Deming On Safety: Now You Two Play Nice

By Phil La Duke

“Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service..”—W. Edward Deming’s 9th Point.0

W. Edward Deming (source http://alanpippenger.com/?page_id=11)

It’s been a couple of weeks since I continued my series on how W. Edward Deming’s points apply to safety. Deming’s ninth point, “Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service” is another one of Deming’s points that really doesn’t take much imagination to connect it to safety. (My take on the previous points can be found on this and my personal blog—yes, it’s a gimmick to read both, but if you give it a chance I think you will glean useful material from both sites).

Safety has to be about more than just not getting injured, it has to be about making the workplace better WITHOUT sacrificing safety and that takes teamwork.  For far too long the safety department has seen itself as somehow removed from the core business and with every consultant on the planet screaming for Operations leadership to cut cost and concentrate on its core business such think is more than just wrong-headed, it is practically suicide.

“Us Versus Them” Conflict

One of the chief sources of destructive conflicts in organizations is the “us versus them” view of the workplace.  Nowhere is the better evidence than in the on-going battle between Safety and Production, Safety versus Engineering, or Safety and Continuous Improvement. Safety has been the policeman for so many decades that it is tough for other areas of the company to see them as any thing but obstructionist.  Safety for its part, often sees the other departments as recklessly pursuing profit with little regard for the safety of the workers.  It’s a faux dichotomy; nobody really wants to jeopardize lives in favor of profit, and safety doesn’t want to shut down the company to eliminate injuries.  But “us versus them” conflict has deep roots and can be difficult to over come.

In many organizations, the Safety function grew out of Human Resources (HR), which in turn, has its roots in personnel.  For many years, HR was the rules and write-up department.  Operations made the money and HR was always mucking about with new rules.  Human resources has evolved into a highly functioning partner in most companies success but for some people the memories of HR throwing up roadblocks without offering alternative solutions run deep.  Fairly or unfairly, Safety has been tarred with that same brush, and needs to do something about it.

Safety often has little love for Operations, which it sees, as too willing to take reckless chances and put people at risk.  It is seldom that Safety sees Operations as evil or as having malicious intent; it’s just that it sees Operations as less than realistic about the likelihood of an injury.

The rift between Safety and Engineering can run almost as deep.  Engineering changes to a process that is in production tend to be costly and difficult to implement, and even the most carefully designed processes often need to be tweaked after they have been built and installed.  Safety professionals rightly expect Engineering to design a safe and capable process, but Engineers aren’t always able to “engineer-out” every hazard.  Engineering often see Safety professionals as showing up with objections without solutions—Safety professionals tell Engineering what they CAN’T do without offering viable, safer, alternatives.  For their parts, Safety professionals counter that an unsafe design is an unsafe design and it is not their responsibility to design a safe system, rather its job is to identify issues and provide guidance as to whether or not a system is safe.

Perhaps the most bitter—and surprising—rivalry is between Safety and Continuous Improvement.  This conflict is part “us versus them” and part “territoriality”.  It’s not surprising that there would be considerable overlap between the two groups.  Both functions can rightly claim that activities like 5S (6S to the masters of the obvious who realize that “safety” also begins with an “S” and have renamed the activity); it’s little things like this that make the Continuous Improvement professionals roll their eyes when the Safety professionals open their mouths.  Safety, on the other hand, resent the CI team referring to them as “non-value added” activity.  Many Continuous Improvement groups eye Safety greedily and whisper in the ear of Operations leadership that Safety should reside within the umbrella of CI.  Safety, views CI as working too hard to make process improvements without considering the impact changes can have downstream in the process.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

As Deming points out, all activities must work as a team, to “foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service”. If worker injuries, over exposure that causes industrial illnesses, or fatalities don’t represent a problem that will interfere with production, it is difficult to envision one that would.  But how can an organization break down these barriers?  Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best:

  • Co-located Teams.  Conventional wisdom holds that functions should sit together, after all, doesn’t it make sense that everyone in a functional department would sit together.  Unfortunately, teams that aren’t housed together (in some organizations, an individual might never have met his or her program manager in person, interacting only on conference calls and via email.) Co-located teams (those where members are seated with their project teams instead of their functions) tend to be more cohesive and higher functioning than other teams.
  • Goal-Based Compensation. It may surprise some to learn that many team members are compensated dramatically different than their colleagues from different functions.  As long as one function can be successful while the other fails there is a strong danger of creating destructive competition and conflict. Cross-functional teams should be given a common goal and compensated according to how effectively they achieved it.
  • Cross-Training and Interdisciplinary Rotations. The best way to understand and value a teammate’s contribution to the team is to walk the proverbial mile his or her shoes.  A greater understanding of how each function operates is key to closer working relationships.  Cross training or a rotation to a different function can greatly improve the level of cooperation between groups.

Not every Safety function is at odds with other functions (this is the kind of disclaimer I have to put in because despite my earnest belief that my readers are smart enough to distinguish between me identifying a problem and not weaseling it up by qualifying each statement with a “many” “few” or similar verbal marshmallows some half-wit inevitably stumbles across my post and hammers out a frothy “I hate you” email) but those who fail to reach a high degree of collaboration with traditional rivals will likely go the way of the dinosaur.

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by rockfordgreeneinternational on May 26, 2012  •  Permalink
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Drawing the Line between Just Culture and Accountability

By Phil La Duke

For the last couple of weeks I have been teaching Just Culture to a large healthcare organization and it has triggered new revelations about the concept. First, a bit about Just Culture: James Reason first used the term “Just Culture” in the late 1990’s to describe an environment where workers felt free to admit mistakes. Because people are intrinsically fallible, Reason, believed it was unjust to punish people for things that they neither intended nor chose to do. Mistakes, most often are important sources of information about flaws in our processes, and Reason believed that punitive responses to mistake making led to a climate of fear where mistakes were driven underground. Most advocates of Just Culture believe that a “culture of safety” cannot be achieved until a Just Culture is firmly entrenched within an organization. Just Culture is characterized by a sense of fairness—people are held accountable for their actions, but the accountability doesn’t necessarily mean punishment. When it comes to things going wrong there are basically three categories: mistakes, risk taking, and recklessness.

