Lean Safety: Transforming your Safety Culture with Lean Management

While worker safety is often touted as a company’s first priority, more often than not, safety activity is driven by compliance to legislation rather than any safety improvement initiative. Lean takes a proactive approach – it is not contingent on legislation. A serious Lean effort will tear apart an old inefficient entitlement-riddled culture and build it into something effective.

Lean Safety: Transforming your Safety Culture with Lean Management takes lessons learned from Lean and applies them to the building of a world-class safety-first organization. Based on 30 years of experience with successful implementation of continuous improvement, Robert Hafey focuses the power of Lean improvement on the universal topic of safety. In doing so, he shows how Lean and safety are linked; that the achievement of one is often dependent upon achievement of the other. In this book, written for managers and executives as well as workers on the line, Hafey: 

• Challenges each stakeholder to think proactively and accept individual responsibility for safety


• Emphasizes that the building of a top safety program requires the building of a world-class safety culture


• Demonstrates how basic Lean tools are as applicable to safety as they are to Lean, such as the A3 problem-solving process and the facilitated kaizen blitz


• Removes fear from the accident investigation process so that root causes are addressed rather than hidden


• Establishes standards and metrics for safety management that are clearly definable and measurable

Any lasting improvement must become both institutionalized and perpetually capable of adaptation. World class safety is not about writing correct rules, but more about righting the culture responsible for the well-being of its stakeholders.

Listen to what Robert Hafey has to say about Lean Safety.