You’ve been working hard to boost safety awareness and engagement in your workplace. You consider OSHA standards to be the bare minimum of compliance. And your injury stats are headed in the right direction. But it’s still not enough. How do you kick safety and health up to the next level?
Robert Pater, founder and managing director of Strategic Safety Associates of Portland, Oregon, likes to quote Albert Einstein: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Doing what you’ve always done is not the path to breakthrough safety performance. Next level safety culture requires an alignment of strategy, communications, and actions.
“My biggest mission when I work with safety professionals,” says Pater, “is to get them to try something new. If you don’t try something new, you’re not going to get new results.”
Pater and his team have put that philosophy to work in companies in 60 countries. Clients include Honda, Johnson & Johnson, Amtrak, DuPont, and Harley-Davidson. Some of those clients have experienced dramatic results, including an 80 percent reduction in injuries.
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What to Do
How do you create an environment that encourages breakthrough safety performance? The key is a deliberate move toward a high-level safety culture. For Pater, this means an environment in which employees have internalized safety. It’s part of who they are and how they behave.
Workers in these environments avoid risks not because someone tells them to, but rather because they know the consequences and avoiding those consequences is inherent in the way they work. They work safely not because someone is watching them, but because they know what’s at stake.
In such organizations, the emphasis is on leading indicators such as engagement, self-monitoring, and building a spirit of trust between management and workers. Trailing indicators like injury and illness statistics are de-emphasized.
Pater quotes one client, the CEO of an oil tank company, who says the most important leading indicator is “the quality of safety conversations” throughout the facility. Involvement and participation in safety meetings are measured with the expectation that leaders talk least and rank and file workers talk most.
Support and Involvement
The best safety managers support rather than threaten, says Pater. Instead of issuing dire pronouncements about the dreadful consequences of not wearing PPE, for example, they get employees involved in decisions about protective gear. Workers examine and fit test various options and share their opinions about what works best, knowing their opinions matter.
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Safe behavior becomes a habit that extends to every aspect of a worker’s life. In an advanced safety culture, workers approach process equipment on the job in the same way they handle hunting and fishing gear and power tools at home—with understanding and respect for risk.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk more about breakthrough safety performance and tell you about critical elements required to achieve high-level safety results.
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