Mistakes

Mistakes are those unintended negative outcomes that we categorize as human errors; they are the reason they put erasers on pencils. Much as we try we can never eliminate human errors (since they are unintended and often subconscious). Mistakes aren’t bad, in fact, most of our learning as people come from trial and error. As infants we investigate our world and as we make mistakes we fill our gray-matter database with what works and what doesn’t. This neurological database subconsciously continues testing our environment and leads us to innovations or disasters with cold indifference. We call mistakes that are purely the result of slip-up “human error” and in general we would hold people accountable for their mistakes to the extent that we would ask them to bring the lessons that they have learned to bear so that we can learn from the mistake and to help others from making a similar errors in the future. This process is called mistake-proofing.

Mistake-proofing is something of a misnomer because its intent is not to prevent mistakes so much as it is to lesson the consequences of the error. While mistakes are difficult to prevent, there are many factors that make mistakes more likely:  Stress. When we get stressed it signals to our brain that an adaptation may be necessary to protect us. The subconscious mind begins to experiment with the environment to test the figurative waters and gage the safety of change. The greater the stress the more frequent the “mistakes” one makes as the subconscious brain rapidly tests the safety of moving from one environment to the next.

  • Fatigue. Many tasks require us to complete a process precisely or to check details. Fatigue makes it more difficult to perform a task without variation and variation in a process leads to mistakes.
  • Repetition. Our brains are designed to look for patterns and anticipate and continue those patterns. Often, people who are doing repetitive tasks will unknowingly see something that simply isn’t there or to fail to see something that is there but shouldn’t be present.
  •  Distraction. Our brains process stimuli at an astounding rate. The vast majority of these stimuli are interpreted by our subconscious in microseconds. Additionally, recent brain research has shown that the human brain is incapable of consciously “multi-tasking which means that distraction plays a major role in mistake making.

Drift

While to err is human, not all of our Snafus are honest mistakes. Often, mistakes are the result of behavioral drift or inappropriate risk taking. Behavioral drift is the tendency of a person to gradually move away from a standard until the person has moved out of compliance. There are two kinds of drift, intentional and subconscious. Subconscious drift often begins through human error when a person makes a mistake but suffers no meaningful consequences for having made the error. Intentional drift typically evolves as a worker becomes more familiar with operational norms, taboos, and mores. As a person feels more at home with the culture one is more comfortable deviating from the standards because he or she understands the amount of behavioral variance the culture will tolerate. In other cases, a deviation from the standard is inappropriately believed to be justified or mistakenly believed to be an innovation. Taking a shortcut is an example of an intentional drift in one’s behavior. Is it wrong to take a shortcut? Perhaps not in itself, but one should consider that if a shortcut is truly an improvement one should work to have the shortcut included in the work standard rather than working outside the standard work.

Another source of drift is ineffective training. Research has shown that as much as 80% of the skills taught in training courses are not retained long enough to be applied on the job. If this is the case, workers may be operating at only 20% accuracy in the tasks they are charged with completing, and the remaining 80% represents variation or drift from the standard.

Poor Decision Making

Poor decisions can be more dangerous and also more difficult to prevent. Poor decisions are typically categorized as “unsafe behavior” or “at risk behavior” and represent the largest cause of undesired outcomes. Workers are called on to make decisions all day long and the more bad decisions they make the greater the risk the organization faces. Poor decisions can be effected by:

  • Poor communication. Many catastrophic decisions are made simply because the information on which these decisions are made are incomplete, inaccurate, or just plain wrong. Increasing the effectiveness of the communication vehicles is perhaps the single most effective ways to reduce bad decisions.
  • Assumptions. Often disasters are caused because someone made a decision based on an assumption—the person who made the decision believed something to be true when it was not or assumed that all elements of a process were performing to a standard when they weren’t.
  • Miscalculation of Risk. We all manage risk, but many times one person’s assessment of a risk is considerably different than someone else’s perception of the situation. Often times a bad decision grows out of a person’s belief that the possibility of a fairly probable failure is extremely remote.

Discipline Doesn’t Work

There is a misguided thought process that people use when things go wrong. People tend to seek retribution for even the smallest errors and in the case of mistakes; retribution has no chance of preventing further errors. Punishment is almost as ineffective in preventing people from repeating mistakes, or continuing to make bad decisions. When we assign blame, we seldom look for answers beyond the blame.

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by rockfordgreeneinternational on May 21, 2012  •  Permalink
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This week’s post will be delayed

This week’s post will be delayed at least 48 hours.

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by rockfordgreeneinternational on May 20, 2012  •  Permalink
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Point 4: Instill Universal Ownership and Accountability for Safety

My 14 points for safety was one part homage to W. Edward Deming and two parts an attempt to identify in broad strokes the cumulation of my experience, education, and internalization of my body of work around worker safety, a journey of learning I undertook some 40 years ago and one, God willing, I will continue for some time. Every so often I explore these points in a bit more depth. In this weeks post I explore my fourth point.
My fourth point for worker safety is

“Instill Universal Ownership and Accountability for Safety: Every Job plays a role in ensuring workplace safety and everyone must be accountable when procedures fail to keep workers safe.”

I have always been leery of slogans like “Safety is everybody’s job” chiefly because I’ve come to learn that when something becomes everyone’s job it effectively becomes nobody’s job.
When it comes to lowering workplace risk of injury (or workplace productivity for that matter) everyone plays a role and everyone must know ones role, own one’s role, and be accountable for the successful completion of the duties of one’s role.
The safety of the workplace is a complex system with many interdependencies; a vast network of links and connections and like a chain a safety system is only as good as its weakest link.

Everyone who interacts with this system has certain duties:

1) Duty to comply with a standard. Each person (be he or she the CEO or a visitor) needs to under and comply with the safety procedures appropriate to one’s position and activity. Additionally, one has a duty to perform one’s job as designed. Working out of station increases risk to the worker but adds variation and risk to anyone who interacts with the system.
2) Duty to actively reduce risk. People tend to think about safety in individual terms when in fact when they take unjustifiable risks it can cause an injury or system failure anywhere in the system.
3) Duty to reduce variation and risk in the work and work environment. All worker’s must be the acknowledged owner of safety. They must be expected and allowed to police and enforce the safety of their jobs and spheres of influences. Their authority over safety of the work area must be acknowledged, supported, and respected.
4)Duty to Know One’s Duties . A lack of training or awareness of safety expectations can never be allowed to excuse one’s failure to behave in an unsafe manner or to knowingly fail to contain a hazard. If one has not been informed of all hazards one has the responsibility to seek out this information.

