Tag Archives: risk management

Astronaut Chris Cassidy: Leadership Under Pressure (and its Value to Risk Management)

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Capt. Chris Cassidy, a Navy SEAL, led a number of diverse teams as NASA’s Chief Astronaut and Commander of the International Space Station. He’ll share his views on risk management and leadership under pressure.

I think most of us look up at the stars and wonder what it would be like to travel in space. One of my earliest memories is of being allowed to stay up past my bedtime to see Neil Armstrong take that historic step following the moon landing of Apollo 11.

I didn’t really understand what was happening, but I remember my parents were excited and anxious, and my father told me, “We’re seeing history.” And I will ever forget Armstrong’s famous quote: “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”

Armstrong’s small step/giant leap was the result of years of training, thousands of hours spent researching and documenting risk management protocols and billions … Read more...

How ESG Management Builds Resilient Organizations

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While many organizations view ESG and ESG management as simply another reporting obligation, ESG principles and frameworks provide better understanding of people, processes and tools. 

Organizations need to do more than know their product lines, research their customers and balance the books. They also need to understand the threats and opportunities that are part of the world in which they operate. Understanding the nature of risk might not be the most exciting part of running an organization, but it’s the one that will help to ensure you have an organization to work at in the years to come. 

The last few years have completely upended our ideas of what is required to build a resilient organization. In 2019, no one was thinking about how to react to a pandemic that would shut down the entire world, a supply chain that threatens to crumble under the weight of constant disruption, the … Read more...

NSC Publishes Guidelines for Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention

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Serious injury and fatality prevention is dependent on effectively identifying and controlling risk.
Serious injury and fatality prevention is dependent on effectively identifying and controlling risk.

The National Safety Council’s (NSC) Campbell Institute – Center of EHS Excellence recently released details of two frameworks described as “a new direction for research on leading indicators” for serious injury and fatality (SIF) prevention.

In a white paper titled, Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention: Leading Indicators, Cumulative Risk and Safety Networks, cumulative risk assessment and social network analysis are proposed as SIF prevention frameworks. The research involved a working group tasked to define a set of key leading indicators relevant for SIF prevention and interviews were conducted with nine Campbell Institute member organizations as the basis for the white paper’s recommendations.  

Representatives from organizations interviewed shared details about their data collection efforts and analysis strategies, leading indicators related to SIF prevention, leadership and employee engagement around SIF prevention and the challenges their organizations have faced. … Read more...

Best Practices for Managing Risk in High Hazard Industries

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Despite many improvements over the last century, serious injuries, work-related fatalities and property loss remain a significant global challenge in different high-hazard industries. Improved risk identification, control and management can reduce risks to employees, facilities and the surrounding area.

Our latest Expert Connection session, Managing Risk in High Hazard Industries, is designed to examine the elements of risk management, particularly in high hazard industries, and the technologies being used to mitigate risk. Panelists include Debra Koehler, Director, Solution & Industry Marketing, Intelex Technologies ULC; David D. Wagner, Director of Applications Engineering & Product Knowledge, Industrial Scientific; and Michael Wegleitner, Corporate Director of Health & Safety, Hecla Mining Company. They will review:

  • The elements of risk management, particularly in high hazard industries.
  • How risk is determined and measured.
  • The technologies being used to mitigate risk.

The live session is scheduled for Wednesday, June 2, 2021 … Read more...

Intelex Experts Examine How the Construction Industry Is Flexing its Technology Muscle

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The construction industry has been engaging more and more in technology solutions for challenges such as regulatory compliance, safety analytics, training tracking and more. Join our panel of experts for our latest Expert Connect session, “Construction Builds Technology Muscle” on Wednesday, May 5, 2021, from 10am-10:45am EDT

Chuck Pettinger, Ph.D., Process Change Leader – Implementation for Predictive Solutions Corp., will be our moderator. Chuck has over 30 years of experience designing, implementing and evaluating culture step-change initiatives. His major interests include developing large-scale corporate behavior change initiatives, assessing industrial safety cultures, using advanced predictive analytics to develop leading indicators and conducting organizational leadership workshops.

