Selecting and developing employees is where the ultimate criticality lies in sustaining occupational safety excellence. Once a new employee enters the workplace, most organizations deploy mechanisms to ensure they are onboarded (assimilated into the cultural norms and performance expectations) in an efficient and effective manner. On the journey to excellence, is this an opportunity missed? With this new hire, have you introduced a complimentary safety mentality that will enhance the culture, or inadvertently introduced a new element of risk?

Assessing a Vendor's Culture

Many firms are beginning to understand the role that culture plays in incident prevention and have taken impressive steps to develop a desirable climate for employees to work within. Several organizations have added requests to their procurement processes to gain potential vendor safety information and measurements. Safety rates, costs, programs, practices and even culture are assessed to ensure new risk isn't introduced to their employees and processes.

While not ideal as a standalone tactic, having clients (or potential clients) assessing your safety performance can be an effective beginning motivator to improve safety if the intrinsic motivation within the company's leadership is missing. Furthermore, some of these companies are examining the safety indicators as a measure of other values and priorities.

In a private discussion recently, an executive of one such company put it aptly: "Good safety is good business. If you can't do something as important as safety well, what else aren't you doing well?"

Determining the impact of outside forces on your culture is an admirable advanced approach. But, what about an individual force? What about a single influential individual? Malcolm Gladwell referred to these individuals in his 2002 book, Tipping Point, as Mavens. Others use terms such as influencer or change agent. Consider the potential positive or negative impact an influential new hire can have on the existing culture. Helping organizations manage this type of predictive insight has neutralized risk prior to its introduction into the cultural and safety performance equation.

Understanding the Applicant

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, organizations have continued to enhance their pre-employment practices. Recent additions have included background checks (personal, professional, criminal, credit), reviewing driving history, assessments of competency (demonstrable knowledge, behaviors, and skills required to perform specific tasks) and personality profiling (tests to determine character, patterns of behavior, thoughts and attitudes).

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