Steps to Safety Culture Excellence

Terry L. Mathis, Shawn M. Galloway

• Editorial: Wiley
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118530245
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Categoría: Salute e sicurezza sul lavoro

Provides a clear road map to instilling a culture of safety excellence in any organization

Did you know that accidental injury is among the top ten leading causes of death in every age group? With this book as your guide, you'll learn how to help your organization develop, implement, and sustain Safety Culture Excellence, vital for the protection of and improvement in the quality of life for everyone who works there.

STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence is based on the authors' firsthand experience working with international organizations in every major industry that have successfully developed and implemented ongoing cultures of safety excellence. Whether your organization is a small regional firm or a large multinational corporation, you'll find that the STEPS process enables you to instill Safety Culture Excellence within your organization.

STEPS (Strategic Targets for Excellent Performance in Safety) demystifies the process of developing Safety Culture Excellence by breaking it down into small logical, internally led tasks. You'll be guided through a sequence of STEPS that makes it possible to:

• Create a culture of excellence that is reinforced and empowered at every level
• Develop the capability within the culture to identify, prioritize, and solve safety problems and challenges
• Maintain and continuously improve the performance of your organization's safety culture

Although this book is dedicated to safety, the tested and proven STEPS process can be used to promote excellence in any aspect of organizational performance.

By optimizing the safety culture in your organization, you will give the people you work with the skills and knowledge to not only minimize the risk of an on-the-job accident, but also to lead safe, healthy lives outside of work.

MILESTONE 1
STRATEGY

Business is like war in one respect. If its grand strategy is correct, any number of tactical errors can be made and yet the enterprise proves successful.

—General Robert E. Woods

If you are still reading, you have probably decided either to move forward or at least to explore the possibility of doing so. Always remember that STEPS is not a new program. It has no necessary additional structure and no set timetable. It simply asks you to utilize existing structure wherever possible and to progress systematically through this series of STEPS to ensure that you have the necessary reinforcement to promote excellence and then have the capabilities to get in control of your safety issues by prioritizing and addressing them one at a time.

It has been suggested to us many times that an assessment should be the starting place for the journey to Safety Culture Excellence^SM rather than developing a safety strategy. In our experience, when you begin with the assessment, your strategy can become simply a plan to address your weaknesses rather than a true strategy. It is like planning your life based on a visit to your doctor’s office. A strategy should give direction and meaning to everything else you do in safety. If you have this in place before you assess your current status, you tend to move forward toward your goal rather than from side to side addressing your perceived issues reactively. One of the challenges of Safety Culture Excellence is to move from strictly reactive to proactive efforts. Developing a safety strategy is the first and most important step toward doing so.

Goals:	To move from avoiding failure to achieving success
	To include excellence in the safety vocabulary
	To align all safety activities around an overarching strategy
	To illicit extra effort by defining the rationale of safety
	To provide a clear and repeatable direction toward success
	To align and motivate workplace behaviors to accomplish the strategic goals
Methods:	A leadership training and workshop or multiple workshops to develop a Safety Strategy
STEPS:	1.1 Purpose
	1.2 Core Values
	1.3 Vision
	1.4 Long- and Short-Term Goals
	1.5 Objectives
	1.6 Marketing
	1.7 Initiatives
	1.8 Safety Excellence Accountability System
	1.9 Identify and Enable Change Agents
	1.10 Measure/Adjust
	1.11 Continuous Improvement

Now that leaders have decided to move forward and have the big picture of what a safety strategy entails, they can participate in a workshop or series of workshops to fill in the details of a customized strategy for the organization. The following sections are dedicated to each of the 11 elements of a safety strategy. If it has been too long since the first training/workshop in which the leaders reviewed the materials mentioned previously, it may be wise to review each of the 11 elements on the diagram in more detail from the previous section. Do not be concerned if you do not complete every detail of the strategy in this session. Strategies are living things that need to grow and change as thinking and issues change. If leaders cannot flesh in their strategies in a reasonable time or seem to be stalled in their thinking, it is usually best to skip over that section and move on through the others. You can revisit the skipped session at the end, but there is still no pressure to develop the strategy during this session. It is better to get it right than to get it right now! Remember also that you are going to go through each of the STEPS and that strategies might become clearer during that activity.

