Agenda

“When my crew came to me with a problem, I’d say ‘It’s your ship – how would you fix it?’.”

Mike Abrashoff was the most junior officer in the Pacific Fleet when he took command of the near-worst performing ship. Twelve months later, the USS Benfold was the best ship in the entire Navy—using the same crew. The story of that stunning transformation has lessons for every organization: leadership matters, engagement is key and culture is everything.

Mike established a set of management principles that he calls The Leadership Roadmap. At the core of his leadership approach on the USS Benfold was a process of replacing command and control with commitment and cohesion, and engaging the hearts, minds, and loyalties of workers with conviction and humility. “The most important thing that a captain can do is to see the ship through the eyes of the crew. The idea is to empower every individual to share the responsibility of achieving excellence.”

Mike is the author of four books. His first, It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy, has sold over 1.3 million copies and has a timeless message: don’t let outside forces stand in your way as excuses—control what you can influence to get amazing results. His next two books, It's Our Ship: The No-Nonsense Guide to Leadership and Get Your Ship Together: How Great Leaders Inspire Ownership From The Keel Up, show how these principles have been put into action by business leaders in their organizations. Mike’s latest book, Ship Happens (co-authored with Stacey Cunningham), serves as a guide for leaders, detailing his strategies for transforming USS Benfold into the top-performing ship.

He inspires audiences to rethink their beliefs about leadership and organizational culture and tailors the message to focus on engagement, execution, change, safety, diversity, leadership, teamwork, innovation, accountability, and more.

Frontline leaders and supervisors are considered by many to have the toughest position in any plant. Frontline leaders must keep their employer happy by fulfilling all KPI goals and strategies while at the same time keeping employees engaged and focused on those same goals and strategies. But it's not that simple. Successful leaders need to know how to fine-tune hazard identification skills, give positive feedback, and have difficult conversations—all while keeping human factors in mind. Participants will become part of Deric's presentation and evolve into better communicators in safety and performance in a group discussion on difficult conversations and best practices, collectively identify and practice the soft skills required for true climate/culture change, and conduct a real-time SafeLead risk assessment and discuss solutions.

Check-the-box compliance can feel so satisfying but once you've fulfilled your regulatory requirements it can be hard to get people within your organization to recognize that human factors training is necessary to not only improve but sustain safety. Hear the true story of how a plant of close to 100 employees went from eight lost time injuries to zero recordable injuries by introducing and embracing human factors. Participants will be taken beyond just the recordable injury reduction to analyze how the company maintained a positive safety culture by implementing techniques and tools that led to increased levels of near-miss reporting, improved employee safety performance and a high level of leadership support to keep everyone safe not just at work, but at home and on the road as well. Participants will engage in a Rate Your State activity and anticipating error exercises with safe work permitting and procedure execution scenarios.

Were Heinrich's theories merely misunderstood or fundamentally flawed? The recent emphasis on significant incident and fatality precursors has challenged safety professionals to rethink the long-held assumption of the causes of workplace accidents. In this knowledge expedition, participants will gain a deep understanding of the original intentions behind the Heinrich Safety Pyramid and look at the intricate relationship between the findings of a recent study of SIF precursors in high-risk workplace incidents and the identification of corrective actions. This journey will unveil the secrets of workplace safety, an interactive discussion will challenge long-standing beliefs, and the workshop element will equip participants with the tools to safeguard their organization like never before.

A positive safety culture and a positive safety climate are very closely linked. Both are essential to improve productivity, quality, retention, employee engagement, and morale—and reduce injuries. The SafeStart Human Factors Framework allows leaders to connect individual performance and organizational performance to provide a construct to ensure consistency between technical and human systems. This session will define six safety climate success factors. Participants will be part of the discussion with two key people from SafeStart and learn how human factors in organizational systems influence individual actions and decisions, and vice versa. Participants will discover how to distinguish climate from culture—and why it matters—and they will also participate in an activity where they use human factors as a lens for assessing management system elements and discover practical leadership skills related to human factors.

