Insights into Your Safety Culture Dr. Timothy Ludwig

I had been warmly welcomed to South Africa. We were there to work with a mining construction company who wanted to solve their safety challenge. The immensity of this challenge hit us on our day off while we dealt with our jet lag.

We took a tour of Soweto outside of Johannesburg. Soweto is where a student uprising and the deadly crackdown by the white police enraged the world and marked the beginning of the end of Apartheid. I recalled wearing black and white armbands in college protesting Apartheid. But when I found myself face-to-face with the actual peoples, places, and cultures of South Africa, I knew the time had come to go beyond a youthful ideal.

Listen to find out what I learned during my time in South Africa. Essentially, it's most important to change yourself before you're ever able to begin helping others.

Now is the time to put all our behavioral skills to work. There are critical life-saving behaviors that we can all do to protect ourselves (e.g., hand washing) and to exponentially protect others. Indeed, putting on face masks keep infected people, many of whom are unaware and exhibit little symptoms, from transmitting the virus to others. In real ways, we are protecting our colleagues by wearing masks.

But how can we utilize behavioral science best practices to ensure mask wearing compliance in the work place? Enter the T.H.A.N.K.S. Conversation. Based in behavioral science, it utilizes the practical utility of the simple conversation to reinforce difficult behaviors and shape them to fluency over time.
Listen to Dr. Ludwig walk us through a step-by-step example of how one of these behavior-changing conversations might play out.

People are active.  They don’t want to sit back and be passive.  In fact, these particular set of heroes want to be ACTIVE in the face of our nation’s crisis.   They need to be told what to DO, not what to NOT-do.  This professional workforce can actively engage in many ways to positively impact their own health and the safety of the region’s food supply.   Empower the workforce to pinpoint the active behaviors they can all engage in.

If you have questions or comments about this or other episodes, email Dr. Ludwig at TimLudwig@safety-doc.com

What does our global attention to hand washing during pandemics teach us
about worker compliance around life-critical and other behaviors required
for safety?

In order for a consequence like punishment to be effective, we must come in contact with the consequence. Using threats in an attempt to avoid danger or damage are simply idle threats that can be a dysfunctional practice that kills your safety culture.

In order for a consequence like punishment to be effective, we must come in contact with the consequence. Using threats in an attempt to avoid danger or damage are simply idle threats that can be a dysfunctional practice that kills your safety culture.