The Rise of The Safety Extremist

By Phil La Duke

 

“’Isms’ in my opinion are not good”
—Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off 

fa·nat·ic (fuh-nat-ik) noun

1. a person with an extreme and uncritical enthusiasm or zeal, as in religion or politics.

ex·trem·ist (ik-stree-mist) noun

1. a person who goes to extremes, especially in political matters.
2. a supporter or advocate of extreme doctrines or practices.

I write provocative material.  I deliberately try to elicit a visceral response and take people to a place where they can explore their deepest held beliefs and question basic ideologies of safety. The latest in neuroscience suggests that our decisions or made and our ability to change reside deep in our subconscious beneath our defenses. When something strikes a nerve at that level it can be difficult to  have a rational conversation, but in general, if one can at least reconsider one’s belief set maybe its worth it.

Why is it important to reexamine our deepest held beliefs? Because the world is a dynamic place and if our beliefs are static we become increasingly out of touch.  If we cling blindly to our beliefs and lash out to anyone who threatens our worldview then we run the risk of becoming completely and dangerously out of touch with the realities of your profession and become a useless relic.  That should be career suicide, but sadly even the most out of touch hacks can usually find work based on their years and years of experience.  But what good is 40.2 years of experience if that experience consists chiefly of self-congratulatory affirmations and retreads of theories that are a century old.

Not that every new idea is a good one.  There is as much crap spewed by the idea d’jour pundits today as there ever has been. And just because an idea or theory is new doesn’t make it any better than conventional wisdom, but it’s important that any professional consider new ideas and emerging thought with an open mind.

That’s getting tougher and tougher to do in safety, owing to the rise in extremist thought in safety. The merest suggestion that we discard a safety truism is likely to to create nothing short of a public out rage.  Take for instance the response to Heinrich’s Pyramid.  A recent thread on the social networking site LinkedIn elicited 3,186 comments ranging from the intellectually bantering to the crackpot personal attacks. The thread quoted a recent assertion by EHS Today:

“Heinrich’s assertion that 88% of accidents are the result of unsafe acts has been dismissed as something he just made up. There was no research behind it whatsoever. “ and asked the simple question “What’s your opinion? And why?”

According to a recent article by Ashley Johnson in H+S Magazine a poll the magazine conducted found that 86% of respondents believed either completely or somewhat in Heinrich’s theories, while another 10% reporting that they weren’t familiar with Heinrich’s theories.  The article is a scathing indictment of Heinrich’s theories from experts who question his methods, his conclusions, and generally speaking nearly everything had to say.  The article was balanced by a half-hearted defense that the numbers were never meant to be statistical predictors (the were, by the way) and that Heinrich never blamed the workers (he did. In fact Heinrich was a devotee of eugenics and believed that one’s race and ethnicity played a factor in the likelihood that a worker would be injured or cause an injury to other.)

The What does this all have to do with extremism? Plenty.  This demonstrates that  despite a growing body of evidence that deeply held belief will hold sway.  This in itself is not extremism, but it does create an environment where extremists thrive.  Why do people cling to beliefs that are refuted (there are still people who deeply believe in fake photos and film footage of the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot, even though the perpetrators of these hoaxes[1])? People tend to want to believe in what they’re doing and when people chip away at the foundation.

Its not just the Heinrich supporters who will lash out against any suggestion that doesn’t support their world view.  If you don’t believe me just publish something critical about Behavior Based Safety.  Within hours extremists and fanatics will marshal their forces and begin attacking you.  The problem has grown to such an extent that several editors of leading safety magazines actively avoid the debate more out of a desire to avoid arguing with fanatics than out of fear or intimidation.  But intimidation of the press is a goal of extremists everywhere —from Al Quida to the Ku Klux Klan to the Neo Nazis to the safety extremists—is to discredit, attack, intimidate, and generally silence the media which, if it is truly unbiased—will never buy there bill of goods.

Extremism Is Rooted In Fear

Let’s suppose you have 40.2 years of experience in safety where you served with distinction, and someone comes along and asserts something contrary to the foundation on which your entire experience is predicated.  What happens to your credentials and accomplishments and very identity as a safety professional when all on which it is built crumbles? People will protect their beliefs with a wildness typically reserved for mother grizzlies defending their cubs; they will make ugly personal attacks and seek to gather together like-minded souls close to them.

