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.