Matthew Koss
Matthew Koss
Director of Corproate Safety
ECS Limited
Unsafe Acts: C-Suite Behaviors that Wreck Safety Culture
The C-Suite is a highly competitive, demanding, and often cutthroat environment, where individuals are often under immense pressure to maintain the organization’s success. Top executives rely on business metrics as essential tools for evaluating performance and driving improvement.
In more recent years, OSH Professionals have been introduced into this environment with the same expectation of meeting company objectives as business executives responsible for profit, sales, productivity, market share, budgets, etc. It is not surprising that C-Suite executives, influenced by decades of success using Scientific Management principles, have regarded safety as another business metric.
However, when it comes to safety culture, an over-reliance on metrics can lead to unintended negative consequences that can wreck safety culture. This session will discuss some common pitfalls that plague the C-Suite’s approach to safety culture and some insights to avoid such pitfalls.
Matt Koss is the Director of Corporate Safety at ECS Corporate Services LLC. He earned a Master of Engineering (MEng) in Advanced Safety Engineering & Management from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a Bachelor’s of Science in Safety Management from Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania.
He holds Board of Certified Safety Professional Certifications including the Certified Safety Professional (CSP), Safety Management Specialist (SMS), and Construction Health and Safety Technician (CHST). Matt has worked in the Occupational Safety field for over 15 years and serves as the Vice President of the American Society of Safety Professional’s (ASSP) Chesapeake Chapter. He has also published articles on construction-safety topics and the value of safety metrics in the ASSP’s Professional Safety Journal.