Extremism Loves Company

Social networking sites make it easy to reach out to a world of people. Some credit social networking with ushering in Arab Spring, but it also has a darker side.  Social Networking affords us the opportunity for the fanatics to get their ideas out to a sympathetic ear. Unfortunately, when it comes to safety, people are dying in the workplace while crackpots are postulating theories that are given equal weight with responsible theorists in safety.  I will leave the readers to decide which slide of the equation on which I fall.

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[1] I’m speaking of the most famous loch ness monster photo and the actual film footage of a reputed big foot. The very people who first produced them convincingly disproved both of these.  If you want to believe in the Loch Ness monster or Big Foot God bless you, but what was the most compelling evidence has been disproven. And don’t even get me started on crop circles.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, closed-minded safety professionals, Criticisms of BBS, Criticisms of Heinrich's Pyramid, extremism, Heinrich Pyramid, organizational change

Misleading Indicators

“If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know you aren’t already there?”

By Phil La Duke

Nearly every safety professional worth his or her salt has been told that he or she needs to look at both leading and lagging indicators; it’s good advice, in fact, it’s advice I’ve given many times in articles and speeches over the years.  But in my last post (two weeks ago—I spent the last week at a customer site and with the travel travails I just couldn’t bring myself to hammer out a post, deepest apologies to my fans and detractors alike) I questioned the value of tracking (not reporting or investigating, mind you, just tracking) near misses.  Well, as you can imagine the weirdoes, fanatics, and dullards came out in droves to sound off and huff and puff about things I never said (reading comprehension skills are at a disgraceful low these days).  Not everyone one who reads my stuff is a whack-job however, and some of the cooler heads insisted that tracking near misses was important because near miss reporting is a key leading indicator; it’s not…and it is, but like so much of life, it’s complicated.

Near misses in themselves aren’t leading indicators; they are things that almost killed or injured someone, and most importantly, they are events that happened in the past.  Not that anything that happens in the past has to be automatically counted out as a lagging indicator, but unless you still cling to the idea proffered by Heinrich that there is a strict statistical correlation between the number of near misses and fatalities, near misses are no more a leading indicator than your injury rate, lost work days, or first aid cases.  They simply tell you that something almost happened, and nothing more.  Now some of you might try to argue that if you have ENOUGH near misses you are bound to eventually have a fatality, but that does hold up to careful scrutiny.  Leading indicators are often expressions of probability, and like the proverbial coin that is tossed an infinite number of times, the probability of the outcome does not change because of the frequency of the toss.  If you were to toss the coin 400 times and it came up tails, the probability that the 401^st toss would come up heads is still 50:50. So knowing that tracking near misses doesn’t really shed any light on what is likely to happen mean we should stop investigating near misses? Certainly not, but we really do need to stop thinking that the data is telling us things that it isn’t.  On the other hand, near miss reporting is indeed a leading indicator; if we accept (as I do) that when people report near misses they: a) are more actively engaged in safety day-to-day (and I suppose someone could argue that this doesn’t necessarily correlate) and b) the more the individual reports near misses the better he or she is at identifying hazards (again, this is a leap of faith, but  I believe in most cases this to be true.) So if you want to gage the robustness of your safety process I suppose the level of participation in near miss reporting is a good indicator.

The whole exercise got me thinking about indicators, and how often safety professionals (and everyone else on God’s green Earth for that matter) tend to be mislead by data because of the erroneous belief that the data is saying things that it isn’t.

Causefusion

Regular readers of my blog will recognize the concept of “causefusion”.  The term was coined by Zachery Shore in his book, Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions which he uses to explain how people mistake correlation and cause-and-effect.  According to Shore, causefusion works something like this[1]: People who floss their teeth live longer than people who don’t floss or who floss irregularly therefore flossing your teeth makes you live longer.  It makes sense, right? Yes, except that it is wrong.  There are other possibilities for this correlation, for instance, isn’t it possible that people who are more interested in their health overall might be more likely to floss regularly? In a world where eager safety professionals provide data to Operations people who are hungry for quick fixes, Causefusion happens a lot; and it’s a real danger because it leads us away from the true causes of injuries and may blind us to real shortcomings in our processes.