Soft skills are the personal attributes (people skills) that enable safety professionals to effectively interact with others. Traditional safety training focuses on teaching workers how to follow compliance rules but when you don't relate to workers on a human level, there’s bound to be a disconnect. This session will explain how soft skills can help safety professionals win the hearts and minds of workers and dramatically boost compliance rates as a result. Participants will workshop on what has worked for them and what hasn’t and gain an understanding of best practices in the industry. Participants will also come away with the skills and knowledge to add a hefty dose of engagement to their next training sessions, improving both the quality and consistency of safety outcomes.

So many efforts within organizational safety management can be around messaging and meeting tactical objectives such as training. While these are important efforts, actual safety and safe behavior are much more of an “in the moment” matter of decision-making in work environment realities and require a proactive program implemented from the bottom up. Focusing on worker behavior rather than waiting for problems to occur can help change the safety climate within the organization. Participants will be part of the discussion with David who observed this reality for years, including the tactical efforts made that often don’t fully “hit the mark.” Participants will also come away with practical tools and approaches used to successfully flip a safety culture.

Remote learning is a way to standardize training across various sites. High Liner Foods was challenged to implement an enterprise-wide safety program that had to include all of their employees in North America—regardless of location; promote a common safety language; and focus on a single initiative that everyone could champion. SafeStart for Remote Workers was something that checked all of those boxes. Participants will hear High Liner Food’s story of challenges and successes in rolling out this remote training platform. Participants will be polled on roadblocks they face in making a program successful and sustainable. High Liner Foods will provide a first-hand account of what has done over the three years since it was launched.

Intense. Primal. Effective. These are all words that have been used to describe traditional bootcamp. And with good reason—bootcamp is designed to reprogram a person’s bad habits. This immersive storyteller’s bootcamp will prepare participants for combat against ineffective safety training. Since the topic of safety is typically dry or boring, many safety professionals and trainers struggle to keep their sessions fresh, engaging and memorable. Participants will be whipped into shape, taking away actionable tips to sharpen their craft and become more powerful and authentic trainers

Most organizations have done an outstanding job with the hierarchy of controls and overall compliance programs. In an ideal world, that would be enough to solve recurring safety problems yet injuries still persist. One critical area that is often overlooked is how human factors influence safety outcomes. For potential investments in new safety initiatives, addressing human factors may only be on the "nice to have" list. This session will start the conversation on why human factors training is essential in every industry and participants will take away useful strategies to gain leadership buy-in to support the effective management of human factors in the workplace and beyond. Be part of the discussion in this interactive Q&A with two expert safety leaders and your host Rick from SafeStart.

Gamification not only injects fun and excitement into training material but a game show format can produce a very positive response from attendees during a dry subject for instructors to maneuver through like safety. This session will demonstrate how the new SafeStart Refresh Challenge reinforces the key SafeStart techniques with competition and camaraderie while distracting participants from the fact that they are still learning. Participants will also experience first-hand how gamification will get employee engagement and interaction almost immediately. By joining in the gameplay, participants will leave this session energized about this new refresher unit, their fun quotient will be met and they will understand why they need gamification (especially the SafeStart Refresh Challenge) in their organization.

Frontline leaders play a key role in organizational safety success and SafeLead gives them practical knowledge of both human and system factors that influence what people do. But how do organizations achieve the most value from this culture-improving initiative? This session will educate participants on the Do’s and Don'ts of an effective SafeLead implementation through real client examples, stories, and a dedicated Q&A session. Participants will roll up their sleeves and get to the bottom of the Who, What, Where, When, and How of managing a SafeLead implementation, get a true understanding of the process by creating their own personal value statements and most importantly, come away with a plan for creating sustainable and consistent personal skills growth for their facility.

When it comes to leading in safety, it’s important to recognize that humans are fallible and errors are to be expected. By gaining a deeper understanding of what causes people to make mistakes and errors, leaders are more capable of creating the impact desired for the organization. Since human factors affect us all, leaders need to understand the role they play in uncovering these not only within those they lead but within themselves. This session will share Kevin’s personal journey to becoming a better leader in safety by understanding how influential human factors are on performance. Participants will walk away with the strategies needed to become more effective in leading those in their charge, and they will learn valuable ways to improve things like team morale, employee retention, and operational excellence while identifying leading indicators that help thwart the rise in undesired outcomes.