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by rockfordgreeneinternational on May 12, 2012  •  Permalink
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Deming On Safety Part 8

By Phil La Duke

W. Edward Deming (source http://alanpippenger.com/?page_id=11)

“Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.”—W. Edward Deming’s 8th Point.

Of all of W. Edward Deming’s points, not resonates quite so deeply with me than his eighth point, “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.” While each of his points is directly relatable to the field and function of safety, perhaps this point is more than merely relatable, it is the foundation of safety.

Sure, safety means not getting injured, and yes, safety means that one is operating at a relatively low probably of injury, but at its core, safety means freedom from fear.  As anyone who was around an organization when it tried to implement process improvement in the world of quality can attest, driving fear out of an organization isn’t easy, in fact it’s damned difficult.

If we have any hope of creating a culture that values and encourages worker safety we have to begin on a foundation of trust, and fear destroys any chance we have of building trust.

Fear creates an environment and a culture antagonist to safety in all senses of the word.  What’s worse is much of the fear that has been institutionalized in organizations has been caused by, or at very least exacerbated by safety professionals themselves. Let’s take a look at the five fears:

Fear One: Fear of Injury or Illness

In 1985, when I joined General Motors as a hardware installer, I was afraid.  I had transitioned from a job as a part-time security guard at a nuclear power plant to a highly coveted position in an auto plant. I was poorly trained, and—despite having lived on a farm and worked doing physically demanding work—was not prepared for the rigors of assembly work.  Even though OSHA had been around for over a decade my coworkers and I were not required to wear safety glasses (if we wanted them, we had to provide them ourselves) and the cotton gloves provided (absolutely one pair per worker—no exceptions) were wholly inadequate protection against the jagged metal parts I installed.  This, coupled with oil-saturated wood-block floors that frequently had blocks missing, minor injuries were a daily occurrence, and back strains, twisted ankles and other minor injuries were “why we get paid what we do”.  Unlike some industries where it’s considered “tough” or  “macho” to ignore injuries, my coworkers and I viewed an injury that required a trip to the medical department as a welcome relief from the back-breaking work that was our jobs.  That’s not to say that we wanted to get hurt, in fact, we did a good job of looking out for each other and prided ourselves in watching each other’s back.  We’d complain about unsafe working conditions (blocks in the floor that were missing, frayed electrical chords, or heat that sometimes rose above 120 degrees.) Some supervisors tried to help, but most knew that nothing would be done and would roll their eyes at the complaints.  One day an electrician to whom I was casually acquainted died when the afternoon supervisor energized the line on which he was working (he had started at the end of the day shift) electrocuted him.  Back then we didn’t know or care about lock out, we counted on communicating to keep us safe.  For many of us, we knew that it was probably only a matter of time before we got hurt, but what were we supposed to do quit? For blue collar workers growing up in the 1970’s in Detroit this was the only life for which we were prepared or wanted.  Shut up, do your job, and if you beat the odds you came home whole.  We knew we were rolling the dice every time we went to work, but we also knew we’d be rolling the dice anywhere we worked so we might as well roll them working for the Big Three where at very least the United Auto Workers could get us great pay, good benefits, and some measure of safety.  We didn’t talk about it, but the fear was always there. I know that there are some of you reading this and are thinking how much things have changed since that time, and a lot HAS changed.  But if you think that fear of injury isn’t rampant in the workforce today, you are deluded.  As Deming pointed out, no one can really have his or her head in the game when they are terrified that said head might be separated from his or her body in an industrial accident. (I’m paraphrasing Deming, but I think he would agree with my conclusions).

Fear Two: Fear of Write Up

In many workplaces in the world today if you get injured you can expect to be disciplined for your clumsy stupidity or your reckless behavior.  You will get a stern lecture about how you are lucky to be alive or that your actions didn’t injure someone else. You will likely get a warning, and if the behavior that caused your injury is judged to be a pattern you may be suspended or fired.  What rational person will report injury under the threat of disciplinary action?  Why would I come clean about my culpability in a mishap knowing that the powers that be will use my admissions against me?

Driving this fear out of the organization is the heart and soul of Just Culture, but far too few organizations have adopted anything close to a culture based on justice.

Fear Three: Fear of Layoff

As a general rule, the jobs most likely to injure a worker are those that require significant physical strength and stamina.  This means that when the body ages, wears out, or yes, gets damaged, the worker not only faces layoff, but a greatly diminished chance of securing employment elsewhere.  This fear that one will become obsolete and lose one’s job to someone stronger and more fit is omnipresent in today’s fiercely competitive labor market.  When the Great Recession hit safety professionals expected a glut of fraudulent cases and found, instead, under reporting as workers fearing job loss concealed on the job injuries.

Fear Five: Fear Of Embarrassment

Generally speaking people don’t intend to get hurt and when they DO get injured the circumstances leading up to the injury aren’t exactly praiseworthy.  As long as hazards are the subject of whacky photos the fear will persist.  Adults fear workplace embarrassment more than they fear being a workplace fatality.  Safety professionals must make a concerted effort to drive out this fear of embarrassment; this effort starts by remembering that safety is no joke.

Fear Four: Fear that One Will Be Ostracized

In the name of behavior modification, safety professionals have created an environment where the mistakes of a single worker can cost all others everything from pizza parties to hundreds in safety bonuses.  Now in addition to the physical consequences associated with an injury workers must fear the wrath of their fellow workers who are deprived rewards because a coworker has been injured.

Driving fear out of the workplace begins and ends with safety.  Safety professionals must foster an environment of trust and open and honest communication if we ever hope to drive fear out of the organization and build a culture where safety is valued.

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by rockfordgreeneinternational on May 5, 2012  •  Permalink
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La Duke’s 3 Point: Focus On Prevention

By Phil La Duke

It’s been almost two months since I posted my 14 Points of Safety http://philladuke.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/la-dukes-14-points-for-safety/ on my personal blog.  I’ve explored the first two points in detail on both www.philladuke.wordpress.com and here.  I thought this week I would tackle the my third point, Focus on prevention.

“Preventing injuries is more efficient than reacting to them. Injuries are caused by failures in the system.  By managing hazards (procedural, behavioral, and mechanical) organizations can reduce unplanned downtime, injuries, and defects.”—Phil La Duke’s third point of safety.

