Improving safety performance, step by step

Companies who have a high safety performance aren’t just lucky. Instead they understand that safety performance is a process requiring several organisational and conceptual principles in place both at a formal and informal levels.

Green-Jakobsen has a proven record of helping our clients – both ship and shore – to develop and implement formal and informal mechanisms to ensure a more resilient and sustainable safety culture and performance.

A key focus for Green-Jakobsen is to help our clients’ employees translate general safety methods, tools and ideas into something that can be applied during their daily work. Our focus is on embedding improved behaviour, leadership, communication, reflections and evaluation of safety performance while at work.

Therefore we …

With a step-by-step approach we ensure effect rather than providing deliverables only. Our defined performance behaviour, risk management principles, safety performance assessment tools and extremely thorough understanding and experience of how to improve a company’s safety performance is as good as you will find it.

The process of transforming an idea into culture doesn’t happen at the office at a meeting. There is a difference between talking about resilience and engagement and actually achieving it.

Ensuring a resilient safety culture is not the delivery of a package – it is a process that requires focus, persistency and on-going monitoring of progress. Green-Jakobsen helps our clients manage this process and have a long and proven record of doing so.

For Green-Jakobsen building resilience is more than achieving compliance of the sort you see in campaigns such as the one you see for Shell.

When taking a closer look at the various definitions there seems to be another way of seeing resilience, which appears to be more straightforward: Engagement. Using this word suddenly makes it easier to understand what a company can do to build resilience.

For Green-Jakobsen, the ability to organize genuine engagement through employee dialogue, reflection and learning processes is what makes organisations ‘bounce back correctly’ after both positive and adverse events. It is the real difference between the talk and the walk.

Often, working with our down-to-earth approach means having to view safety and development in a new perspective.

It requires trust, openness and self-reflection.

We have seen that real impact can be achieved when every single person is aware of how he or she contributes to a shared goal, whether it’s the company vision or the main aim of a safety programme. In any case, a shared goal really has to make sense to everyone, and it has to be achievable.  We transform strategy into daily work.

Continuous involvement and reflection

To go about this, we make employees self-reflect in different ways. In most of our courses, workshops and training we involve participants actively in a very ‘hands-on’ manner in order to make everyone think about their own contribution. They are asked to reflect on: ‘what does this mean to me in my everyday work?’ or ‘how does my leadership impact the crew and vessel performance?’

We call this reflective learning and we find that this helps bridging the gap between the learning situation and the work situation.

Alongside making employees aware of their part and of influencing a larger process, we try to foster an open and trusting atmosphere for everyone. This part is not easy at all. Nevertheless, experience has taught us again and again that pursuing openness and trust in the long run pays dividends when a change in safety mindset is needed.

Our wide range of safety and leadership courses are fundamental in the change process. Read more about them here.