Category Archives: Creating & Maintaining a Practical Based Safety Culture
Nesting Measurable Activities in Your Organization – Aligning HSE Culture to Management Functions
Excerpt from
“MORE Creating and Maintaining a Practical Based Safety Culture© Turning Intention into Action”
Consider measuring and nesting expectations and behaviours that CREATE Safety. Include your Management Team! Thoughts? Please share with your team and start the larger discussion of measuring safety and not the lack of it!
Saskatchewan Safety Council’s 43RD ANNUAL INDUSTRIAL SAFETY SEMINAR Feb 1-3, 2016
Very much looking forward to my Keynote on Feb 1, 2016 at the Saskatchewan Safety Council’s 43RD ANNUAL INDUSTRIAL SAFETY SEMINAR Feb 1-3, 2016
Hope to see you there!
What Are YOU Doing Today To Make Safety Happen?
One of the best questions any Leader can ask of the people doing the work of their companies is “What are you doing today to create safety?” This is an important question to be answered because if it can’t be answered then safety isn’t being created. Safety creation activities are the key to achieving safety excellence. Safety is like any human endeavor, we have to make it happen (or we’re just counting on luck). Here are examples of the two possible scenarios:
Wishing & Hoping Safety
The first of the two scenarios is what I call “Wishing and Hoping Safety.” Folks who manage this way subscribe to the idea that since nothing bad has happened, we must be doing things well. These companies measure their safety success by counting injuries (or lack thereof). When there are no injuries, they assume proudly that they created that situation where no injuries occurred. Trouble is little or no effort has gone into creating the safe situation so it could be, at best, a guess that safety happened.
It’s also highly likely that unsafe things happened today but they were fortunate enough not to pay the price with a resulting injury. An additional dynamic with this type of Wishing & Hoping Safety is there is a high likelihood that when an injury does happen there is blame flailed around in all directions (except back at the blamer). Insults pointed at the injured human like (Stupid, No-Common Sense, Idiot) are all too likely. For more on the silliness bordering on insane use of “Common Sense” and the wise use of Common Knowledge” see:
Time to Replace Common Sense with Gained Common Knowledge
Integrated Safety Management System
The second of the two scenarios, which is much wiser and more stable is taking an Integrated Safety Management System approach. This requires intent, actions and evidence to build safe places to work Best of all it measures the existence of those actions to develop confidence that there is a causal relationship between the actions and the outcomes. Sounds to me like we’re actually starting to manage!
Over time, a state of safety excellence is created and exists consistently and predictably. The company works long periods of time with few downgrading incidents. When they do happen, a calm and measured response is likely. There is empathy for the people injured and a true commitment to uncover what may be something missed in creating safety excellence. The pride comes not from pretending perfection but from an overwhelming commitment to learning from mistakes and continual improvement. Reports of actions taken is the highlight of the statistical analysis since there are very few injuries to count. When a day is finished there are statistical measures on what was done to create safety and therefore likely an incident free day.
So there you have it, TWO states for your company to be in… Wishing & Hoping or creating safety excellence through thoughtful and diligent use of an Integrated Safety Management System. One you need to change as soon as possible the other one you should be extremely proud of!
So tomorrow morning, ask 10 people who work at your company the question “What Are YOU Doing Today To Make Safety Happen? If you like the answers you hear, congratulations. If you hear a lot of pausing and “aww, well, you see…ummm, aww” you know what you need to do. Start asking for the creation of safety activities to be reported.
For more information on creating safety excellence visit Safety Results Ltd.
- The Emperor Has No Hard Hat: Achieving REAL Workplace Safety Results©
- Creating & Maintaining a Practical Based Safety Culture©
- More Creating & Maintaining a Practical Based Safety Culture – Turning Intention into Action©
- How to Hold GREAT Safety Meetings – These meetings don’t suck anymore!©
An Open Letter To CEOs & Their Management Teams About Safety Excellence
Here are the Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions You Can Actually DO! Make 2016 the year your company achieves Safety Excellence…here’s how you do it:
1) Make safety look more like your business and less like a “program.”
Safely is HOW we do our work. It’s NOT a program, it’s not a special set of activities any more than efficiency is a program. Challenge the people that work in your organization to create safe, efficient and effective production of your goods and services. Then resource their efforts.
2) You’re paid to get results, not prevent things.
STOP preventing accidents and start creating safety (See Resolution #1)! You’re in the business of adding value to your stakeholders and shareholders. You’re not in the C Suite to Prevent Loss!
