with greater consequences....
Safety Meetings: Why Management Should Show Up
It’s not easy being a manager. A schedule full of pressing responsibilities and duties that are difficult to communicate to other employees but that are necessary to ensure the business keeps running smoothly day in and day out. A macro focus trained on every aspect...
3 Winter Workplace Safety Tips
Winter brings along more than shorter days, snowy landscapes, and dropping temperatures. Wintery weather creates additional hazards and challenges that make work more difficult and dangerous. Ensure your safety culture extends year-round - snow or shine. Don’t wait...
Every All-Star has a Coach: Build Safety Pros with Expert Training
Everyone knows Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, and so on. But can you name their coaches? Good coaching is what separates your players from your legends. Michael Jordan didn’t attend one basketball camp and go on to be the greatest basketball...
Overcoming the Struggle to Hire and Retain Younger Talent
It’s no secret that hiring is hard for many organizations right now. Continued company success relies on bringing on new, top talent to fill open roles. But pressure is mounting as businesses continue to struggle for ways to attract and retain younger recruits....
Benefits of Proactive Safety Education and Where to Begin
Safety education helps create a culture of safety within an organization where employees identify and correct risks and hazards before they can cause an injury or worse. Yet many employers wait for traumatic incidents to inform their training needs and reveal safety...
OSHA Issues COVID ETS – Update and Resources
[November 4, 2021] – The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has issued an emergency temporary standard (ETS) today to minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission in the workplace. The ETS goes into effect immediately upon publishing in the Federal...
Supervisors: The Backbone of Your Safety Program
Quality front-line supervisors are the key to drive safety success in organizations. They are the employees most familiar with how teams operate, and they act as the closest level of management on the ground with workers. This gives supervisors the unique ability to...
Fire Safety at Home is as Important as at Work
Fire safety plans are critical for safety in the workplace. And these plans are more than just good safety procedures — they are required as part of state and local fire codes. Which is why every workplace has a fire safety plan that employees test at least...
Top 6 Spooky Job Sites From Around the Country
There are some fear-inducing incidents that occur on job sites that fall outside of near-misses, injuries, and accidents. They drift into the realm of the frightful and unexplained to send a suspenseful chill down the spine of readers. And we’ve decided to celebrate...
Do’s and Don’ts of Air Monitors Every Worker Should Know
A key element for keeping workers safe on the job is limiting exposure to harmful chemicals and hazardous materials. Most associate these exposures with liquids and harmful solid materials but the concern is just as valid for the substances in the air around a site....
Risk Assessment, Analysis, and Management: What’s the Difference?
Language has surprising overlaps between words. Which is why effective communication focuses just as much on how a message is said versus what is actually said in the message. This is important in safety when determining if a bright sign with images will warn workers...
Optimum Names Scott Rasor Executive Vice President of Insurance and Risk Management
LISLE, Ill. – Leading safety management and safety culture solution provider Optimum Safety Management® is thrilled to announce the addition of insurance industry veteran Scott Rasor to the team as Executive Vice President, Insurance and Risk Management. Rasor’s...
What Your Leadership Style Says About You
Leadership is not a monolith. All leaders work toward achieving a desired result by precisely balancing their emotional investment in their people and their logical investment in their end goals. But the balance between these factors can vary between any two leaders....
Are Your Supervisors Seeing Hazards? Studies Suggest They’re Not
Supervisors are key employees for organizations. They have the greatest insight on the ground-level, day-to-day operations. They are influential team members and have a greater responsibility for safe working practices on-site. They harness their insights and...
Safety Update: White House Issues New Rules on Vaccines
[September 10, 2021] – President Biden imposed new vaccine rules on Thursday affecting federal workers, large employers, and health care staff. These new requirements could apply to as many as 100 million Americans. As your safety partner, we to ensure you are aware...
Bring Safety Home: How to Develop a Home Emergency Plan
Emergencies are unpredictable. They put lives and resources in danger at a moment’s notice. Which is why so much time and effort is used to develop emergency plans in the workplace. Proper planning is the buffer that mitigates the impact of emergencies, saves lives...
5 Tips to Improve Forklift Safety
Workers take notice when large pieces of heavy machinery are brought onto a worksite to complete part of a project. These machines require special attention, loading and unloading requirements, use by specific operators, careful operation procedures, and plenty of...
Talking in Circles: Is Your Company Sending Mixed Safety Messages?
Signs, pamphlets, talks, and meetings all tell a story about safety. But it’s up to an organization to determine whether that story is fact or fiction. Employers run into issues when there is a clear disconnect between the company’s safety message and their safety...
Help Supervisors Find Their Voice and Boost On-Site Safety Communication
Clear communication keeps worksites safe and injuries low. Morning safety briefings and regular one-on-ones alert workers to pressing safety concerns and focus the team to watch out for each other and pay attention to the tasks at hand. But not all supervisors are...
How On-Site Safety Coaching Elevates Your Safety Training
Dedicated safety training is necessary for every organization. These safety sessions are set up as immersive experiences by design because the knowledge employees gain is fundamental to keep themselves and others safe on the job. Workers that attend safety training...