Prevention must be the underpinning of any safety management system but it is easier said than done.  Governments, executives, and many experts actively (intentionally or unintentionally) encourage body counts when it comes to safety.  From safety records and paperwork that must be filed to the authorities, to reports to management safety is primarily a reactive function. We repeatedly extol the virtues of a system of predictive data and proactive responses to trends but scare little is done in these areas.

Reacting Is Easier Than Anticipating

Lagging indicators and quantitative data is easy; companies basically just have to count the boo-boos and Band-Aids. While it’s true that it can be difficult to gather reactive data like near misses, it is infinitely easier than predicting what can go wrong and intervening before it does.  Even if the organization can gather the information it needs, prediction and proactive initiatives require more than just data; it requires safety professionals with the skills to identify trends, interpret them, and design appropriate interventions to countermand the trend.

By using a combination of lagging indicators (“what happened”) and leading indicators “what is likely to happen if we do nothing”) the safety professional can craft a dashboard of metrics that can provide real insight into the risk endemic to a process.  This kind of data is easy to misinterpret, and what’s worse, a safety professional can find him or herself inappropriately using this analysis to support something he or she already wants to do.

Getting a Handle On The Data

Prediction can be as simple as basing safety initiatives on historical data (we know that the kinds of conditions that hurt workers, we know where they are, and when they are most acute) or as complex as conducting standard progressions (or logarithmic progression) on both quantitative and qualitative data (to establish baseline data that can be compared to expected outcomes.)

Barriers to Proactive Initiatives

Many organizations fail to be proactive, not because they lack data, but because there processes are not in control (a statistical term that means that the data cannot be trusted to be reliable).  Remember Statistical Process Control (SPC)? There was a decade and a fortune wasted chasing SPC only to discover that most organization’s processes were so rife with process variability that no valid inferences could ever be made.  The process ended up costing far more than it could ever recoup.  Similarly, the difference between an estimate or prediction and a SWAG (Silly, Wild-Assed Guess) is process variability.  Variability is why Behavior Based Safety (BBS) fails and ultimately will be the reason that companies dump 6 Sigma efforts. These processes are not intrinsically flawed—in fact if applied to a stable process that is in control and has minimal variation they can achieve remarkable and powerful results—but most purveyors of said systems are extremely unlikely to advertise (if they even understand) the inappropriateness of applying these tools to systems that are not in control.

First Things First

So before a proactive safety management system can be implemented the organization’s processes must be in control, and before a system can be under control it has to be standardized, documented, and the workers must be sufficiently trained to compete the tasks with minimal process (both mechanical and behavioral) variation.  My advise is to stick to the simple methods of prediction—layered process audits, workplace inspections, 5S initiatives, and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) efforts.  Not only will such efforts be easier and less costly to implement they are far more likely to succeed in improvements not only to safety, but to quality, delivery, cost reduction, and the expected useful life of equipment.

Performing As Designed

The best indication that risk has been minimized is to audit (and by audit I mean a simple observation of how things are compared to how they are supposed to be) the processes.  If the manpower, machines, materials, methods (behaviors), and environment are all performing as intended and expected then the likelihood that there will be a process failure is fairly small, but if even one of these elements is out of process the risk of injury can be significant.  If more than one of these elements is out of process the risk of injury rises exponentially.

Looking for Indicators

Perhaps the best way to focus on prevention is to identify the elements in your workplace that are most likely to cause (directly or indirectly) a catastrophic outcome.  No one from outside your organization can responsibly identify these elements for you without first researching your work environment.  The place to start is a complete and thorough site analysis that will identify the greatest areas of risk and biggest opportunity for success.

The Cost of Prevention

Preventing injuries can be costly, but it is far less costly than treating injured workers.  Prevention is also a tough sell to Operations leadership because the cost of prevention is tangible and real while the cost of injuries that may never happen is intangible and a matter of conjecture.  Many Operations leaders still believe that the risk is worth taking.  This situation is exacerbated by shoddy data, poorly defined prevention procedures and overly cautious safety professionals who cannot differentiate between a hazard that is highly probable and one that is all but incapable of causing harm or one that is likely to cause a fatality from one that is likely to cause a first aid case.  Prevention can only be truly credible when backed by sound analysis of statistically significant data.

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by rockfordgreeneinternational on April 28, 2012  •  Permalink
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Rockford Greene International Presents “Engagement: The Key To Changing Your Safety Culture

I had a bear of a time getting my Michigan Safety Conference speeches on line.  This is the best solution I can think of on short notice.—Phil La Duke

This presentation was first made by Phil La Duke at the Michigan Safety Conference on April 17, 2012 at the DeVos Center in Grand Rapids, MI. For information on Rockford Greene International, or to request Phil La Duke as a speaker or consultant visit www.rockfordgreeneinternational.com

This presentation is based, in part, on the book Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work Build A Culture of Employee Engagement with The Principles of Respect to purchase a copy of this book, go to www.paulmarciano.com. I don’t have any financial interest in Dr. Marciano’s book—I just think it’s an important work that everyone who works with people, including and especially safety professionals should read and implement.  I don’t want to gush, or to make this a commercial for Marciano’s work so I will close with “buy two copies, because if you loan one out you will never get it back.”

There’s an old joke that goes, “how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb has to want to be changed.”  In some ways, the culture of a company is like that light bulb. It’s great to say that the organization’s view and value of safety has to change, but how do we do that?  The answer is engagement and the key is engagement, not motivation.

About a year ago, I reviewed the book, Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work: Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles of RESPECT™ by Dr. Paul Marciano in my column in Fabricating and Metalworking magazine.  I described his book as perhaps the most important book on safety of the 21st century and the book isn’t about safety. Dr. Marciano’s work about how to get workers truly engaged transcends organizational development in a general sense and hits a bulls-eye on some points that many of the purveyors of safety culture products miss completely.
As I mention in the review Dr. Marciano did have contact with me as he researched the book, and while my involvement fell far short of anything approaching a contribution, it is fair to say that I was a sympathetic audience to his message. The book itself is a great read and should be required reading in any curriculum that confers a degree or certificate in worker health and safety. Frankly, I recommend that it be a part of any leadership or supervisory skills training. It’s that good. The book is available through Amazon.com but if you buy it directly from Dr. Marciano’s website www.paulmarciano.com and tell him that I referred you he will send you an inscribed version at no extra cost as a favor to me.

