A Bullish Forecast for the Decade Ahead
"In my experience, there have never been as many factors as now that support occupational safety and health's development as a profession and an understanding of why it's important," said PureSafety President & CEO William A. Grana Jr.
PureSafety's leader, President & CEO William A. Grana Jr., has written a series of upbeat whitepapers recently, teaming with Todd Hohn, the company's vice president of Strategic Resources, on one of them. The key point in the series for safety and health professionals probably is this, from the one on which they collaborated: "Workforce safety and health initiatives will be as important to 21st century business performance as quality initiatives were to the 20th century."
Principles from this paper, which is titled "Safety and Health: Fertile Ground for Applying Quality Principles and Uniting Efforts," will be shared in a one-hour webinar from PureSafety on June 24, with registration available at http://info.puresafety.com/Unite.html.
During an interview at Safety 2010 in Baltimore, Hohn and Grana discussed the importance of a new acronym for industry, CRGC, which represents Compliance, Risk management, Governance, and Culture. Sarbanes-Oxley and GRC trends have caused many organizations to increase their emphasis on EHS, but GRC leaves out the crucial pillar of culture, which when present and optimized makes for continuously improved safety, health, efficiency, and profitability, they said.
Employees in organizations with a strong EHS culture will do the right thing naturally, not just when they're being monitored, and systems that support this -- promoting transparency, for example by ranking safety and health performance by site or by manager -- have a strong positive impact on operations, Grana said.
"In my experience, there have never been as many factors as now that support occupational safety and health's development as a profession and an understanding of why it's important," he said. "We think this is as exciting a time [for the profession] as it's ever been."
For more information and to access Pure Safety's whitepapers, visit http://twitter.com/puresafety.