We are a globally recognised provider of health and safety training and consultancy to develop and grow OHS practitioners and other Leaders in organisations. We specialise in Safety Culture Transformation and Health and Safety Training and Development.
Our commitment is to deliver exceptional processes and services that truly empower people and enable organisations to develop and sustain safe and healthy work places.
There is however a serious flaw in how most organisations think about safety. In the 21st Century we live and work in a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, but many still cling to safety concepts dating back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. They rely on procedures, structures and motivational processes that had become outdated. They’re forever trying to engineer better systems and they spend millions on trying to educate and train their people to understand and use these systems. When that fails as it often does, they try to enforce compliance with disciplinary and punitive actions.
We are a globally recognised provider of health and safety training and consultancy to develop and grow OHS practitioners and other Leaders in organisations. We specialise in Safety Culture Transformation and Health and Safety Training and Development.
Our commitment is to deliver exceptional processes and services that truly empower people and enable organisations to develop and sustain safe and healthy work places.
While this might have worked to some extent in a world that was mostly stable, predictable and manageable 20 or 50 or a 100 years ago, it is no longer enough. Even with the best efforts they now continuously fall short in a world which has changed and is due to change even more. Most companies that still rely on conventional approaches to safety realize this – they see exactly where they want to be but it is as if they are looking at it through an impenetrable glass ceiling that stops them from reaching their espoused ideals and goals such as “Zero Harm” or even worse, “Zero Incidents”.
At Saacosh we get this. We’ve been down that road and we’ve shared the intense frustration of CEOs, MDs, GMs, Safety Managers, Safety Officers and others who did everything they could but still failed to break through this Safety Glass Ceiling. In spite of their best efforts and intentions they still have more incidents and accidents and sometimes fatalities than any of us can and want to endure.
And so, we continued to look deeper and discovered that it is possible to break through the Safety Glass Ceiling in a world where much of what we were taught and once believed is no longer enough to create safe working places. We looked at how some high-risk organizations such as nuclear power plants, offshore drilling rigs, naval aircraft carriers, aviation systems and Formula-1 teams were able to break through the Safety Glass Ceiling and we adopted their approaches and principles into the advice and processes we offer our clients.
Saacosh incorporates principles and practices from High Reliability Organizing (HRO), social neuroscience, safety and resilience engineering, legal liability, leadership development, risk management and occupational health and safety to provide an unprecedented list of offerings and services. Through our consulting, training and safety solutions we have helped some of the world’s leading organisations break through the Safety Glass Ceiling. This comes down to not only investing in systems and prevention, but also investing in people and building real-time resilience.
While some of these did help to improve the way some companies were doing safety, they still failed to transform organizational cultures embedded in safety and health practices dating back to the Industrial Revolution. Intensely frustrated with this reality, founding member and safety pioneer Francois Smith then embarked on a journey that entailed academic study in South Africa and the USA as well as practical research and experimentation on the dynamics of occupational health and safety in the 21st Century workplace.
Francois later joined forces with Natalie Skeepers to establish Saacosh (Pty) Ltd in January 2005. Their passion and aim were to establish an organisation that would uplift and transform the professionalism of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Practitioners in South Africa.
Saacosh has since grown into a multi-dimensional one-stop services company that addresses the health and safety needs of companies, practitioners, leaders, managers, supervisors and coalface employees through the following four distinct business focus areas:
Saacosh Academy provides in-house occupational health and safety training to clients across the globe. However, we are proudly African and most of our greatest successes have come from assisting clients on this great continent to break through their Safety Glass Ceilings.
Saacosh Academy was established in 2016 as a subsidiary of Saacosh (Pty) Ltd with the exclusive objective of providing cutting edge, yet highly relevant, nationally accredited and workplace orientated education and development for students and practitioners who have a passion for the Occupational Health and Safety profession.
Saacosh Academy proudly offers students that are registered in the NQF level 5, 3-year Occupational Health and Safety Practitioner Certificate, an excellent learning opportunity through a blended learning approach backed by a highly responsive and flexible Learning and Support Centre on a virtual platform for the second part of their studies.
Student progress are monitored and managed through our state-of-the-art Learner Management System that integrates seamlessly with our Learning and Support Centre as well as the Learner Management Information System (LMIS) of the Quality Council for Trades and Occupations (QCTO) (referred to as “Administrator” Computer & Internet Facilities).
We strive to be a leader in the occupational health and safety education and training field in the mining and industrial sectors and to equip students with the required knowledge and skills to meet the growing economic and social demands of the South African economy.
Through the application of proven learning methodologies and a blended learning approach to develop expertise, knowledge, skills, innovation and creativity, we strive to ensure that students are appropriately equipped for the competitive and challenging work environment.
There is a serious flaw in how most companies think about safety. In the 21st Century we live and work in a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, but many still cling to safety concepts dating back to the heydays of the Industrial Revolution. They rely on procedures, structures and processes which had become outdated. They’re forever trying to engineer better systems and they spend millions on trying to educate and train their people to understand and use these systems. When that fails, as it often does, they try to enforce compliance with policing, disciplinary and punitive actions.
