Delivering Safety Excellence

Engagement Culture at Every Level

Michael M. Williamsen

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119772262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Health & Safety
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Delivering Safety Excellence

Discover how to overcome a culture of inadequately addressing risk and thereby achieve safe working practices from a leader in the field

Delivering Safety Excellence: Engagement Culture At Every Level provides an in-depth and practical overview of how to energize frontline employees, supervisors, managers, and leaders to overcome and solve regularly occurring safety concerns. The book teaches readers how to resolve dysfunctional safety cultures by engaging employees at all levels. This cross functional engagement culture regularly builds safe and effective working practices that eliminate regulatory, financial, and personal risk shortfalls while encouraging profitability and efficiency.

The distinguished author shows how culture improvement processes and models can be utilized to improve the performance all across an organization. The material is presented in dialogue format using case studies to highlight the relationship between the concepts discussed and their application in the real world.

You'll discover how to implement real solutions in industries of all types and in organizations of all sizes using practical and concrete strategies tested by the author in regions and varying cultures around the world. Readers will also benefit from the inclusion of:

• A thorough introduction to rapidly resolving the many common deficiencies insafety culture, including scarce regulatory and cultural materials and a lack ofsupport, trust, and credibility for safety officers
• Practical discussions of how urgency can obstruct a consistent culture of safety, performance, and prudence
• Explorations of behavior-based safety, the injury plateau, the Occupational Health and Safety Act, and a dynamic model of safety weaknesses that lead to injuries

Perfect for safety officers at all levels of organizations of any size, Delivering Safety Excellence: Engagement Culture At Every Level will also earn a place in the libraries of executives, managers, leaders, supervisors, and employees who seek a one-stop reference for how to build a safe and profitable company.

Part I

1
The Funeral

Aaron is physically sick to his stomach as he attends the funeral of a 37 year employee who fell to his death at work on the weekend. As he stands just behind the tearful widow, Aaron and his fellow employees are equally in tears. This was their close friend who was known for a good work ethic, reliability and friendship. Aaron, the organization's new safety manager, could see it coming with a Recordable Injury Frequency (RIF)¹ of >10 for more than a decade, and yet the company leadership just kept doing the same thing and hoping for different results. Aaron's day only gets worse as he feels the guilt of living in a sick culture of denial that has now taken the life of a good friend.

Do you ever experience something that is wrong, something that you try to hide? To some extent we all do! Personally, an experience such as this brings to mind recently working in a third‐world country with a “challenged” work environment, while also traveling with family members after the work assignment. There were many excellent sights, people, sounds, and events wherever the vacation travels took us. And yet we experienced multiple troubles as well. While viewing a raging, dangerous river in a remote village the guide, Dalmiro, related that this was the location of a significant international extreme kayak event each year. Dalmiro then revealed that besides the boulders there was an added, hidden danger; the village of 10 000 or so people had no wastewater treatment and all the raw sewage was also a “secret” part of the raging river!

This “secret” comment brought to mind the story of a family member and her childhood obstinacy about eating certain foods. She hated hamburgers and refused to eat them. Her parents would “park” her at the table until she finished her meal. However, acting like the child she was, she crossed her arms and pouted. When her parents left the table, she would toss the meat behind the refrigerator and after a while call out to say she was done. All were happy as long as the subterfuge continued. One day her father cleaned behind the fridge, and the deception came to an end.

Unfortunately many people in the safety profession have experienced organizations which have hidden the ugly, rotten, stinking truth about their culture of employee injuries. The subterfuge works for a while and then……

Give some thought to your personal and organizational circumstances. In the long run there is no escape from reality. You cannot hide the truth because untruths will eventually be revealed. Let us be ethical in all we do; you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. The upper management approach of Aaron's organization of hiding injuries was living in denial. Their solution to injuries was to send injured workers to Employee Relations (ER) for a multi‐month review to see if punishment was warranted. This was truly counterproductive in many ways. Rather than focusing on what we all can do to eliminate a similar event from happening in the future, there were no reports of lessons learned, or issues resolved by searching out and identifying the actual blame. Additionally, the union and management both came to the same tragedy enabling conclusion – which was a lack of support for safety, and a lip service only approach to an understaffed safety department, eliminates trust and credibility. This denial approach only adds to the problem culture which continues to deliver the next series of painful injuries. Additionally, even if things do improve, beware, the lack of trust legacy hangs on for years. Our hourly and salaried people do not forget or forgive easily. Aaron has noticed that when there is an injury or mistake, there is always a contingent of the employees, at all levels, who immediately go back to the old paradigm of blame and shame. This included the ER function which was comfortable with the search for blame, and the potential for punishment. Change does not come easily.