Effective safety communication and leadership have always been cornerstones of proactive safety culture and management systems. However, as safety professionals, are we inadvertently undermining our efforts even before we utter a word? In the realm of safety, communication transcends mere words. This session delves into the profound impact of nonverbal communication on safety engagement, emphasizing the importance of human connection. Leslie will explore scientific research, delve into social psychology and neuroscience concepts, and impart practical strategies to enhance safety interactions with workers, supervisors, and leaders. From incident investigations to risk identification and correction, this interactive session will equip you with the skills to elevate safety through nonverbal communication.

When investing in safety training, companies want to get the most out of their investment. One-and-done programs might look good in the short term but to achieve lasting performance improvement, you need to look at all of the different plays required for skill improvement—at an individual and organizational level. Sustainability is about having everyone speak the same language and carry their training through the long term to maximize the company’s investment. This session will provide a playbook for sustaining SafeStart and define the five long-term success factors. Participants will use the playbook to effectively deliver a SafeChat topic, a toolbox talk and learn how to effectively use the between unit activities to successfully sustain the SafeStart process.

Even if your safety management program has robust technical systems and rigorous training, numerous incidents may occur if you fail to properly manage human factors. Participants will be part of a demonstration and see how human factors are the most challenging obstacle to maintaining your safety management systems. They will also review a real-world case study of how one company was able to integrate elements of human factors management into their SMS and participants see first-hand how to use a flexible framework as well as guiding principles from the new ANSI/ASSP Z16.1-2022 standard to show how to achieve a balanced approach to managing complex safety systems.

Fatigue is one of the most significant issues that companies face in every industry, but it’s also the one that people don't think about as a serious problem because most of us feel tired every day. A deeper look at the causes of incidents notably shows worker fatigue as one of the most common human factors named by individuals and it affects safety, quality, and productivity. This session will reveal what the research shows in terms of best practices for scheduling, shift structure, and even staffing to help avoid problems stemming from an excessively tired workforce and examine emerging technologies that can help identify at-risk individuals during the work shift. It will also uncover how the individual worker reduces the likelihood of injury by developing skills including self-triggering when the state of fatigue is elevated and maintaining good sleep habits.

It’s no secret that workers are injured and suffer preventable injury-related deaths at a much higher rate off the job versus while they're at work. And logic would indicate that their friends and family members are hurt a lot outside of work too. Companies often notice the impact of their injured workers but have you ever thought about the impact that the injuries and fatalities of workers’ loved ones—especially children—have on employees? Learn how to make the “heart and mind” connection to reduce the impact of human factors beyond the workplace to not only reduce worker incidents but also improve family safety (when they take safety home), increase worker satisfaction, reduce absenteeism, strengthen recruiting and cause companies to have a more favorable perception in the community.

Up until 10 years ago—before neuroscience discoveries became mainstream—people in safety only had a partial picture of what drove behavior. The common (and incomplete) view was that all behavior was conscious or could be made to be, especially if it involved something as important as safety.

The latest discoveries in neuroscience are reshaping our understanding of human decision-making and behavior. But even though the information is more available, a lot of companies still fail to see how human factors can be managed within their companies. A better understanding of what is going on inside people’s heads enables companies to help their workers make safer decisions and influence their behavior to be safer.

There is plenty of science showing that most decisions originate in the subconscious. Habits are often created unconsciously and they are carried out automatically. In fact, the majority of what we do we have done before, so we do it in an automated fashion to some extent.

Are our habits always “safe”? Research shows they feel safe, but hardly ever are. Without knowing how the human brain functions, it is difficult to help people reshape habits or decisions that would help them be safer and get hurt less.

Personal protective equipment (PPE) is considered the last line of defense when all other lines have failed. By adding the human brain to the list of PPE, Cristian will demonstrate how a neuroscience-based leadership approach can influence the way everyone thinks about safety. Learn how physiological changes in our brains and helping people build good habits can help them make safer decisions.