Chuck will guide our experts through a discussion about some of the technologies being used by world-class companies in the construction industry to protect workers and the business. Existing challenges like compliance and safety have been compounded by new challenges brought about by economic … Read more...

EHSQ Professionals Are Using Technology to Teach New Tricks to Old Tasks

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As a Gen Xer, I’ve seen the evolution of consumer products through the years. When looking at consumer audio devices, the transition from records to CDs to the audio streaming apps used today has been nothing less than astonishing. While I’ve grown accustomed to playing the game of catch up every few years, I suspect that the pace of this will accelerate even more in the coming years. 

The same is true at work. Access to new and improved technology allows me to work from home, stream video conferencing calls, view dashboards that track business performance, use my phone to instant message coworkers and much more. As an EHSQ professional, what technology do you use at work that have enhanced how you perform your job tasks?

For example, are you utilizing:

PPS and sensors to keep remote workers and their managers connected and notify teams of the potential exposure to … Read more...

Mitigating Threats and Uncovering Opportunity: Learning About the Complexity of Risk

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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the concept of risk-based thinking to worldwide attention. The global scale of the pandemic and the indiscriminate way in which the virus is transmitted mean that risk experts must consider a vast number of risk profiles when calculating the threat.

Consider this: COVID-19 can be transmitted from anyone to anyone, which means every single person on the planet is at risk. Yet the nature of the virus and the different contexts in which people live mean that not everyone shares the same level of risk. Elderly people and those with pre-existing conditions are at very high risk of serious complications from COVID-19, while young, healthy people are at a much lower level of risk.

The economy is facing an extreme risk from the disruption to the labor market and mandatory isolation of consumers who would normally be out spending money, yet fully digital enterprises like … Read more...

Why Risk-Based Thinking Should Be Part of Your Quality Management System

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While the concept of risk is easy enough to understand, figuring out how to apply it to your organization can be somewhat more complicated. Learning how to manage the effect of uncertainty in such a way as to determine the impact on how value is created and sustained requires a deep understanding of your organization’s processes. Many organizations are tempted to avoid these difficulties by ignoring risk management altogether, which can lead to cost overruns, time delays, waste, rework, or even to more serious problems that have an impact on health and safety or the environment.

Fortunately, ISO 9001:2015 for quality management systems (QMS) can provide some much-needed guidance on how to make risk-based thinking the cornerstone of your QMS. ISO 9001:2015 incorporates risk-based thinking throughout to help your organization make better quality decisions that anticipate and prevent process problems. It also incorporates the high-level structure of Annex SL to … Read more...

The Campbell Institute Releases Strategies for Injury and Fatality Prevention

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Organizations that pursue strategies to eliminate serious injuries and fatalities have reached a level of maturity in their safety management systems that allows them to identify the most serious risks to workers.

The Campbell Institute, the global Center of EHS Excellence at the National Safety Council, has released a new white paper, Designing Strategy for Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention – the second in its series on this emerging safety trend. The report shares the perspectives of 11 Institute member and partner organizations on a variety of topics surrounding the development of their serious injury and fatality (SIF) prevention strategies and long-term goals, including metrics, tools, communication, and performance.

“We’re finding that organizations pursuing SIF prevention strategies have reached a level of maturity that goes beyond focusing on near misses and injuries to identifying the most severe risks,” said John Dony, director of the Campbell Institute. “Organizations working on SIF … Read more...

Don’t Let Your Incident Management System Sink Like the Titanic

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Ask a group of people what caused the Titanic to sink and most will say, “An iceberg.” In reality, the Titanic tragedy was caused by a series of events—management failures, poor-quality construction, employee errors/lack of training, poor planning, and either failure to track incidents or the inability to analyze incident data in a meaningful way—that ended with the sinking of the ship.  

As explained in the new Insight Report, The Five Things You Need to Know about Incident Reporting and Management,” safety and environmental disasters rarely occur because of a single event or incident, which is why it’s critical to adopt an incident management system that identifies root causes and protects your business from future occurrences.  

Workplace incidents can be painful for injured employees, the environment, and your organization’s bottom line, but incident management and reporting doesn’t have to be a pain point for you. 

Effective incident reporting and risk management … Read more...