Vertical and horizontal alignment within organizations are seen as prerequisites for meeting strategic objectives and indications of effective management. In the area of safety management, the concept of vertical alignment has been followed through the introduction of hierarchical structures and bidirectional communication, but horizontal alignment has been given little attention. The principal goal of this study was the assessment of horizontal alignment within an aviation organization with the use of data from safety investigations, audits and meetings in order to explore the extent to which (1) causal factors recorded in safety investigation reports comprised topics discussed by safety committees and focus areas of internal safety auditors, and (2) the agendas of safety committees include weak points revealed during safety audits. The study employed qualitative and quantitative analysis of data collected over a 6 years’ period at three organizational levels. The results suggested a low horizontal alignment across the three pairs of the corresponding safety management activities within each organizational level. The findings were attributed to the inadequacy of procedures and lack of a safety information database for consistently sharing safety information, cultural factors and lack of planning for the coordination of safety management activities. The current research comprises a contribution to the literature and practice and introduces a technique to assess the intra-alignment of safety management initiatives within various organizational levels. Future research is needed in order to investigate the association between horizontal alignment of safety management practices and safety performance.
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Walking meetings are a promising way to reduce unhealthy sedentary behavior at the office. Some aspects of walking meetings are however hard to assess using traditional research approaches that do not account well for the embodied experience of walking meetings. We conducted a series of 16 bodystorming sessions, featuring unusual walking meeting situations to engage participants (N=45) in a reflective experience. After each bodystorming, participants completed three tasks: a body map, an empathy map, and a rating of workload using the NASA-TLX scale. These embodied explorations provide insights on key themes related to walking meetings: material and tools, physical and mental demand, connection with the environment, social dynamics, and privacy. We discuss the role of technology and opportunities for technology-mediated walking meetings. We draw implications for the design of walking meeting technologies or services to account for embodied experiences, and the individual, social, and environmental factors at play.
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Various tools for safety performance measurement have been introduced in order to fulfil the need for safety monitoring in organisations, which is tightly related to their overall performance and achievement of their business goals. Such tools include accident rates, benchmarking, safety culture and climate assessments, cost-effectiveness studies, etc. The current work reviews the most representative methods for safety performance evaluation that have been suggested and applied by a variety of organisations, safety authorities and agencies. This paper discusses several viewpoints of the applicability, feasibility and appropriateness of such tools, based on the viewpoints of managers and safety experts involved in a relevant research that was conducted in a large aviation organisation. The extensive literature cited, the discussion topics, along with the conclusions and recommendations derived, might be considered by any organisation that seeks a realistic safety performance assessment and establishment of effective measurement tools.
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In this project, a consortium of Fraunhofer Innovation Platform (FIP-AM@UT), Connec2 and Walraven will investigate the possibility of two-way communication between production machines and an XR (eXtended Reality) platform. This communication can benefit the installation, commissioning and maintenance of specialty machines by connecting remote experts to local technicians and the machine in a virtual environment. This can reduce the necessity for travelling of remote experts (machine builders, programmers, process engineers), which leads to faster respond times and improves the well-being of these experts. Through the XR platform of Connec2, which is already used in the market for online meetings, presentations and collaboration, we can enable monitoring as well as (managed) control of a machine. For this we need to extend the production machine control with an interface that allows for remote connections. Special attention will be given to the safety and security aspects of the system. At all times, the machine should be safe for its direct users and surrounding. Things like loss of connectivity or network latency may not lead to dangerous situations. Another thread to the safety of the machine might be unauthorized access to the system. A secure system design will have to prevent this. The project not only aims to design such a system, but also to create a demonstrator of the development. Cooperation between local and remote users of a machine can be tested and validated at the shopfloor of the Advanced Manufacturing Center, a fieldlab for innovating digital production techniques.
