EG Weiss & Associates Safety Culture Statement
EG Weiss & Associates Mission Statement
Our mission is to help our clients make distinctive, lasting, and substantial improvements in their performance and to build a great firm that attracts, develops, excites, and retains exceptional people and partners. It is our goal to help customers achieve their objective, reach their goals and complete their missions by providing innovative, best-in-class consulting, solutions and services.
At EG Weiss & Associates we believe in the creation, nurturing and promoting of a complete operational safety culture within organizations. This belief is represented in every EG Weiss class, presentation, program, workshop and exercise.
Safety culture is how an organization and its members behave in the pursuit of safety. It is the “product of individual and group beliefs, values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behavior that determine the organization’s commitment to quality and patient safety” Organizations with strong safety cultures are not characterized by a complete absence of adverse events, but by their commitment to capturing and responding to these events, recognizing how each one gives valuable insight for further system improvement. Unsafe cultures, in contrast, can be highlighted by a lack of trust, fear of speaking up, absence of transparency, incivility, or even workplace violence.
A robust safety culture includes several fundamental elements:
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Psychological safety: In a psychologically safe environment, individuals feel comfortable, even obligated, to discuss adverse events and near misses in an open and transparent manner, with the goal of improving safety and quality of care and operations.
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Just Culture: Just Culture guides an organization’s response to accountability for errors based on a central belief that most adverse events reflect complex interactions of human factors within imperfect systems. Individual blame is de-emphasized and organizational response instead focuses on understanding how to rectify system dysfunction and support workers or members to prevent future adverse events.
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Reporting, learning, transparency, and feedback: All workers and/or members recognize the value of—and are encouraged to report—errors and near misses. Events are analyzed and learning is transparent and shared with all team members. Feedback on systems changes is provided to reporters. This constantly evolving cycle allows early identification of safety concerns and can address issues proactively before a sentinel event occurs.
We believe that the establishment of a strong culture of safety has positive impacts on not just workers and or members but on those we serve including other organizations, leadership, clients, patients, victims and refugees.
We believe that leaders with a strong commitment to safety culture often drive the establishment of codes of conduct, which in turn reduce intimidating and disruptive behaviors among staff in the workplace. Respectful communication is a cornerstone for psychological safety and prevention of staff burnout. Conversely, organizations which tolerate behaviors that undermine a culture of safety have higher degrees of depression and burnout, significantly lower job satisfaction, higher staff turnover, and increased complication rates.
EG Weiss & Associates relies on a model of safety culture that focuses on three duties balanced with organizational and individual values.
We believe that people make errors simply because they are people and that errors may lead to accidents or even, in our field of work, death. We understand that the standard solution for many years has been to blame those involved and often remove them from any future equation or involvement. We believe that seldom are these mistakes the fault of an individual but rather fault of the system or in the training of those involved. As we move forward as a company, we will continue to apply these beliefs to every effort, project and deployment in the hopes of changing people by changing systems and improving training.