Another way that we can be lead by indicators is the paradigm effect. When we think of the word “paradigm” we think of the definition, “a typical example” or “viewpoint”, but in the world of science paradigm there is another, lesser known definition, “a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject” Joel Barker pointed out how damaging paradigms (in the scientific sense) can be.  Barker believed that there were many instances where the worldview is so powerfully believed that any new evidence that does not support the worldview is ignored. Consider the dangers of ignoring critical new information relative to worker safety because you believe in a particular tool or methodology so strongly that you can’t even consider another viewpoint.

A third way that we mislead ourselves is when we see patterns that aren’t there.  This phenomena is wonderfully described in another book that I really believe is important to the world of safety, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average by Joseph T. Hallinan. According to Hallinan—and the latest in brain research supports his contention—the human brain tends to see patterns even where there are none.  So in cases where safety professionals desperately seek answers and are under pressure to initiate action, the pressure to see patterns where there are none can be extreme.

Perhaps the most misleading indicator is one of the most common: zero recordables.  Too often safety professionals (and operations, as well, for that matter) see a trend of recordables as evidence that they are at far less risk of injuries and fatalities than they are.  This isn’t to say that they AREN’T at less risk, but there isn’t anything more than a correlation between the two elements; they might be good but they are just as likely to be lucky.

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[1] The example is mine and mine alone, don’t get all huffy and bother Shore.

Filed under: Loss Prevention, Loss Prevention, Near Miss Reporting, Performance Improvement, Phil La Duke, Safety, Worker Safety, lagging indicators, leading indicators, measuring safety, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, predicting injuries, safety measures, Worker Safety

Safety: We Can’t Apply Static Solutions to Dynamic Environments

 

By Phil La Duke

“I’m over the hill, I know it, but it CAN happen to you. Every year you get a little older and a little slower; it happens to everyone.”

—Butch Cassidy to the Sundance Kid,
Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid

One of the most difficult things associated with creating a safe workplace is that the workplace keeps changing, and—at least in many organizations—our safety solutions don’t. Some of you are reading this and already throwing up defenses.  Of course safety changes, after all we do Job Safety Analysis on tasks where an engineering change has been made, we review our safety policies annually, and we do continuous improvement workshops designed to make the workplace safer. It’s fair argument but too often the pace of change outstrips the organization’s ability to update—and indeed sometimes overhaul—it’s approach to safety.

The workplace—any workplace—is continuously changing: bearing wear out, lanyards fray, people get older and everything, and I mean everything, is grinding it’s way toward the end of its useful life.

But our safety strategies seldom acknowledge or address the magnitude of variation in our system. In many respects, safety is a static solution to a dynamic problem and that can be dangerous.  If our policies, procedures, and controls are designed to protect us from a static problem but that problem is dynamic the very measures designed to protect us may not only fail to do so but may in fact subject us to greater danger.

The problem is difficult to manage and far from limited to safety; all of the SQDCME are effected by this constant march to mortality, and because the problem isn’t exclusive to safety we can leverage tools from other disciplines, not only does that help us manage the problem, but it helps us to forge bonds and make in-roads into the other functions and these may prove to serve us well when we need to enlist their help.

TPM

The first, and potentially the most useful, tool at our disposal is Total Productive Maintenance or TPM as it is commonly called. TPM was created in Japan in the early 1970’s to improve machine reliability by anticipating maintenance needs and planning maintenance before originated in Japan in 1971 as a method for improved machine availability through better utilization of maintenance and production resources. TPM is operator focused rather than maintenance focused and operators are expected to make basic checks of the worthiness of their equipment according to a carefully designed schedule.  The idea driving TPM is that the operator knows the equipment better than anyone and can tell, almost intuitively when a machine is about to malfunction. I use the word “malfunction” instead of “breakdown” because in this instance context, that of TPM, the operator should be so in sync with the equipment that he or she knows that something is amiss long before it actually breaks down.  A good analogy, or at least one I think many to which many of us can relate is driving our car.  We know when something is wrong by the way it steers, whether or not the brakes feel soft, if it is making a funny noise, or something doesn’t smell quite right. We are far more capable of knowing that something is wrong even if a mechanic is more qualified to identify the cause of the problem and repair it.  Anyone who owns an automobile or major appliance probably knows that it is generally cheaper and more effective to keep the equipment running well than it is to pay to have it repaired once it has broken down.  This goes deeper than simple preventive maintenance, but also speaks to how the equipment is used (To continue the analogy—from not overloading a washing machine or driving a car in a way that protects the transmission or engine.)