3) Zero isn’t a valid Safety Goal – It’s not about safety at all!
Not sure how or when it happened but this ZERO chant has to stop. A company can have ZERO injuries and do absolutely nothing. There’s a problem with celebrating a goal that can happen just by chance! Set SAFETY goals (doing things that create safety) and lose the non-injury goals. The people who work for your company can be working in very unsafe ways. If they don’t get caught by an injury they may believe that you still want them to work that way.
Don’t ask about injuries that didn’t happen, ask questions about what your corporation is doing to create Safety. Measure those things and you’ll get better at safety.
4) The few can’t control the many.
The idea that supervisors are in control of safety and can do all of the safety work is insane. Engage your workers in creating safe work. Give them the time and resources to become your safety leaders!
5) What you show interest in is what is important.
Show your sincere interest in how your company is working safely. Get out of your office and ask a lot of questions about safety. Every time you ask about efficiency and effectiveness, add the work “SAFELY.” For example: “How long is it going to take to SAFELY complete that portion of the project?” Another example is “How much will it cost for us to SAFELY get that part of the project done?” Adding the word SAFELY to your assignments is powerful. Then as a follow-up, when they tell you it’s done…ask them how they ensured it was done safely?
6) Think about START, STOP, CONTINUE.
Want a goal better than Zero Injuries? Ask your people to create activities around STOP, START, CONTINUE. Ask them what they are going to STOP doing to make their work safer. What can they START doing that they are not now doing that could make their work safer? Finally have them identify what they are doing now that is making their work safe and how are they ensuring that they are doing work that way every time they do it.
7) Lead don’t follow.
Leaders inspire. If you want your corporation to be safety excellent you need to create that challenge, resource the efforts and measure A LOT. Giving everyone (including yourselves) safety activities to do and make those responsibilities nested in job descriptions and performance evaluations will do much more than ZERO injuries chants (See Resolution #3).
8) Create Safety Excellence WITH your employees and contractors.
As a management team you need to get out of your offices and sit with your people and ask them what YOU can do to help them create safety in their work. Train them (and attend the training yourselves) how to create safety. Show them your interest by your actions… words are cheap…actions show REAL commitment!
9) STOP just being “Committed to Safety” and actually DO SOMETHING.
See Resolution #8. Make a commitment as a management team to do a list of activities in the coming year that demonstrates that your team has “skin in the game” of creating safety excellence. Then tell your Board of Directors that you have made completion of those activities part of your “at risk pay” performance evaluation. If you don’t do the work you don’t get the bonus!
10) Trust your Supervisors & Employees to be Safety Leaders.
This is the most important of all. Your people are more than capable to create safety excellence in their work. You trust that they will give your production of goods and service… make it a condition of your measurement of GREAT outcomes that they demonstrate that they are doing that work safely. Lack of injury does NOT do that. Actually working safely is the only measure of safety excellence.
I hope this has helped you focus on what you and your senior management team can do to create safety excellence in your corporation. Don’t hesitate, do it now! Your corporation will be much safer than it is now if you do!
For more information on Safety Leadership read “The Emperor Has no Hard Hat: Achieving REAL Workplace Safety Results”. WINNER, Honorable Mention, Globe and Mail’s Best Business Books of 2006.
Avoid Seeking the Impossible
There seems to be a theme lately in the Safety World – Humans intellectually looking for impossibly high reliability where there is none. Seeking perfection where none exists. Seeking Anti-fragile (I really don’t like that artificially created non-word) in a fragile reality. Looking for predictable outcomes in a random world.
We can only know what we know. Until of course we create perfect “future vision” and/or ”time travel” the unexpected is to be expected. We can only do what we can with what we have. Wishing and hoping for insight we can’t possibly have (expecting perfect Risk Assessment and Management for example). It is certainly interesting and increasingly frustrating to watch the safety community spin.
I prefer to focus on excellence with expected and predictable occasional failures. Reality is real! :O)
It’s not like listening to athletes who have just won something and explain that they gave 110%. Of course it’s not at all like believing in Santa!
Merry Christmas To ALL
Measure, Measure, Measure…the Right Things
Saying What Is REALLY Important Matters Part 2
What Does Counting Injuries as a Measure of Our Safety Process do to Our Risk Communication?