“PowerPoint presentations are for people who don’t know what the (expletive) they are talking about”—Steven Jobs

Just a quick note about the visuals of this presentation.  I hate bullet points. I think presentations that have boring slides emblazoned with bullet points are the height of tedium and are used by lazy presenters to cover for their lack of preparation for their boring speeches.  Years ago I spoke at the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the keynote speaker was Wade Davis, author of The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic  Wade Davis has studied the extinction of cultures around the world. Wade was a local and despite having a presentation that had nothing to do with safety—he talked about how written language was causing cultures to become extinct at a much greater rate than animal species.  But I digress, my point is that Wade Davis used three immense screens with photos he had taken for National Geographic.  Nobody, least of all me, missed the boring bullets.  It took me awhile to screw up the courage to abandon the death by PowerPoint presentations; some of you will hate these slides and, I hope, some of you will like them (maybe even enough to follow my lead.)

 

The photo on this slide was taken by Phil La Duke at the Redford Theater (A beautifully restored turn of the century theater in Detroit)

Culture is the culmination of the rules, norms, and shared values of an organization. An organization’s culture is “how it rolls”; it’s just how we do things here.  The idea of a “safety culture” is a misnomer since all companies have some opinion and approach to safety.  At best a company can have a “safety subculture” but even that bugs me. Modifying the word “culture” with a word like “sales” or “service” or, yes, “safety” tends to imply that the organization pursues that adjective (or is it a gerund?) above all other Engaged employees who value safety are the single greatest determinate of a company’s safety management process.

Another photo of the interior of the Redford Theater

Engagement is different than motivation.  Motivation changes the climate in an organization where true engagement will change the very fabric of the organization.  Engagement takes hard work—there are no shortcuts to an engaged workforce.

A third photo from the Redford Theater, Detroit, MI

Having said all that, watch out for people selling “safety snake oil” disguised as engagement; engaging employees is hard work and it takes true leaders to do it. Nobody is going to sell you a magic bullet that will suddenly engage your workforce, but plenty of the pundits will try.  Now that “safety culture” is all the rage there are plenty of people who are trying to sell “culture change solutions” even though they just aren’t qualified to make the claims they do.

Why engage employees? Simple, they work as if they own the companies and make decisions based on what they think is right not what will win the Safety BINGO, or get their name on the Safety plaque, or even what gets them that bonus of no lost work days.  Engaged employees make the difference between cultures that value safety and those that don’t.

At the root of employee engagement are trust and knowledge.  Engaged employees must be able to trust that the relationship is reciprocal—a smart employee won’t work for the companies interests for long if he or she thinks that the company’s interests conflict with his or her own.  Similarly, a worker cannot truly become engaged if he or she lacks a basic understanding of how the organization’s business model works.  Engaging employees is impossible without a solid talent development and industrial learning effort is in place and effective.  Workers must understand the corporate goals and vision if they can ever be expected to embrace and support them.

What’s at here stake is more than just worker safety.  In the increasingly volatile and competitive business environment only those companies who are successful in attracting and retaining the best talent will be successful and a key to retaining talent will be in the organization’s ability to engage workers.  I won’t try to explain too much of Dr. Paul Marciano’s work here—the book is well written and accessible to us non-PhDs so I would recommend you picking up at least two copies (once someone borrows your copy you will never get it back so buy two.)

It amounts to this: If you want to foster a culture in which individuals value worker safety, you must build an environment of trust and learning. There are no short cuts, no magic bullets, and no bag of tricks that will take you there. You must work hard and stay focused to achieve it.

I'm fortunate in that I live in Detroit and am able to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts often. Diego Rivera painted a beautiful mall in the DIA courtyard. I use photos that I took of the mural often. If you ever get to Detroit check out the DIA and this beautiful work of art.

Why worry about engaged employees? Shouldn’t employees be happy they have jobs?Disengaged employees cost companies millions in lost productivities, at the most innocuous the disengaged employee adds nothing of value to the organization but at his or her worst, the disengaged employee chases away customers, poisons morale and cause top performers to seek other employment.  From a safety prospective the frustration and dispirited attitude of the disengaged employee make it harder for the other employees to work safely or to look for safety innovations.

In his book, Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with The Principles of RESPECT, Dr. Paul Marciano outlines the best practices for creating engagement.

Improving new hire training.  The first 90 days are essential to the worker’s long-term engagement and the training the worker receives in that time period can make or break your engagement efforts.  New hire training should:
Provide a clear understanding of policy presented in a positive and welcoming tone.
Embed safety in all training.  Safety should be hardwired into all training.
Ensure good safety practices are introduced early in the training.
Encourage suggestions.

It sounds too easy.  If you want your employees to feel engaged ask them what they think.  Your employees are experts in their work, and yet too often, the safety professionals treat the employees as uninformed children.  We tell workers to avoid doing things only an imbecile would do. Involving your workers allows you to reposition your role from policeman to trusted advisor simply by shifting the power and responsibility from the safety professional to the employee.  Believe it or not, they’ll thank you.

Engagement comes from understanding the core business and your role in its success. Not only does cross training increase the employee’s job satisfaction but it will also increase the employee’s overall understanding and appreciation of the overall safety of the workplace.

Inviting other department heads to share a meal and talk to the employees is another way to help your workers to understand the business and to build a rapport with other areas of the organization.  Also there is a powerful dynamic borne out of a shared meal.

Creating a special project that allows the employees to have a real say so in the success of the business is an excellent way to build engagement.  A safety taskforce allows the company to build engagement while at the same time improving the overall safety of the workplace.

Perhaps the moat powerful way to internalize a concept is by teaching it.  And perhaps the most powerful form of teaching is coaching.  Creating safety coaches out of your team members allows you to create the essential foundation of a culture that values safety and hardwires it into your daily routines.

Creating stretch assignments that allow your workers to move beyond their comfort zones create personal growth.  Obviously, you will want to be careful in selecting an assignment that affords your associates room to grow without jeopardizing their physical safety.

Autonomy is a great way to create employee engagement and provided that you have built a solid foundation in safety encourage workers to make their own decisions will quickly build an engaged workplace.
An engaged workforce can transform the workplace, but it can’t do that without an equal, if not greater transformation on the part of the safety professional.