The classic control, passive aggressive, old school challenges normally exist in these situations, and in other departments as well. Aaron's solution needs to not become angry, vindictive, or to go behind management's back. Rather, Aaron will have to persevere in upholding his values and his responsibility to do the right things that are effective in helping to resolve the safety and interpersonal issues. A part of this approach will require him to carry on a dialogue with the new incoming chief executive officer (CEO) and his staff. Aaron must use this method if he is to get them to support his desired approach to develop root cause solutions and a subsequent culture that includes a sustainable safety excellence commitment dedicated to significantly reducing injuries and associated incidents. It is no surprise that about 90% of these injuries happen in the operations group. As a result, Aaron will need to develop a solid adult‐to‐adult relationship with the operations hourly and salaried leadership personnel. Considering the history of the company, making such a turnaround in relationship excellence will not come easily. You will need slow and steady perseverance, Aaron.

After the funeral, Aaron is back at work and pulls out a report written by “the Doc,” a consultant he hired to interview more than 100 hourly and salaried personnel in Aaron's organization of more than 1000 employees. The report refers to honest one‐on‐one input from the whole range of hourly through salaried employees who discussed their organization's safety and morale truths with the Doc. The employees did not rip and tear during the process, but they were brutally honest in their confidential comments. Aaron hurts as he reads and digests these painfully honest and ugly facts that he and others shared as inputs about their sick safety culture.

Aaron sits at his desk head in hand with disturbing thoughts going through his brain that: nothing is good, just another day/set of injuries to read and evaluate with no support for himself being the safety manager. Aaron is the leader of a small safety department which has a ½ administrative assistant time allocation, one safety resource up from the ranks, and two safety trainers, one of whom is on the ropes for his poor performance in other departments that got him transferred (hidden) to safety.

What kind of day lies ahead? Good = no injuries, or bad = one or more injuries. Aaron is up from the ranks. He knows the people requiring his injury investigations, and it mentally and physically pains him to do so. The company has been in business for more than 70 years and is one of the top 25 in the North American continent when measured by sales volume. For these same 25 entities they are 12th in size, but number 24 in injury rate with only an independent offshore business operation being worse.

As typical to industry, management gets paid on results for cost, customer service, and uptime. The company has had no fatalities or disabling injuries for quite a few years. As a result, the just retired CEO left a weak safety department and associated weak safety culture. They are complacent and multiple years behind what industry leaders are doing to prevent injuries. The safety Recordable Injury Frequency (RIF) has been greater than 10 for more than a decade. The former CEO's legacy approach for an injury was: a quick injury investigation; a secret report sent to Employee Relations (ER); followed by a secret and protracted/lengthy analysis as to what kind of punishment should be given to the injured employee as a result of any perceived negligence.

Aaron remembers a recent safety article that used the phrase Paradigm Paralysis. The focus of the article was a complaint about the tendency we all have of using old (and outdated) approaches to solve current problems. As Aaron reads the blog article he reminisces about a war hero acquaintance, Tom, talking about his career in the armed forces. Tom's observation referenced military leadership's oft‐used approach of employing the same tactics for the next war that they used in the last war. Tom's conclusion was that this approach just does not lead to optimum performance, in war – or in safety.

Our safety profession history began in 1911 with a disastrous, multiple life‐ending tragedy at a New York garment manufacturing sweat shop (Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire). Over the ensuing years “we” have experienced all kinds of research, regulations, techniques, technologies, leadership, education, training, and the like. Much of this information (but not all) has moved us to better downstream indicator safety performance.

Talking with past generation safety people, there is often a great reluctance to try new safety concepts that are outside of their experience comfort zones, ergo, Paradigm Paralysis. Certainly, the foundational approaches which have been developed in the past 100 years still apply. And yet, this decade's safety performance plateau is not satisfactory. We must relentlessly pursue better techniques and tools to eliminate the possibility/probability of injuries/incidents.

Our current war on injuries and incidents is being fought by a new generation with new cultures, different workplaces, and a myriad of other differences from what the older generations experienced. We must be open to considering and trying new approaches which can help us win the important safety battles that face us now and in the future. And yet government and some industry safety bureaucracies seem to often stick to the use of regulations followed by punishment as the predominate model with respect to safety improvement. In truth, a very conservative approach is influenced/hindered by the “standard practice” approach that is greatly influenced (hamstrung) by the litigious nature of society, i.e. not trying something out of the ordinary in order to minimize lawsuits! Such, “Standard Practice” cultures built on conservative tradition can be VERY difficult to change.

Since the 1970s' Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) became law, OSHA has tried a number of approaches in an effort to improve safety in the United States:

• The regulations have set a foundational standard that has definite merit.
• The punishment by legal fines structure got some corporate attention, but it has led...