The Outovator’s Guide to Building a Safety Culture: Part 1 - Introduction
“Over a period of 13 years, the “safe company index” returns were 333 percent. By contrast, over that same period the S&P 500 returned 105 percent. That showed a significant outperformance by the safe companies to the tune of nearly three times.” — Jason Dia in EHS Today
The Journey Ahead: Building a Behavior-Based Safety Culture
In 2018, I began a journey to codify the main principles of building a behavior-based safety culture. That process stemmed from my work with Fiber Materials, Inc. (FMI), a company which provided me with considerable freedom to help them transform from a company that appreciated safety into one with a strong and vibrant safety culture – a culture that positively impacted many aspects of the business beyond just safety.
While at FMI, I worked in concert with the Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) team, a group of smart, accomplished individuals who had a willingness to learn and listen to meaningful feedback. That collaboration built on my past training and experiences as an operator helped me codify and document a set of best practices for companies around the world to refer to when developing and implementing a behavior-based safety culture. The approach is also leveraged during the due diligence period for acquisition targets.
To be honest, this process wasn’t always easy or simple. Over the course of my career, I’ve worked for—and with—many multinational companies with operations across dozens of different countries and cultures. What I found was a wide range of safety performance standards. At one end of the spectrum, I found an extreme focus on production performance metrics and delivery deadlines that inevitably led to mistakes, which not only cost the company money but sometimes resulted in employees losing a finger, a leg or even their life. At the other end of the spectrum, I found companies with excellent safety metrics and classical safety “systems;” however, even at companies with an excellent safety record I was often stunned by the absence of a genuine safety culture.
And as we know: Culture trumps everything.
Renewed emphasis on safety and safety culture is especially important now for five reasons:
First, disrupted global supply chains are forcing more locally based manufacturing, resulting in individuals utilizing manufacturing processes that are unfamiliar or may not have been used for some years.
Second, as COVID-19 restrictions were lifted and workers returned to factories and workplaces, there was a risk that workers may have forgotten safety habits and skills.
Third, employees seeking a deeper engagement with the organization, including the creation of an empowering culture.
Fourth, an increasing number of experienced workforce members have left the workplace for multiple reasons (COVID-19, great resignation) creating a loss of critical organizational memory around safety culture
Finally, and most importantly, the culture transformation (which begins in the safety area) swiftly transcends into all parts of the business, thereby unleashing the creative potential of our employees.
Implementing a behavior-based safety culture starts with engaging and relevant training that introduces and explains the concepts of the program – in particular the iceberg model and its ramifications on leading indicators. Training may start in a traditional classroom or meeting room but eventually the best training shifts to on-location modules within the working space.
Safety culture transformation at its core relies on two ideas:
First, for each accident logged, there are hundreds of unsafe conditions and dozens of near misses which are usually not reported; and
Second, swift, focused, positive reinforcement (for employees who identify these small unsafe conditions) is proven to significantly alter worker behavior and result in a personal responsibility of ensuring a safe work environment.
A safety culture also comes with the ability to critique and improve the safety performance of any employee, regardless of position or status. While it might be fun to “catch” a senior manager doing something that could result in harm, imagine how the employee will feel when he or she corrects the senior manager’s behavior and is then thanked publicly for their concern, rather than being afraid to speak up in the first place. In such cases, I have personally experienced CEOs go out of their way to show respect to the employee who called them out and praised the person for their commitment to caring for colleagues. The impact on organizational culture is very visible.
What if any company, regardless of size or resources, could empower employees to self-report unsafe conditions and near-misses without the fear of retaliation?
What if the employees were rewarded for reporting such risks?
What if self-reporting was linked with a positive impact for their families who are often affected following even a minor accident or incident?
Practicing these ideas repeatedly enables the cultural transformation. Rewarding employees with praise and gratitude for sharing their concerns helps leaders take the first step toward building a resilient, behavior-based safety culture able to withstand not just routine issues, but to also overcome the unexpected crisis. And, once employees feel empowered about safety, they become encouraged to make bold recommendations and suggest improvements in other areas, such as production scheduling, quality control and standards, and product innovation. Continuous improvement habits slowly develop which results in a culture that delivers a win for the company, for customers, for employees and for other stakeholders, such as neighbors and suppliers.
Adding positive, emotional drivers to a required change increases the chance of the change becoming permanent. Simple changes, such as adding photos of an employee’s family in addition to production metrics on walls across the manufacturing area, can serve as a reminder to work safe—and reminds others to do the same, too! We will explore how this is done at “best in class” companies.
What are most companies missing? Why are more companies not leveraging a safety-based culture?
Culture always starts at the top. The truth is many leaders (including board members) look only to the trailing statistics of their monthly safety reports to determine their safety success. If the accident rate is below their target or the average for their industry, they quickly move to other topics. When it comes to safety, it’s always all hands-on deck; but, with leadership, empathy, and a little creativity to motivate and engage employees, you’ll be well on your way to an inclusive behavior-based safety culture across the organization.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll be publishing a series of thought-provoking articles talking about this new kind of human due diligence, a way to show business leaders how a safety strategy that marries the head and the heart can—and will—deliver to top- and bottom-line growth.
We will start by looking deeper at the payback from such activity (Article 2). Then, we will move on to drawing an analogy with building a safety house with five levels (Article 3). As we build the “safety house” we will leverage seven tools (Articles 4-6), and will then get into the details (Articles 7-11). Finally, we will review case studies featuring experiences from actual companies (Article 12).
I hope you’ll join me on this journey. And please, share your comments with me so we can take this journey together!