Operational Risk

Welcome to the fourth installment of our “Bowtie Analysis Blog” series. In our first installment, we talked about the usefulness of risk bowties for training employees on workplace risks, our second installment explored the way they can pull together information from many different types of assessments, and our third post discussed how bowties help visualize and manage risk […]

Welcome to the third installment of our “Bowtie Analysis Blog” series. In our first installment, we talked about the usefulness of risk bowties for training employees on workplace risks, and our second installment explored the way risk bowties can pull together information from many different types of assessments. In this post, we’ll be looking at […]

Many EHS professionals know they struggle with managing workplace risks, whether it’s accurately assessing them, controlling them, or getting the entire workplace involved in the process. In our new series, “The Bowtie Analysis Blog,” we’ll tell you about how a risk assessment tool called bowtie analysis can help. In this first installment, we’ll talk about […]

One of the best ways to prevent and control workplace injuries and incidents is to “design out” hazards and risk early in the design phase. This is known as Prevention through Design (PtD), a national initiative led by National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). World-class […]

Ask most safety professionals, and they’ll tell you: Our goal should be to prevent incidents before they happen. But ask them how, and you’ll probably get many different opinions. It’s fair to say that in the absence of a coherent strategy, many fall back on the reactive approach of addressing risks only after incidents have […]

Welcome to our seventh and final installment in our IH 101 series! It’s been quite a journey so far, but we definitely saved the best for last. Last time, in Part 6 of our IH 101 blog series “Medical Surveillance – Strengthening Your Last Line of Defense for Worker Health,” we learned the basics of […]

In Part 1 of our blog series on Industrial Hygiene Program Management, “SEGs: The Foundation of a Great Industrial Hygiene Program”, we learned how to create similar exposure groups (SEGs). This step of characterizing your workplace and forming SEGs is a prerequisite for performing qualitative exposure assessments (QEAs). If you haven’t already, we recommend reviewing […]

SEGs: The Foundation for a Great IH Program For this first session of our IH 101: Introduction to Industrial Hygiene Program Management series, we’re going to take an in-depth look at similar exposure groups (SEGs) to help you understand their critical importance to your IH program. We’ll also offer common-sense guidelines for how to set […]

The hardest part of any continuous improvement process is accurately identifying the reason that risk is present in the system to begin with. This is also the most critical step when implementing improvements. There are four key characteristics that every root cause statement should include to provide quality data that can result in effective solutions. […]

Many company managers, and even some experienced safety professionals still maintain the view that some workplace accidents ”just happen” — that not all workplace incidents are preventable, and that we therefore shouldn’t always expect to find root causes for why they occurred. The reasons behind this attitude vary, with some individuals claiming that such ambitious […]