The definition of keynote address, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an address designed to present the issues of primary interest to an assembly (such as a political convention) and often to arouse unity and enthusiasm.” And that is the perfect description for the three keynote addresses planned for EHS Today’s Safety Leadership Conference 2017, scheduled for Sept. 11-13 at the Hilton Atlanta.
From big questions, like “Who owns safety?” to examples from an MIT lecturer and researcher about industrial practice where productivity, safety and morale simultaneously improved to addressing how companies can develop and accomplish a culture in which safety is the shared value of every employee, our three keynotes alone are worth the price of admission.
Here’s a taste of what you’ll hear on Sept. 12 and 13…
Who Owns Safety?
Tuesday, September 12, 8:00am - 9:15am
Terry L. Mathis, CEO/Founder, ProAct Safety
It is human nature to take better care of that which we own. Ownership is the main reason people will detail their own car but won’t even run a rental through a free car wash. Ownership is also the reason why some safety efforts are stellar and others are lackluster. Should we create ownership in our safety efforts? Who should own what? And how do we accomplish this?
Terry L. Mathis is a well-known and respected international consultant, speaker and author and the founder of ProAct Safety, a 24-year-old international safety and performance consulting firm. He is a veteran of over 1,600 safety, culture and performance improvement projects in 39 countries and 21 languages, and has personally assisted organizations such as Georgia-Pacific, Herman Miller, AstraZeneca, Wrigley, ALCOA, Merck, Rockwell Automation, AMCOL International, Ingersoll-Rand and many others to achieve excellence.
He is a regular keynote and breakout speaker at ASSE, NSC and numerous state, company and industry conferences. Terry has co-authored five books on safety and strategy, and has authored more than 100 articles in publications including Professional Safety, EHS Today, ISHN, Electrical Engineering Journal, Chemical Engineering Journal and Business Week.
You Don’t Have to Trade Off Safety for Production
Tuesday, September 12, 3:30pm - 4:30pm
Dr. John Carrier, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School
The greatest challenge to developing and sustaining a safety culture is the mindset that in order to achieve a safe working environment, a price in productivity must be paid – in other words, we are trading off a portion of today’s productivity to prevent an infrequent, but catastrophic event. Then, the job becomes optimizing multiple outputs - performance, safety and staff morale – using separate inputs.
While this may be true in a theoretical sense, it is patently false in practice. Most systems are running in a condition that is both unproductive and unsafe. However, there are many examples from industrial practice where productivity, safety and morale simultaneously improved, most notably Alcoa under Paul O’Neill’s leadership and the NUMMI auto facility jointly run by Toyota and GM.
As powerful as these examples are, they are generally not sufficient to change operating behavior, because “our system is different.” In this talk, we will discuss a generalized theory that explains how to simultaneously improve productivity, safety and morale through the detection and elimination of hidden factors, which are the hardened aggregates of quick fixes, workarounds and undisciplined work habits that over time form a second system within your workplace that produce poor quality work in an unsafe manner very slowly, while degrading worker skills.
The good news is that we can reverse these hidden factors if we know how to detect and then eliminate them. Dr. Carrier will show examples from his extensive field work, including offshore blowout preventer maintenance (driven by the Deepwater Horizon tragedy) and his long-running project with the EHS department at MIT. Productivity improvement of up to 30 percent can be achieved while reducing safety incidents by 50-90 percent.
Unless you are running a perfect system, there need not be trade-off between productivity and safety – unless our own thinking makes it that way.
Journey to Safety Excellence: Building Safety Leadership Culture
Wednesday, September 13, 11:45am - 1:00pm
W.E. Scott PhD, MPH, President, CEO, Global EHSS Leadership Solutions
Patrick (Pat) Cunningham, MS, Director, Safety & Auditing Services, Browz
This special keynote addresses how companies can develop and accomplish a culture in which safety is the shared value of every employee. Audience members will learn how to lead and implement a safety culture, involve employees in recognizing and identifying hazards, use measurement tools created for the National Safety Council’s Journey to Safety Excellence initiative to quantify the effectiveness of your safety culture and apply continuous improvement methods to evaluate and improve their safety efforts. Watch your business thrive by incorporating safety into the foundation of every strategy, decision, operation and action.