5S

Another useful tool safety can leverage is 5S.  I’ve written extensively on how 5S relates to safety, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here.  In general terms 5S is another Japanese methodology for making the workplace more efficient.  In the original Japanese, 5S used five words that each began with the letter S (seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, and shitsuke) but because there is no direct translation you will tend to see variation in the exact words (so nitpickers looking to find fault will be disappointed here) used as English equivalents.  Perhaps the most common are: Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain. Some companies have added “safety” to the mix but it really isn’t necessary since the 5S activities will nearly always result in a safer workplace. In broad strokes the continual nature of 5S makes it an ideal tool for managing the ever-present changes that are going on in the workplace. Sorting materials and tools not only make it easy to keep excess stock from accumulating in, and blocking, exits, pedestrian walk-ways, and aisles, but it also helps reduce damage to dunnage and tools which otherwise might cause injury. Setting in order (sometimes called “straightening”) helps us to continually check the condition of our tools, workflows, and facilities. Shining, and people often scoff at the idea of scrubbing down the work surfaces until they sparkle but, at least in my experience, it really helps.  Clean floors, tools and work services eliminate trip hazards, and can expose previously hidden hazards like frayed wires, and damaged walking surfaces. Standardizing helps ensure that procedures are in place and up to date and may also ensure that chemicals are properly stored, flammables are in appropriate cabinets and so on. But the final S, Sustain, lies at the heart of addressing the dynamic work environment. Only through continual sustainment efforts can we hope to create a dynamic solution.

There are certainly other tools that can help the safety professional to build dynamic approaches to the ever deteriorating and degrading workplace but to some extent safety professionals need to seek out the tools and solutions that best fit their industry, their segment, and their organization.

Filed under: Safety, managing safety dynamically, process degradation, Safety, Worker Safety

Tilting At Windmills: The Madness of Near Miss Reporting

By Phil La Duke

 

 “There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.”

― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

 

Perhaps the quickest and surest way to lose credibility with workers, if not the entire organization is to ask for information and then do nothing with it. Ask a worker for a suggestion for making the workplace safer and then (at least seemingly in the eyes of the worker) ignoring it, or dissecting it to the point that everyone has long since caring about it.

Collecting data for collection’s sake happens a lot in worker safety.  We love to gather information, hoard it, report it, and sometimes even analyze it. The unrelenting pursuit for near miss reporting is the great white whale that compels otherwise sane and reasonable safety professionals to a fool’s errand, the Seven Cities of Cibola of safety just out of grasp and wanted so desperately by safety professionals.  Why?

Recently I was discussing the latest retread of Heinrich’s Pyramid with a handful of overly academic and painfully earnest theoreticians who work ostensibly in the service of safety. The subject at hand, a crudely scrawled graphic of an iceberg splattered with PowerPointless mental salver, as if some virtual vandal had tagged it with inane graffiti.

The pictograph in question is the new metaphor for teaching the great unwashed the relationship between the number of hazards, first aid cases, recordable incidents, serious injuries, and fatalities. It’s another, “no kiddin’?”, ” hit ‘em over the head” condescension that safety autocrats trot out every so often to demonstrate how much smarter they are than the “ordinary” mortals of the shops, warehouses, wards, mills, mines, and shipping docks, who pushed to it, would admit that they care not one whit about the theories of safety.  Most workers would rather not die horribly in the workplace; that’s their primary concern safety theory, for them is just a lot of hot air from a lot of people who don’t work all that hard for a living.

The injury berg is more a cautionary tale about the unfettered access of safety professionals to clip art, than any useful or meaningful tool.  Hey safety professionals, listen up: we get it: if there are enough hidden hazards eventually someone will die. Well not really, it’s all about probability and if we’re going to talk about probability, we had ought spend a moment acknowledging that most of us (statistically speaking) won’t die in the workplace.