Thank you for attending this presentation it was my pleasure being here and I hope you found a thing or two challenging and thought provoking.
Note: Phil La Duke is available for consulting or  private bookings of this or one of his many other speeches for more information contact Patrick Sullivan at Psullivan@rockfordgreene.com.

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by rockfordgreeneinternational on April 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Phil La Duke, Safety Culture

Posted by rockfordgreeneinternational on April 23, 2012

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So You Want to Speak At Professional Conference…

By Phil La Duke

Phil La Duke making his first of many speeches at the National Safety Council

Last week I delivered two speeches at the Michigan Safety Conference and, as usually, it got me fired up about the professional speaking circuit. I enjoy speaking and I enjoy attending professional conferences. It gets me pumped up about the things about which I am most passionate and affords me the opportunity to meet and talk with so many fans of my work (and a lot of people who really hate it too, which, while less fun is an important part of my professional growth.)

I go to a lot of professional conferences. Between exhibiting at the American Society of Healthcare Human Resource Administrators (ASHHRA), the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM), Society for Manufacturing Engineers (SME), American Society of Training & Development (ASTD), Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE), Northern Utah Manufacturing Association (NUMA), American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE), and the National Safety Council (NSC); speaking at the annual conferences of Northern Utah Manufacturing Association (NUMA), American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE), and the National Safety Council (NSC), the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering (CSSE), and the XIV International Symposium On Mining Safety (and numerous regional conferences); covering the major international safety events for Facility Safety Management and Fabricating and Metalworking magazines and having developed content for a company that designed, developed, coordinated, and presented conferences, I consider myself, if not an expert, certainly a connoisseur of professional conferences. Some, like the Michigan Safety Conference and SME’s EASTEC, are shining examples of what a professional conference should be while others seem to be half-assed attempts at conferences that ultimately come off as amateurish farces akin to “the let’s fix up the barn and put on a play” fiascos from an old Little Rascals short. When the events are good they are excellent and when they are bad, they leave one with a strong urge to slap one of the organizers.

“Some of the professional organizations have failed their constituencies so entirely that they should disband and never reorganize.”

I speak for a living. By that I mean that I derive a significant portion of my business by delivering speeches—from executive retreats to key note addresses at annual safety meetings and everywhere in between (for the right price I will come and speak at your kid’s birthday party.) When I speak at a professional conference (in many cases for a fee but often for free in the spirit of volunteerism in pursuit of improving our profession.) And while I enjoy it immensely, speaking for free at a conference costs me more than just the money I pay in travel, it also means that I have to turn down other paying gigs to make time on my schedule for appearances that don’t pay. I’m not griping—there is no gun to my head forcing me to speak, and were it not for these venues many of you would never have the opportunity to see me live, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to have met so many great people.

More and more people have been asking me how they can break into the speaking business. I’ve been on the safety speaking circuit for about going on ten years and there are things that I like about it and things I hate. Here are some things that I would like you to know about speaking at professional conferences (these rules don’t apply to private gigs) before you decide to write another abstract:

  • The Pay Sucks. In most cases, only the top keynote speaker is paid. For the rest of the speakers the only compensation they receive is the exposure they get from doing their speeches. As a master of shameless self-promotion I tend to publicize my appearances to an embarrassing extent. I issue multiple press releases, I promote my speeches in my blogs, I tweet them, I strong-arm my publishers into publishing stories on them, and I plaster LinkedIn and Facebook with material hyping my appearances. The buzz tends to draw standing room only crowds and a small percentage of those appearances turn into business. But most people who speak at conferences do little in way of promotion and end up with sparse attendance and lackluster response; they don’t get business out of the gig and basically are speaking completely pro bono.
  • It Costs A Lot To Present. Effectively, many organizers of a professional conferences see a speech as a privilege and that they are doing the speaker a huge favor by allowing him or her to grace the hallowed halls of their professional sessions. While some organizations stand out as really going above and beyond (again the Michigan Safety Conference and SME but also the National Safety Council, the Symposium on Mining Safety and NUMA) while others can be downright belligerent. (ASSE has been so condescending, rude, and out-and-out nasty to me and other speakers over the years that I doubt I will submit any speaker abstracts to them ever again. I most certainly cannot encourage other speakers to do so. In fact, why don’t you go to its website http://www.asse.org/education/pdc/2013/speaker-submission.asp  and submit an abstract telling them to shape up? Let them know in no uncertain terms that they will soon be unable to attract any but the most amateurish speakers.) In fairness, I don’t really blame the ASSE, because much of the conference planning (and associated correspondence) is outsourced to a really crappy conference planning company, but then again, ASSE does continue to use this company year after year.
    In the U.S. a speaker at a safety conference can generally expect the conference to provide one free admission to the conference (so if you have multiple speakers the additional speakers will be expected to pay to attend the conference) and a token of appreciation (typically a nice promotional item with the logo of the organization emblazoned on it). What this means to you as a speaker is that you will likely be required to pay your own airfare, hotel, meals, and ground transportation. In many European (or academic conferences world-wide) you will likely be charged to attend your own speech, a ludicrous business model that generally results in people basically paying to speak. As you grow in popularity, or in my case notoriety, you can expect the organizers to pay your travel expenses and an honorarium, but some of the more arrogant organizations will flatly refuse to even consider doing so no matter how “big” you get. (I know of at least one who expected ex-President Bill Clinton to speak for free—I ask you, how much more exposure does HE need that he would consider doing a speech for a tote bag and a yearly membership to a crappy professional organization?)
    The costs don’t stop there. Some years back I had a paper accepted for presentation at Loss 2010 an international conference presented by the European Federation of Chemical Engineers an organization for which I have the utmost respect. After spending weeks reworking the paper (the peer review committee first asked me to condense six abstracts into one and then to expand one paragraph of that draft into a full paper) it was an onerous process that I did (I actually had to turn down business just to finish in time for their tight deadlines.) During the acceptance process they made it clear that if accepted I would be agreeing to present the paper in person. Traveling to Bruges, Belgium would be costly (about $6,000 u.s.d.) and I would have to turn away another important engagement but I knew this going in, so I really didn’t have a legitimate complaint. Then the organizers sprang it on me: I would not only be expected to pay admission to the conference the price would be almost $2,000 u.s.d.! That was the final straw—my total expenditure would (including the loss of revenue) reach nearly $20,000 u.s.d. I reached out to a dear friend and colleague from Norway who was already planning on attending the conference and he generously agreed to present my paper on my behalf. The organizers were indignant claiming that they had been very clear about their expectation that I would deliver the speech in person and refused to consider anything less. I pulled out. I felt bad, but given the circumstances (they never once mentioned that they expected me to pay for my own speech nor the exorbitant cost) I just couldn’t do it. I have submitted two abstracts for Loss 2013 but have made it very clear that I would not be paying a $2,000 fee to hear myself speak; at my last contact the organizers could not even tell me how much they would be charging attendees because they only calculate the attendance fee after they get a full attendee list (as it was explained to me, they calculate the cost of putting on the conference and then divide it by the number of attendees; it’s absurd, but, I’m told, common practice in many parts of the world.
    If anyone from a European or academic conference is reading this, do yourself a favor and talk to the organizers of the Michigan Safety Conference, SME EASTEC, or the National Safety Council you need a different business model.
  • People Will Steal from You. Last year I spent about six months going back and forth with a conference organizer from a Malaysian company who approached me about doing safety conferences and training in Qatar. The rate he was prepared to pay was substantially lower than my normal fee, but given that he was talking about up to 50 sessions a year the reduced rate seemed justified. After submitting a complete course outline, a bio, photo, multiple iterations of marketing materials, and even some course materials he broke off negotiations. When pressed about it, it was obvious he had no other intent than to trade on my name and materials (market me and then deliver another local speaker at the last minute.) Not only did this cost me money—I had to spend weeks writing and rewriting materials—it damaged my reputation as a speaker.
    A week or so ago I received a similar request from an organizer from the United Arab Emigrates; staffers from Rockford Greene are in negations with them but let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.
  • Don’t Expect Gratitude. In most cases, organizers of professional events are surprisingly grateful that you are donating your time (even in the many cases where I am paid, it is seldom what I command on the private circuit, so even then it is a losing proposition). But in many cases, the organizers seem oblivious to the financial sacrifices a speaker makes to appear at a conference, and some are downright nasty to the speaker. Many organizers seem to forget that people pay to go these conferences to attend speeches and see the latest and greatest developments by visiting exhibitor boots at the expos. Ever been to a conference with crappy speakers and only a couple of vendors? Did you go back? The major differential between a good conference and a bad one is the quality of the speakers and the quality of the exhibitors, and yet many conference organizers act as if they are in a position to abuse speakers, journalists, and exhibitors (I’m looking at you ASSHRA and ASSE organizers) without jeopardizing the quality of their conference.

