The Outovator’s Guide to Building a Safety Culture: Part 2 - Benefits
A behavior-based safety culture saves lives, saves money—and empowers employees!
Direct benefits of a behavior-based safety culture include reduced operational costs from lost-time accidents, fewer worker’s compensation claims, and a noticeable drop in accident and incident investigations. These operational savings can be as high as one percent of the entire sales of the organization.
Indirect benefits are focused on having a more engaged employee culture, reduced turnover, and a more engaged workforce who are empowered to share new ways of working. In fact, the list goes on and on! Although it’s sometimes difficult to quantify, each indirect benefit positively impacts overall financials far more than the more obvious direct benefits.
My personal experience in large multinationals, in small family firms, and in private equity portfolio companies, suggests that building a behavior-based safety culture is an investment that will empower employees, directly improve an organization’s financial performance, and reduce operation costs while ultimately saving lives!
I hope you are now sufficiently motivated to get started on your behavior-based safety culture journey!
So, where does one start? It starts at the top!
When leaders have an absolute commitment to the physical and psychological safety of employees (and other stakeholders), they build an incredibly valuable bridge of trust between the board, the C-Suite, and the shop floor. By providing a framework and best practices for a behavior-based safety culture, built on a foundation of environmental, health and safety, leaders visibly demonstrate the authentic values of the company.
In any organization, culture change starts at the top, from the Board to the CEO and to the C-suite, and then out into the broader organization. However, the senior leadership team must have a genuine, empathetic desire to ensure the physical and psychological safety of the employees. Those same executives must ensure engagement with employees at every level, devote adequate time to discuss and understand the consequences and expectations of employees, and get a feel for how employees can co-own those effective communications, behaviors, and actions.
Start by engaging in open, two-way conversations with members of your senior leadership team. Please discuss in-depth, three separate but connected topics:
Physical safety and accident statistics (trailing metrics),
Psychological safety and
Safety culture (combination of attitudes, values, and perceptions).
Understand their thoughts and gauge their personal commitment to the process. Share how safety (and a safety culture) will benefit them personally, not just in the company, but also at home. Less accidents, reduced costs and more empowerment means less stress! Some companies even reach out to families of the senior leadership team to share their experiences on how a behavior-based safety culture can make for a happier and healthier home.
These deep conversations will help the senior leader realize whether the senior leadership team is ready for a cultural safety transformation and is willing to invest leadership energy. If they are not ready, please slow down, make the time to train and discuss, and then help bring together the senior leadership team before launching a major new initiative.
If the management team needs more time, work with them and together complete the detailed spreadsheet of questions (shared in the upcoming Article 3). Have them first read through this series of articles, and the associated references. Then gather them back (in a few weeks) and reassess their willingness and/or readiness to proceed. If you need all the articles at once and canot wait for them to be published please request a copy.
We are all in this together. Only by sharing knowledge and experience can we say we have done everything in our power to prevent employees from being injured, and we have empowered them to be the best they can become. It is a firm promise behind everything we do and who we are as a company and a culture, and it is good business (direct financial impact).
In this article, I have tried to convince you of the many benefits of a behavior-based safety culture. In the next article, we will frame the journey as an analogy to building a house.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll be adding thought-provoking articles to provide leadership with what I’ve learned along the way. I hope you’ll join me on this journey and share your comments so we can continue the discussion!