In Part 1, I outlined why I think counting injuries as some measure of safety is not only illogical, it does a great deal of damage. Leading the people you work with to think that as long as they don’t get hurt it must be OK. Imagine the trades person who just finished a job and took terrible risks (perhaps not locking out) and then his/her boss tells then they have done a GREAT JOB. At the end of the month we add insult to injury by celebrating an “injury free” month and hand out safety trinkets and repeatedly tell everyone (including your clients) “we had another SAFE month…keep up the good work!”
So let’s stop this madness and actually measure SAFETY. I propose that safety is doing what we need to do without taking unnecessary risks. We look at a job that is to be done and we evaluate the risks we face. We come up with a way to do the job that is the most safely productive way to do it without taking unreasonable and unnecessary risks. In the example above, working with electricity without locking out is terribly risky. It’s unnecessary to work without the protection of locking out the energy (at least in most cases except for highly trained and protected trades people who work with live electrical lines). So the challenge becomes deciding what needs to be done to manage the identified risk and taking those steps each and every time we’re going to do that job. If there are roadblocks to the chosen safe behaviours then we need to jointly devise ways to ensure the safe way becomes the natural way to do the job. Now we have some real things to measure that are creating safe production. Counting, measuring the creation of safety through our defined activities give us some real evidence-based data to work with. Now when we congratulate the people we work with on a good job…we can actually mean it!
So using the example above we can certainly measure if lock out processes are in place, we can also measure if the hardware is available. Then we can start to measure the compliance level and effectiveness of the process. Now when we see positive actions and evidence we truly have something to celebrate. If we find short comings we have something positive to work on and celebrate when we’ve accomplished our goals of creating safety. We’ll know without a doubt that we created the situation of ensuring we’ve locked out. Best of all we did it with our employees!
So there you have it Just some practical thoughts on what we can do to create and measure safety…give it a try. It’s a lot better than counting what didn’t happen and assuming we created the non-event. See how silly that sounds?
Saying What Is REALLY Important Matters
Saying What Is REALLY Important Matters
Part 1
What Does Counting Injuries as a Measure of Our Safety Process do to Our Risk Communication?
There’s a long tradition in thinking (by some) that measuring safety is best done by measuring the lack of injury. If you’ve read ANY of my books, articles, newsletters, tweets, Linkedin posts and/or my blog you’ll know that I believe this is illogical and a very poor measure of safety. Measuring injuries as proof of safety is illogical because lack of injury can happen by just being lucky. Very unsafe activities can result in no injuries at all.
What I haven’t talked about much is what this huge error in risk communication does to our workers. Let’s explore…
What are we really trying to say?
If we count and celebrate lack of injury, do our workers start to think that as long as they are not injured it must be what they want?
Is the message to them “Take risks to get production, just don’t get caught by hurting yourself?” How about “It must be safe, last time I did it I didn’t get hurt!”
I’m confident that we do a great deal of damage to our workers risk perception by linking the lack of injury to their safety. Every one of us reading this can think of a time (in most cases, many times) when we’ve done something everyone on the planet would consider unsafe yet we didn’t get hurt.
So celebrating lack of injury statistics when your whole company knows that it was achieved (at least in part) by some level of luck is extremely damaging. It actually encourages behaviours that may not be in the best interest of your workers. In a similar fashion, hiring contractors with low injury rates may very well be celebrating and rewarding the best manipulators of safety statistics.
Let’s stop linking this poor measure of safety to our success and/or the rewarding of contracts. We will be successful when we are doing our tasks (work or play) in a reasonably risk managed way. Risk can never be zero but it can be logical based on what is available to us to reasonably control the harmful energies that may strike us. Risk management isn’t magic… it’s logical and hopefully a thoughtful use of our knowledge. Above all there needs to be a reasonable relationship between the risk and the amount of control achieved.
Measuring positive attributes of safe production is the real measure of working safely.
Next time we’ll discuss what we can count and measure that REALLY demonstrates what is important to us by counting the “creating of safety through our activities.” In Part 2 we’ll reveal that counting what we do is much better than counting what doesn’t happen to us! Stay tuned!
When are YOU going to stop relying on Injury Data As A Measure of Safety?
It is highly illogical to use a measure that can clearly be the result of LUCK to measure the existence of a state of safety. Safety is what we DO it’s not what doesn’t happen to us. If YOU don’t stop using this measure and giving it importance in your organization…WHO WILL?
"Safetyresultsblog" Alan D. Quilley CRSP 