So Why Do It?

I can’t speak for everyone, but I love speaking at conferences, even the poorly organized ones. And the vast majority of the conferences that I have been invited to participate are excellent. (The organizers of the XIV Semanario Internacional De Seguriad in Lima, Peru treated me better than a rock star.) Speaking at conferences allows me to travel and meet fans of my writing. These events also allow me to showcase topics that other conference organizer may see (or more likely, read about) and pay me to speak at other events. Also, speaking—far more so than writing—allows me to really explore a topic in-depth. Certainly I get tangible marketing benefits and sales opportunities (not as much as many organizers think, but still there are benefits). And finally, and those of you who have seem me speak hopefully can attest to this, anything can happen at one of my live presentations; I guess in the end I am just addicted to the frenetic energy that one can only experience by speaking at a public event. But sadly I will be doing less and less speaking at these conferences because the demand for my private speaking engagements, client commitments, and demands for my writing mean I have to be more judicious in where I speak.The Michigan Safety Conference will always remain near and dear to my heart because that is effectively where I got my start (technically my first speech was at Automation Alley) so I generally agree to speak there annually, but others are going to be tougher decisions.

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by rockfordgreeneinternational on April 22, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by rockfordgreeneinternational on April 22, 2012

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It’s All About Engagement

By Phil La Duke, Rockford Greene Associate and Co-Founder

 

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This week I will be presenting two speeches at the Michigan Safety Conference.  I hope to see some of you there.  For those of you who can’t be there, I am sharing my thoughts on the topic here and on my personal blog, www.philladuke.wordpress.com

“The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.” —J. Paul Getty

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him smart”—Phil La Duke

There’s an old joke that goes, “how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb has to want to be changed.  In some ways, the culture of a company is like that light bulb. It’s great to say that the organization’s view and value of safety has to change, but how do we do that?  And the key is engagement, not motivation. About a year ago, I reviewed the book, Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work: Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles of RESPECT™ by Dr. Paul Marciano in my column in Fabricating and Metalworking magazine.  I described his book as perhaps the most important book on safety of the 21st century and the book isn’t about safety. Dr. Marciano’s work about how to get workers truly engaged transcends organizational development in a general sense and hits a bulls-eye on some points that many of the purveyors of safety culture products miss completely.

As I mention in the review Dr. Marciano did have contact with me as he researched the book, and while my involvement fell far short of anything approaching a contribution, it is fair to say that I was a sympathetic audience to his message. The book itself is a great read and should be required reading in any curriculum that confers a degree or certificate in worker health and safety. Frankly, I recommend that it be a part of any leadership or supervisory skills training. It’s that good. The book is available through Amazon.com but if you buy it directly from Dr. Marciano’s website www.paulmarciano.com and tell him that I referred you he will send you an inscribed version at no extra cost as a favor to me.

According to Marciano, recognition and rewards don’t work chiefly because – and he gives 20 reasons why – the programs focus on changing behaviors and not on engaging employees. People who are motivated change their behaviors to achieve a short-term goal, but they don’t make the lifestyle changes necessary to sustain meaningful results. So while a safety BINGO may change the organizational safety climate, it won’t change things for long, and it won’t bring the kind of transformational change that is necessary for any meaningful advance in worker safety.

The “Why?” Behind the “What?”

To understand why punishment and rewards don’t work you need to understand the difference between engagement and motivation. Yes…engagement is different from motivation. Motivation seeks to manipulate behavior (and can only be successful for a short time) engagement seeks to win the hearts and minds of the individuals such that they marry their own personal success to that of the overall organization. A motivated employee will work hard for a week to win a sales prize, but an engaged employee will work hard every week because working hard is good for the organization, and what’s good for the organization is good for him or her. In terms of safety, a motivated employee will try his or her best to not make mistakes and to pay attention to win a safety BINGO or to get a bonus, but an engaged worker makes working safely and finding ways to make the workplace safer simply because doing so is the right thing to do.  Motivated employees work to achieve goals, engaged employees work to make lasting improvements and cultural shifts.

