Tracy Hanes, a native Hoosier but now a transplanted Texan, has the secret to reduce employee injury.
After a successful career in the US Navy, and being a Division Commander training over 880 recruits, Tracy developed keen leadership abilities and applied that to industrial safety cultures. “One of the biggest challenges with business owners today is, reducing or eliminating serious injury from the workplace. What they don’t realize is you have to go “Beyond OSHA” to be successful. Safety in the work place is a Psychological game. That requires employee buy in, after all they are your most valuable assets, add in a little servant leadership and you will experience success”.
Carl Potter of Potter and Associates, a Zero Injury advocate echo’s Hanes’ statement “Many executives, managers and supervisors do not have a safety philosophy because they do not understand the concepts of safety and health management. Nor do they understand how to approach safety in the context of the work that they manage or supervise. While many of these leaders are highly educated in management and leadership concepts, most of them have had little training in integrating health and safety management principles into their everyday work”.
Nelson Consulting elaborated, “Can private industry improve its safety record? The answer is a hardy yes! But using the same old methods is probably going to get the same old results”.
No stranger to success while in charge of training, Hanes an educator and advocate for his clients, lead a team of 1,200 employees’ in the most dangerous refinery culminating in an industry record of 1,319,269 continuous work hours in a 90 day period without a recordable injury in 2011. That is the equivalent of 500 employees working a year without a OSHA recordable injury.
The “Secret to Success” formula that Hanes teaches others is the “3” C’s formula.
Communication-It does not matter how big or small a business may be or how big the work force is. There can be a means for the leadership to be aware of what is going on at the employee’s level. Communication channels need to be open and very effective, otherwise there will be disasters and a lot of other hazards lurking, just waiting to cause an incident.
Compassion- To solve problems at the work place the employee should be given full attention and compassion. In an instance where a leader that a problem is unclear, it would help if you asked the employees how the issue can be solved. the employees just might be in a better position to understand how best to deal with a problem, since they’re the ones experiencing them.
Commitment- You’re in it to win it! It takes full demonstrated leadership commitment and employee “Buy In” to have work place injury as an outlier.
To learn more visit www.besafeusa.com or email safetyleader@gmail.com