History of Safety

A Very Short History of Workplace Safety

Philip Carden Health & Safety Leave a Comment

If your notion of safety is an absence of incidents then it follows that you will focus on hazards, near-misses, and accidents. Each is an opportunity for improvement – you can analyze the root cause, make sure you understand the likelihood of recurrence and manage risk by amending procedures and ensuring appropriate training. This notion of safety might be described as ‘traditional’. It assumes that the situations workers will face can be anticipated and that the right course of action can be determined in advance, informed by assessment of past events. In some cases that might be true. But we …

Fairness is an employee experience thing

Fairness is an employee experience thing

Philip Carden Employee experience, Engagement, Rewards & recognition 3 Comments

Fairness is a thing. More of a thing than it used to be. A thing with the ability to upset elections and change voting patterns. Democracy has delivered a few well-deserved reminders of late that people really do care about fairness. Those people are voters and customers. They are also employees. The science of measuring of employee engagement and mood is well-established. And while it is straightforward to demonstrate the connection between engagement and enterprise value, it’s  difficult to translate better measurements into building a better employee experience. It often feels like we get tied up in theory and reporting …

The observer effect is not about cats in boxes

The observer effect:  the surprising role of structured questions

Philip Carden Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback, Motivation

How do we measure things like engagement and experience? We ask questions. But what if asking the question changes the very thing we are trying to measure? Here’s a newsflash: That’s exactly what happens. And it’s not a bad thing — in fact it’s a huge opportunity, because the questions themselves can be subtle but powerful change agents. The observer effect: simply observing a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes that phenomenon (a fact commonly cited in physics). We’re huge fans of open questions, but here are three good reasons why interactions should start with carefully chosen structured questions. Three good reasons that …