Have you ever been in a situation where you witnessed something unsafe but chose to look the other way? It’s okay to admit if you have—this is a reality on a lot of job sites. When it comes to employee engagement and safety, the human element is often overlooked and this has a big impact on how people respond in safety situations. When you talk about safety, it needs to be in terms of emotions, feeling the emotions, and addressing the real people in those situations—when someone gets hurt, they aren't just a safety stat. Talking about regulations and statistics does not make a sustainable impact on employees but participants will come away from this session knowing how to embed human factors into their safety management system to help engage employees and reduce injuries. In the session, participants will also be encouraged to tell their stories on how to develop a safety culture of “If you see something, say something” and the importance of making safety personal.

Something unconventional, something deep, something perhaps partially subconscious, happens to make unhappy workers more hazardous to themselves and their colleagues. Participants will become cryptanalysts to crack the code on the phenomenon that reveals the secret ingredient of worker safety. This session will dive into the science and correlation between happiness, engagement, and safety and participants will come away with fresh eyes on a strategy to improve happiness, culture, and safety in their own organizations.

The SafeStart process has been used across the globe for over twenty years to effectively engage employees in safety and develop 24/7 safety skills. Research (informed by fieldwork) into human factors, and feedback from SafeStart clients has led to the new instructional design of a broader set of tools and resources for making SafeStart "stick" even better over the long term. Sustainability is about maintaining and applying skills, so flexible training units (“flex units”) have been developed meant for just-in-time use. The flex units maintain the common language and thought process acquired from the core units while applying them to specific safety challenges. Participants will engage in an interactive discussion about how the SafeStart process has been updated and get hands-on experience with the new sustainability projects including a “choose your own adventure” client portal walk-through, a SafeChat conversation using the new toolkit, and a quick tutorial on our Client Success Model on how to align your goals, expectations and preparation for a successful and sustainable implementation.

Rarely is a fatal incident a “freak accident” or “bad luck”—they occur when a known control is skipped or fails. The construction, energy, and mining industries have been on a decades-long journey to achieve zero harm, where workplaces are free of fatalities and serious injuries but plateaued progress and persisting fatal injuries indicate there’s still a long way to go in achieving the collective mission. By integrating the social and technical aspects of a safety system, it’s possible to drive improved performance in all aspects of the company. This session will provide a real-life account of the Torex Gold, Morelos Complex HS Journey case study to achieve zero harm, followed by a breakout activity where participants develop high-level plans to implement the routines necessary to create a work environment where every brain is in the game, and people are thinking about personal safety at work, home, and in between.

It is a long journey to safety excellence and organizations need to ensure they are optimizing the use of their resources along their path. A SafeStart Human Factors Review (HFR) helps assess how well companies are considering human factors in their workplace, and it also helps to identify opportunities to move systems, programs and initiatives from reactive to proactive/predictive. This session will discuss how human factors can be integrated into systems and leveraged with individuals to guide the sustainable development of safety excellence. Pete will demonstrate how the HFR can utilize the SafeStart Human Factors Framework and Safety Climate Success Factors to form a lens to focus on improvements. Participants will take part in a safety climate survey about blame, trust and engagement. Then they will work together to place common scenarios in the appropriate learning loop of the human factors framework and discuss the importance of human factors management for individuals and in technical and people systems.

Stop Work Authority has been utilized in industry for over 25 years to authorize employees to cease work if they perceive unsafe behaviors or conditions present. This has undoubtedly led to saving lives and preventing injuries. What would happen if we flipped the concept upside down and asked employees to only start work when the conditions are safe to do so? This session will engage participants to explore a new concept that combines human factors, fatality prevention and barrier thinking into a powerful way to reduce risks. Fundamental to implementing ‘Start Work Authority’ is the need to identify high consequence risks, e.g., fatality potential events and defining how human factors are identified and mitigated before and during work activities. Participants will outline an approach to adapt ‘Start Work Authority’ to their organization as well as define the steps to achieve leadership support for this approach.

Have you ever developed “the plan”—you know, the one that will solve all your woes? It’s a solid plan, a winner, but upon implementation, it just sputters and stalls. Too often we strategize in a vacuum, failing to incorporate the input and feedback from our most trusted resource—our people. In this session, participants will receive some tips on creating a strategy and vision that will both garner buy-in and commitment from the C-Suite and will be welcomed and implemented by the frontline. They'll also learn how to maximize the efficacy of their strategy and positively impact organizational performance by understanding the advancement of human factors.