Top Ways to Combat Safety Fatigue
Humans can only operate at peak efficiency for so long. We eventually work through so many tasks and decisions during the day that we reach a point of mental exhaustion. It’s during these points of mental overload that critical decision-making becomes more lax and we...
Turn OSHA Top 10 Lists into Site-Specific Action Plans
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) publishes an updated list of the top 10 most cited standards from data collected during the previous year. The list is created both from data collected directly by OSHA and from other sources of labor statistics...
How Good Are Your Team’s Safety Briefings and How Can They Be Better?
Keeping worker safety at the front and center is key to keep projects on track and on budget. And it’s more likely for safety to remain a priority when the whole team is aligned on expectations and duties at the start of every workday. Because quality communication is...
Top 5 Things That Should Happen the Minute OSHA Shows Up
The sudden arrival of an OSHA inspector immediately changes the energy at any facility. Employees and supervisors alike tend to be more on edge with an OSHA official on-site which can make the inspection more difficult and unpredictable. This can make the entire...
How Optimum Partners with Your Existing Safety Team to Deliver Lasting Results
Every business has a specialty that makes it unique within its field. Every business also relies on fundamental capabilities to perform their necessary functions. A company needs to strike a balance between maintaining those fundamental capabilities such as...
Live Online Safety Workshops Allow Safety Training to Continue Without COVID or Travel Headaches
The COVID-19 pandemic is finally slowing down as cities, states, and communities across the nation reopen at varying levels. And one major take-away from a year dealing with the coronavirus is the continued importance of safety preparedness and education. Safety...
OSHA Compliance: Why Routine Inspections are So Important
A major goal of every organization is to actively avoid OSHA citations. This goal makes sense to most employers as OSHA citations are a major setback and can leave a lasting negative impression on a business. Some companies believe maintaining the bare minimum of...
Help Set Up Your Existing Safety Team for Long Term Success
Establishing a safety team within an organization is a solid step in the right direction toward continuous safety excellence. But many organizations make the mistake of pulling back and leaving the team to their own devices after kick-off. This is the quickest way a...
Where You Can Expect to Save Money From Hiring a Good Safety Management Company
A good investment should yield results. But what makes results good or bad can be difficult to quantify when they’re not paid back in direct dollars and cents. A good insurance policy may seem like a waste until the worst has come to pass. A cheap piece of furniture...
Safety Management: The Limits on What Your Insurance Company Actually Does
Many organizations believe the coverage and advice provided by their insurance company is adequate to cover the safety of their employees. This is true in that insuring an organization and its employees are necessary parts of doing business and that the coverage...
Save Time & Money: Automate Your New Hire and Ongoing Employee Training
Maintaining accurate records for employee training participation is a challenge as much as it is a necessity. Many organizations struggle to find the perfect method to both make trainings widely available and to ensure those trainings are completed. And these metrics...
Sustainable Safety Comes Through Your Culture, Not Your Policies
Organizational leaders tend to fixate on injury totals to highlight safety success. This is because injury totals provide a simple metric to easily track without spending time thinking about the health of an organization’s safety program. It encourages leaders to...
5 Things Leadership Needs to Understand About Safety
Many organizational leaders underestimate the potential of making safety a priority for their business. These leaders disregard safety out of hand due to preconceived notions about the limited benefits provided by safety. These same leaders generally only pay...
5 Warnings Your Current Safety Program is Slipping
Trusting when to stay the course during hard times is an admirable trait in a leader. But equally important is understanding a red flag versus a hardship. Identifying the difference between a minor hardship and a major warning sign — especially in safety —...
4 Years and Counting: How Sustainable Sourcing Continues Winning Workplace Safety Awards
When Paul O’Neill took over as CEO of Alcoa, his first goal was to address worker safety. O’Neill stood before the Alcoa Board of Directors and said, “I intend to go for zero injuries.” The Board was expecting him to address revenue growth and initially seriously...
Industry Standards: Are You OK Being Near-Average When It Comes to Injuries?
Few companies strive to be average. It’s a poor business ideal that sets expectations too low to create year-over-year growth and profit. Because average is a static state. It doesn’t win awards, create momentum, or bolster prestige. And any company willing to settle...
What to Expect During an OSHA Inspection (and How to Prepare)
A quick way to sound off internal alarms throughout an organization is the announcement that an OSHA inspector has arrived. The perception that surrounds OSHA inspections tends to trend negatively even though the inspections provide necessary oversight and guidance to...
Proactive or Reactive: Prevent Injuries Today or Clean Up Tomorrow?
Safety is purely a numbers game for some employers. These decision-makers treat safety as a budget to be balanced via a tally of metrics at the end of each quarter or semi-annual cycle. The system they employ generally uses injury totals, workers compensation payouts,...
A Safe Investment: Spend a Fraction of What You’ll Save — in Lives and Money
A prevailing principle in business is that business-owners need to spend money to make money. This adage is brought up to refer to business costs that seem obvious — advertising costs, overhead, materials, and prime real estate. But one avenue rarely mentioned in this...
Outside Looking In: Benefits of an Outside Safety Professional
Second opinions are an important tool used in many industries to help make critical business decisions. We see them employed regularly in medicine, law, real estate, finance, and even construction — as the old adage goes, measure twice, cut once. The reason second...