Friday, September 20, 2013

Is Your Workplace at Risk? Find Out at ASSE's Symposium


At ASSE’s Fatality & Severe Loss Prevention symposium this November, several presentations will address workplace vulnerability to risk and how to identify and mitigate those vulnerabilities.

Organizational psychologist Thomas R. Krause, Ph.D., will discuss how an organization’s culture and leadership affect risk in his presentation, Signals of Vulnerability to Catastrophic Loss. Krause believes that these organizational attributes can be determinants of risk and that during risk assessment, safety professionals need to ask themselves, “Does the leader have a deeply felt value for safety? Or is it just another part of the job?”

“A great safety leader is someone who has a view of safety that is really deeply held,” says Krause, adding that safety must be viewed as the basis for everything that is done in the workplace. In his presentation, he will examine how positive attributes of leadership and culture can be identified and made more prominent, as well as how leaders who feel passionately about safety can encourage their workers to adopt a similar philosophy.

According to Krause, in some workplaces, assessment of leadership and culture may reveal significant vulnerability to catastrophic loss. “If the feeling is that you really have to watch out for yourself, that you can’t believe what others say, that communication is poor . . . . That kind of an environment is where it’s likely that you will have higher than average risk.”

In a concurrent session, John W. Mroszczyk, Ph.D., P.E., CSP, will present Checklist For Sources of a Fatality or Severe Loss in Your Workplace, a lecture focused on assessing risks around energy sources and hazardous substances in the workplace. “You want to focus on areas that have potentially high energy release,” says Mroszczyk, noting that those may include any work stations where flammable liquids or vapors, fall hazards, chemical energy, radiation energy, electrical hazards or moving machinery are present.

Mroszczyk suggests examining how various work activities interact and whether those interactions could result in a catastrophic event. Attendees will leave his session with a checklist containing sources of risk in the workplace. He will provide insight on how to identify additional sources of risk as well as how to prevent incidents once hazards have been detected.

ASSE’s Fatality & Severe Loss Prevention Symposium, Avoiding the Worst, will be held Nov. 21 and 22 in San Diego, CA. Find a complete listing of seminars and more information at http://www.asse.org/symposia/index.php