Jim Joy

Conversation Focus

• A major challenge for 21st century businesses working to create a safety culture is changing the attitude of the workplace and establishing better and more equitable relationships through strong leadership commitment.
• The ‘maturity model’ approach can facilitate the way organizations move towards changing from a ‘blame’ culture to encompassing safety as a ‘way of life’.
• Demystifying the term ‘human factors engineering’: involves recognizing that the design of equipment can contribute to human error. Organizations should factor ‘design risk’ into the equation not only as part of investigating incidents but also as part in the purchasing stage.
• Organizations need to modify the ways that they investigate accidents by taking a proactive approach and ‘tuning’ their risk assessments to get desired outcomes.

About Jim Joy

Jim Joy is Professor of Mining Safety and Director of the Minerals Industry Safety and Health Centre (MISHC) at The University of Queensland. He is a recognized expert in risk management and has been involved with projects over six continents with extensive ‘hands on’ experience facilitating risk assessments and major accident investigations. He has developed mining concepts, tools and management systems, is widely published, and has authored a book on workplace risk assessment called “WRAC”. He is editor of the mining industry publication “Safe Mining”.

Useful Resources

Mineral Industry Safety and Health Centre

Information and resources relating to risk management and safety and health can be accessed through MIRMGATE (Minerals Industry Risk Management Gateway)

The Hearts and Minds program is a useful source for businesses to refer to when developing a safety culture.

Safety culture maturity model for the Health Service Executive, UK