Snake Oil and Culture Shillers

Having said all that, watch out for people selling “safety snake oil” disguised as engagement; engaging employees is hard work and it takes true leaders to do it. Nobody is going to sell you a magic bullet that will suddenly engage your workforce, but plenty of the pundits will try.  Now that “safety culture” is all the rage there are plenty of people who are trying to sell “culture change solutions” even though they just aren’t qualified to make the claims they do.

Why engage employees? Simple, they work as if they own the companies and make decisions based on what they think is right not what will win the Safety BINGO, or get their name on the Safety plaque, or even what gets them that bonus of no lost work days.  Engaged employees make the difference between cultures that value safety and those that don’t.

At the root of employee engagement are trust and knowledge.  Engaged employees must be able to trust that the relationship is reciprocal—a smart employee won’t work for the companies interests for long if he or she thinks that the company’s interests conflict with his or her own.  Similarly, a worker cannot truly become engaged if he or she lacks a basic understanding of how the organization’s business model works.  Engaging employees is impossible without a solid talent development and industrial learning effort is in place and effective.  Workers must understand the corporate goals and vision if they can ever be expected to embrace and support them.

What’s at here stake is more than just worker safety.  In the increasingly volatile and competitive business environment only those companies who are successful in attracting and retaining the best talent will be successful and a key to retaining talent will be in the organization’s ability to engage workers.  I won’t try to explain too much of Dr. Paul Marciano’s work here—the book is well written and accessible to us non-PhDs so I would recommend you picking up at least two copies (once someone borrows your copy you will never get it back so buy two.)

It amounts to this: If you want to foster a culture in which individuals value worker safety, you must build an environment of trust and learning. There are no short cuts, no magic bullets, and no bag of tricks that will take you there. You must work hard and stay focused to achieve it.

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by rockfordgreeneinternational on April 14, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by rockfordgreeneinternational on April 14, 2012

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Moving Beyond Compliance

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Image courtesy of http://www.blurgroup.com/blog/more-regulations-mean-creativity-will-flourish

By Phil La Duke

Continued from www.philladuke.wordpress.com

Before continuing posts relative to  W. Edward Deming’s 14 Points and how they apply to safety, I decided I would explore in more depth my own 14 Points for safety.  As many of you know in addition to making weekly (some would argue weakly) posts to the Rockford Greene International blog I also post to my own personal blog (www.philladuke.wordpress.com). This week I’m doing cross over posts that start on my personal blog and continue here; so if you are reading this you might want to start by reading part one which is posted on my personal blog/

My second point,  “move beyond compliance” grew out of my years of trying to sell safety to people who really needed my help but would rebuff my sales overtures by telling my about how wonderfully compliant they already are.

The VPP Myth

In the U.S. the Occupational Safety Health Administration has created the Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) According to its website OSHA describes the VPP as recognizing “employers and workers in the private industry and federal agencies who have implemented effective safety and health management systems and maintain injury and illness rates below national Bureau of Labor Statistics averages for their respective industries. In VPP, management, labor, and OSHA work cooperatively and proactively to prevent fatalities, injuries, and illnesses through a system focused on: hazard prevention and control; worksite analysis; training; and management commitment and worker involvement. To participate, employers must submit an application to OSHA and undergo a rigorous onsite evaluation by a team of safety and health professionals. Union support is required for applicants represented by a bargaining unit. VPP participants are re-evaluated every three to five years to remain in the programs. VPP participants are exempt from OSHA programmed inspections while they maintain their VPP status.”

While companies who have achieved VPP (for the purposes of this work we will treat VPP as synonymous with its equivalents across the globe) can be proud of the accomplishment far too many see this designation as proof positive that they are “injury proof”  and nothing could be further from the truth. In some cases, VPP designation is used by Operations leadership as the rationale for cutting safety budgets and resources.  In the mind of far too many leaders—both Operations and Safety—recognition of compliance equals safety or at very least “safe enough”.

Certainly compliance with the government regulations is important and compliance tends to correlate to a process that is in control, which in turn correlates positively to less risk. But we can never mistake being compliant with being safe.

Compliance is meant to reduce our risk, but in an environment where business actively seeks to reduce government regulations, and where companies are quick to export jobs to municipalities with much looser regulations we cannot equate compliance with safety.  Also, even the most highly regulated areas typically have fairly antiquated and general standards of safety. The regulations are a hodgepodge of industry regulations, general occupational standards, and environmental protections and lack the cohesiveness can create problems that are difficult for the safety professional to foresee.

A Compliance Impedes A Safety Culture

The compliance mentality also has implications for how the organization places value on safety.  Companies with a compliance mentality tend to tell workers that they are implementing safety procedures not because it is the right thing to do but because they are required to do so by law.  These companies tend to grumble that the laws are getting in the way of doing business and this disrespect for safety tends to carry over and affect the way the rank and file view safety as they do their jobs. The deliberate lack of compliance creates a climate of risk that will ultimately result in serious injury.

Safety Begins With Compliance

No organization can expect to be safe while flouting safety regulations.  Compliance with safety regulations is the first step to becoming a world-class safety organization, but it is only the first step toward a long and difficult journey. Once an organization has created an environment where compliance with safety regulations is a non-negotiable it can mature into an organization that ultimately hardwires safety into all that it does.

Compliance Is Not Enough

Complying with safety law isn’t enough to keep workers safe.  No one has ever been saved because the fire extinguishers were properly hung at the right height or because the evacuation route was hung in the break room. Even so, following these rules are important and symbolize a greater commitment to safety than these activities offer in way of actual protection.

While compliance with safety regulations is essential it is only one of many elements of a larger safety system.  Organizations that are satisfied with merely complying with regulations (over keeping workers safe) will always squeak by with the cheapest, easiest solutions and move their facilities to the countries with the slackest requirements, most lenient enforcement, and most corruptible officials.

Compliance is a fundamental element of any safety management system, but it is only a foundation.  Unless the organization builds on this foundation to create a safety management system that anticipates emerging issues and acts before it is required to do so by law it will always have an impotent safety process in which safety is always an after thought.

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by rockfordgreeneinternational on April 7, 2012  •  Permalink
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