Every month, members of the Safeopedia community come together for an online member's book club to discuss important workplace health and safety topics, share their insights and thoughts, and support each other.
In our most recent session, we invited our member and Author Jeff Dalto to discuss his book "Safety Success Stories."
If you missed it, here's a recap of the session.
Meet the Author
Jeff Dalto is an instructional designer, workplace performance improvement professional, and EHS trainer. He's completing a Master's in Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning from Boise State University and is a member of the Boise State University Learning Science Lab, where's he's played a role in research and writing articles on learning strategies and sciences.
Jeff has also helped to write the ANSI/ASSP Z490 environmental, health, and safety training standards and co-authored the chapter on safety training and learning in the recent ASSP Professional Safety Handbook.
Jeff's mission is to help share out the success stories of other safety professionals, in hopes it will provide insight and positive learnings for other EHS Professionals. In his booklet, Jeff Dalto and Jeff Lyth created a guide to help people share their stories about successes they had experienced and what led up to those successes.
Many thanks to Jeff for taking the time and effort to create this booklet and help share the success stories of 37 other health and Safety professionals!
Meet the Book
Safety Success Stories is a compilation of success stories from across the globe. These are real stories of real successes implemented in real organizations by real people. Our co-host Gary Wong created this word cloud, it was generated from the 37 contributions.
Jeff hopes everyone enjoys this booklet, benefits from its various stories, and most importantly, that you will share your own success stories with others so we can all learn from one another. Please do pass it on!
The Big Picture: Our Discussion Topics
Safety Success Stories is meant to encourage people to celebrate their successes while also talking about how they impeded their various programs and practices through their shares. This guide is a tool that can help everyone learn from other people's successes.
From that starting point, we dove into the patterns and themes gleaned from the various stories. Our co-host Gary Wong generated a word cloud from the contents of the booklet that we then used to generate discussion on the various clusters that emerged.
Word cloud generated from all 37 contributions (credit: Gary Wong)
Jeff then left us with these key takeaways:
- Start small
- Don't forget to learn about successes and build on them (don't spend all your time studying and trying to correct failures and problems)
- Know the importance of communication (asking questions, changing the words you use)
- Be humble and prepare for the possibility that your ideas may not work out as well as you had hoped they would
Meet the Author sessions are collaborative discussions. While our guest author and community co-host Gary Wong get the conversation going, our community members always share their insights, experiences, and perspectives.
Here are some of their contributions.
One of the book's contributors, Jake Mazulewicz, noted that he saw many elements of his story in the world cloud and that it was neat to see the overarching themes come through that fit with the other stories.
Rosa Antonia Carrillo related that "personal transformation" was an important aspect of her success story, since it centered on a regional manager who underwent a transformation in their own relationships and communication with the other employees..
Vince Marchesani told us that behavior-based approaches to safety were huge when he was working in EHS. His organization introduced a "No Blame" culture, which was an important step to improving safety since people didn't believe they wouldn't be blamed whenever an incident occurred. From there, they moved on to a "Brother's Keepers" culture, where people were encouraged to look out for each other. He also introduced the shared vision of being "world class" in order to create purpose throughout the workforce.
Watch the Session
Join Us for the Next One
On March 17, 2023, we will be welcoming Gary Klein to discuss Snapshots of the Mind.
Snapshots of the Mind grows out of the Naturalistic Decision Making movement, which studies how decision makers handle uncertainty and complexity in high-stakes situations.
Click here to register and join the conversation!