Does putting safety first send the wrong message to our organization? Part 2

Culture Change

One of the fundamental breakthroughs a company should realize is that the very same leadership and management skills used in achieving outstanding production, quality and cost could deliver similar results for health and safety. In other words, managers do have the skills to achieve health and safety excellence. They either do not see it that way or they do not see health and safety lending itself to the management systems they use for production, quality and cost.

When health and safety managers finally get the ear of senior management, they rarely choose to communicate in the language of the customer. Instead, they talk about job safety analysis, incident investigations, lost workday cases, OSHA incidence rates, etc. Certainly, all of these have their place, but the manager’s impression at this point is usually: That skill set is not part of my knowledge base. As a result, they reject their ownership role for health and safety. After all, their expertise is achieving production, quality and cost objectives, not health and safety.

Management needs to be taught, or convinced, that safety is not first but rather an equal held to the same level as production, quality and cost. More importantly, they need to be convinced that those same skills they use to achieve production, quality and cost will work in achieving health and safety results.

Steps to Accountability

How do we get management enrolled in the safety process to the extent they own it and lead it? Let’s break this task down into four steps:

1) Get off the Safety First kick if that is your current mind-set.

Instead, find out what the top two to four objectives of your enterprise are. It is a good bet that production, quality or cost will have a presence, but there could be others.

2) Adopt a system to approach safety.

Do not approach safety as a problem to be solved. Be proactive and don’t focus on lagging measures such as safety performance.  Instead, build a management systems approach that has the same elements used to achieve the most important objectives of your enterprise.  Develop a system that focuses on leading edge measures such as:

·        Defined objectives for health and safety established by senior management.

·        Significant management and employee involvement.

·        Establish goals and action plans.

·        Job safety analysis.

·        Training.

·        Performance and results tracking.

When you proactively develop the elements of your system, you have a before the fact system that drives continuous improvement, not an after the fact system focusing on solving the problem of the day.

3. Get management/supervisor buy-in that safety is one of the top objectives of your company.

Meet and share your observation’s that safety need not be first but should be of equal rank to the other two to four top objectives of your company.

For example, assume productivity is one of the key business objectives. Show how improved safety can positively impact productivity and by illustrating the impact when a serious, or even a minor, injury occurs. This can be demonstrated by calculating the impact of indirect cost’s on your balance sheet by illustrating what the company needs to produce in sales to offset the direct claim cost.  This is an eye opener for many managers.   

4. Create the Culture.

Now that have their attention, your job is to train them on how they can apply their management and leadership skills in deploying and executing your management systems approach for safety.  Facilitate their linkage with safety and help them see that their primary roles are to:

·        Set the EXPECTATIONS for the entire organization.

·        COMMUNICATE these expectations to the organization. 

·        Demonstrate management COMMITMENT to these expectations.

·        Provide reasonable RESOURCES to succeed.

·        Create ACCOUNTABILITY standards.

·        COLLABORATE with employees and REWARD progress and performance.

Safety management is a process based on a systematic approach to achieving identifiable objectives. Second, the fundamental role of a management is to communicate, demonstrate and commit to expectations.  Lastly, to accomplish this, provide the resources, audit and implement accountability standards and recognize/reward progress and performance. All this comes together when your THREE SIXTY SAFETY approach is not first but equal to the other organizational objectives.