Safety Culture & Promotion - SM4 Safety Articles & Resources
A Time for Reflection and a Call to Action
As we prepare to flip the calendar from 2022 to 2023, will we do so with something other than a few new gifts and a list of New Year’s resolutions? How can we best use this moment to make a lasting and positive change in our personal lives and organizations?
What If I Can’t Sleep 8 Hours?
Sleep is precious. Ample scientific evidence exists that getting enough sleep sharpens the brain, improves mood, helps with weight management and boosts athletic performance. In fact, the American Heart Association recently added sleep to its cardiovascular health checklist. But what if you’re an aviation professional who struggles to get eight consecutive hours? Your total daily sleep may be enough.
The Two Effects of Jet Lag
Everyone who has travelled in an airplane is familiar with jet lag. True, the effect only applies when travelling east or west. But jet lag is so pervasive and annoying—not to mention a safety risk for pilots—that it merits serious discussion.
Riptide: Psychological Safety in a Cancel-Culture World
There is a dangerous riptide taking place between what is acceptable in our society and what is necessary in our workplace. As everything turns into an “us vs. them” war of opinions, the ability to respectfully listen to others is rapidly becoming a lost art. Aviation must, once again, demonstrate its leadership in constructive communication.
7 Questions to Help You Create Great Safety Objectives
Preventing problems is much more efficient and effective than addressing them after they occur. However, as Dan Heath points out in his book “Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Occur,” there are barriers to “upstream” thinking that must be overcome. This starts with organizations asking themselves seven key questions.
Aviation Mastery or Minimums… What’s Your Safety Standard?
In the realm of professional aviation, each of us carries a mantle of tremendous responsibility for the other souls with whom we share the airspace, our families and colleagues, our companies and employers and, of course, ourselves. The consequences of a serious misstep in our profession can have a finality that renders the statement, “I will do better next time” meaningless.
Humble Inquiry: Are You Asking the Right Questions?
An excellent organization is one that can nimbly execute its strategy while continually learning from itself. Its structure is designed to provide management with constant feedback and performance from normal work. Its safety leadership spends considerable resources to carefully listen to the ”weak signals” from frontline employees, work teams and key stakeholders alike to help build the capacity and risk tolerance necessary for employees to fail fast, fail softly, learn how to learn quicker and perform brilliantly.
Caffeine Will Enable Me To Power Through My Day. Right?
Worrying about the current public health crisis and how it affects our jobs, our lives and our health is something that all of us have experienced to some degree over the past year. Unsurprisingly, an increasing number of people have been reporting sleep disturbances since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Pilot Error Accidents: There Is More To the Story
Working directly with an aviation emergency response firm gives me unique insight into the complex and often cascading factors involved in understanding accident causation. Although pilot error is an often-cited root cause, it is easy to see it is rarely, if ever, that simple.