Safety isn’t a mindset that should be turned on and off. To be effective, safety needs to be a 24/7 strategy that can take all aspects of organizational performance to the next level. But that doesn’t mean this objective is easy. Share your challenges in this interactive session and learn how to help your organization adopt a safety-first mindset. Fewer injuries, increased productivity and an improved bottom line are all results of an organization operating with safety front and center. Do you have experience with evidence-based safety guidance and can identify ways you have engaged employees? Come prepared to share what has worked and what hasn’t worked as participants build confidence in how to make workplace safety the catalyst for greater organizational performance.

Psychological studies have shown that the human brain gives more weight to negative experiences than positive ones. And when it comes to working in safety, there’s no question that the stress of the job can be all-consuming. Even the way safety is measured focuses on the seemingly negative aspects like incident or injury rates and reporting (near miss instead of good catch). It’s almost impossible to quantify what safety prevented because it didn’t happen. For example, we say we had 10 injuries last year, not we prevented 350 people from getting hurt last year. Shifting the message from negative to positive helps build psychological safety and people are more willing to share their challenges both mentally and physically, at work and at home. In this session, participants will work together in a positive thinking seminar to explore how to take the states, errors, and CERTs and put a positive spin on the messaging (with SafeStart cards) and discuss how to fight complacency by growing engagement.

Gamification not only injects fun and excitement into training material but a game show format can produce a very positive response from attendees during a dry subject for instructors to maneuver through like safety. This session will review how the SafeStart Refresh Challenge reinforces the key SafeStart techniques with competition and camaraderie while distracting participants away from the fact that they are still learning. It will also demonstrate how gamification will get employee engagement and interaction almost immediately. Participants will leave this session energized about this new refresher unit, their fun quotient will be met and they will have the key takeaways to know why they need gamification (like the SafeStart Refresh Challenge) in their organization.

Best practices are not a one-size-fits-all approach but when it comes to safety, they are often applicable across many different industries. Learn what other companies are doing to ensure success in their implementations of SafeStart’s suite of processes and what leading indicators they are monitoring to provide an accurate measurement of their progress. One major factor in a successful integration is weaving the SafeStart concepts and principles into the overall safety management system. Learn how to successfully integrate into the company culture and hear specific recommendations for gaining more involvement, buy-in, and support throughout the organization. There’s nothing better than a first-hand recommendation of what works—especially when it comes to training.

Human factors affect all areas of our lives—professionally and personally—and they are influenced by how we respond when faced with stressors. But what is the impact beyond safety? For organizations, other desired outcomes like improved production, less downtime, better retention, increased engagement and communication can be achieved by learning how to better manage human factors both corporately and individually. So it would only make sense if you want to impact the overall culture and produce a happier workforce which in turn improves interpersonal relationships and communications on and off the job, you need to focus on human factors management and 24/7 safety.

Storytelling is so much more than just telling a story. A good storyteller can take the underlying message of the story and make it emotional so that the listeners have a meaningful connection with the story. The reason that better engagement is obtained through storytelling is that people are hardwired to think in narrative terms. If storytelling is done correctly, it can have lasting effects over time which makes stories a useful teaching tool—a link of cause and effect is exactly how people reason.

What’s more, there are ways to tell stories or link to other stories that will make the story more powerful or add more credibility. Storytelling, especially from Larry and Jack, can also be very entertaining and humorous—prepare to laugh out loud! These two experienced and successful storytellers will demonstrate how different kinds of stories have different purposes and as a result a different impact or learning outcome. Some generate raw emotion, others demonstrate “values in action” that teach a lesson or make a point. As a result, storytelling is a powerful tool for a safety trainer; it connects with people on a personal and emotional level and feeds into the way their brains process information.

Winning over an audience can be hard if you’re not skilled in the art of storytelling. Larry survived with his storytelling ability starting as a behavior-based safety consultant at the age of 28, when his audiences were—in some cases—incredibly hostile. And Larry hired Jack almost instantly when he heard him tell one of his most moving stories. The principles of a well-told story are essential to not only gain the trust and buy-in of your audience but also deliver the message to get employees and leaders motivated to move forward. So not only will you learn a lot, but you’ll be moved, you’ll be laughing and you’ll be thoroughly entertained!