Icebreaker Activity: To begin the discussion about strategy, get leaders to think about a strategy that may be more familiar than safety strategy. The example we are using here involves a strategy to dominate market share for a product or service. (If this example is too foreign to what the organization does or if you have a better example at hand, please use another one for this activity.) If this was the challenge, the leaders might follow a model like the one in Figure 1.1. In each of these STEPS ask the leaders for their answers to the questions and how these answers could help develop a strategy.

Figure 1.1 Ice breaker activity: Example strategy to dominate the market.

The STEPS of this process are as follows:

1. Make the business case for the product or service. What is its function? Why is it needed? Who will buy it? What other products or services are on the market and how do they compare? All these questions would be answered, and a statement of purpose would be developed. It would explain not only the product or service but also how the organization would benefit by offering it.
2. A pilot customer would be identified based on the profile of the product, and this customer would be asked to test the product and endorse it. During the course of this process, the product might be found to have faults or weaknesses or there might simply be opportunities to make it better and more suited for purpose.
3. This would continue until the customer either accepted or rejected the product. The voice of the customer (VOC) would be heard and taken into consideration in both the design and the marketing approach for the product.
4. The organization would conduct, or contract for, market research. This research would establish the product’s potential place, but this would also look for trends in the product type. Is this a product with a growing demand, a steady demand, or a diminishing demand? Is the price of similar products moving in a definable direction?
5. An analysis would be made to determine how valuable it would be for the organization to make and market this product. What are the profit margins and the volume potential? How long would it take to begin and how much would it cost to begin? What would profits look like over the projected life of the product?
6. Who is the competition and who could become the competition? How would they compete and what impact would competition have on the profits and life cycle of the product?
7. How will the organization brand the product? What is its name, logo, who is the spokesperson? How will the product be viewed by the potential buyers and how can that best be managed?
8. Who, exactly, are the potential buyers of this product? What are their demographics: income level, neighborhoods, work places, what do they read or watch, and how can they best be reached?
9. The organization would decide how to measure the key indicators of the success of this product launch and ongoing life span. What is the return on investment (ROI)? What is the market share and the rate of market capture? What is the percentage of market saturation?

All these STEPS and questions would be a part of the planning and consideration for such a strategy. How many of these apply to a safety strategy? Can we do significantly less in developing a safety strategy than we do in a new product strategy and expect the same probability and degree of success? The sad truth is that most organizations run other aspects of business with much greater attention to detail than they do with safety. This is the reason that many excellent organizations have less-than-excellent safety performance.

With this level of detail and this comparison of safety strategy to other strategy, the leaders of the organization should begin to consider the elements of a safety strategy. Refer back to the STEPS in Figure 4 in “Making the Decision to Pursue Safety Culture Excellence” that are relisted as the headings of each of the sections in the workshop.

Case Study: Recently, a plant manager led an all-hands meeting with supervisors. He did so with the intent of discovering what was contributing to recent injuries. He also wanted to understand if the supervisors were helping or hindering the efforts to improve. Unexpectedly, one of the supervisors asked the question, “Could you help me understand what the strategic direction in safety is?” The plant manager responded honestly, “Well, that is actually a good question. I don’t believe we have a clear direction in safety.”

The manager looked around the room and asked for confirmation from his department leaders. The body language uncomfortably indicated agreement. The supervisor then politely responded in a hushed tone with a very profound question. He bravely inquired, “Sir, if you don’t know what you want us to do, how are we supposed to know? And, how are we supposed to act accordingly?” This supervisor expressed a concern shared by many first-line leaders.

Many well-intentioned executives believe that their strategic safety direction has been successfully communicated. The sad truth is they are often wrong. Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” If there is no clear, memorable, and repeatable direction, can we really expect people to be working in unison toward the same goals?

Filling in the Details of the Safety Strategy: The remainder of this workshop consists of 11 exercises, each of which is designed to fill in the details of the 11 parts of an effective safety strategy. As you proceed, remember the icebreaker activity and do not fall into the mindset that safety is simpler than other business goals, or that a strategy of getting better by some percent or simply starting a new initiative is really adequate to drive excellence. Encourage the participants to use this workshop to do some deep analysis of how and where and why safety is critical to the organization and what it is really about. We would like you to come away from this workshop with not only a strategy but also a group of leaders who really “get” what safety is about, why it is critical, and how to make it excellent.

STEP 1.1 PURPOSE

Background Materials

Organizational leader...