But this particular graphic abomination belies one of the most foolish pursuits in the world of safetydom: near miss reporting. On the surface, near miss reporting seems like a noble pursuit, but it is as misguided as Ponce D’Leon who might have gone down in history as a great explorer like Drake, or DeSoto, or Marquette, but instead became synonymous with a fool chasing after a ridiculous faerie tale. 

I should pause here and allow time for shouts of “heretic” and “blasphemer” among the safety true blue.  Near miss reporting is as cherished a part of a safety management system as injury reporting or root cause analysis. We take it for granted that in not gathering information on near miss reporting we are missing a crucial part of the safety puzzle. How can we reduce risk without reporting near misses?  Near miss reporting is a relic and we need to abandon it, at least in its current form.

Why? Don’t we want information on our near misses? Doesn’t a near miss portend a mystical connection between mishaps and gruesome fatalities? In fact, it doesn’t at; least not very often. Even though many in the safety community are coming to realize that safety is a complex system and that there isn’t necessarily a continuum on which a near miss is just a failed fatality.  Recent research has shown (look it up) that there really isn’t a statistical correlation between near misses and recordable incidents or fatalities.  They often have significantly different causes and since they originate from disparate sources the supposition that spending precious resources investigating near misses is likely to magically prevent fatalities is forced.

Near Miss Reporting Serves No Good End

If we accept Heinrich’s Pyramid or Nameless Goofball’s iceberg there will be a 300 (or more) to 1 ratio of recordables to first aid, and another 300:1 ration of first aid cases to near misses, so we have 9000 near misses (and don’t get hung up on the ratios—they’ve all been largely disproved (or at least called into question) so if you are going to try to shout me down by dying on that particular hill I should warn you, I’m not taking the bait.  So pick your poison, in any scenario you are likely to conclude that there are anywhere from tens of thousands to several million near misses that are happening in your workplace annually. Let us assume that tomorrow everyone reported every near miss.  Far from being a coup d’ gras for safety, few organizations are equipped to deal with this influx of information.  It cannot be processed so we can’t do anything with it.  Near miss reporting, if successful rapidly collapses under it’s own weight.  What’s worse if we asked for this information and people provided it in good faith. Yet again, we asked workers for information and then did nothing of value with it.

A Near Miss is Not A Near Miss

A big problem with near miss reporting is it creates another category of information that sounds like a logical grouping when it is nothing of the sort. A near miss that results in someone almost tripping isn’t the same as a near miss that almost gets someone killed.  One of these events is significant while the other is notable but probably benign.  By lumping all these near events into a single category we end up Pareto charting them—we have quantitative data when only qualitative data is useful.

So We Should Ignore Near Misses Then?

Near misses should be managed like any other hazard—contained, investigated, prioritized, and corrected.  We need to contain those conditions likely to injure workers, investigate the causes and contributors, prioritize those conditions so that we are able to focus our efforts on the those conditions that are most probably going to result in injury and those that are highly likely to produce an injury that is going to be severe.  We don’t need to worry about having a special name for these conditions—they are just hazards.  The fact that they are “near misses” are no more significant than whether they are behaviors or unsafe conditions.  It’s time for Safety to simplify its approach and to stop tilting at windmills.

 

 

 

Filed under: Safety, Near miss, Near miss reporting, Near misses, Safety, Worker Safety

If It Feels Like Blame and Shame…It Is

By Phil La Duke

Blame isn’t pretty

A few weeks ago, I posted “A @#$@ Storm In Texas” a commentary on how alarming it was that The Boston Marathon drew so much media and public attention while the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas garnered almost no attention outside the professional safety community.  In the introduction that is required when sharing a link in a LinkedIn discussion thread I made the comment that it was time for Safety professionals to “step up or shut up”.  My comment was directed at those safety professionals who, for years, had been bragging up the decrease in worker injuries and “flat” fatalities as if they had single-handedly had ushered in a Golden Age of worker safety.  My contention was that if one claims credit for one circumstance (in this case safety improvements) one must shoulder the blame for circumstances that are disastrous.  I didn’t even imply that safety professionals were responsible for these disasters, and most safety professionals didn’t take it as an accusation.

The harder I tried to point out that if the mouth breathers had actually read the post with even them most rudimentary reading comprehension skills they would understand that I wasn’t assigning blame to anyone in this post. Still the outrage persisted; people who look to take offense will seldom be disappointed.

This is generally where an author writes some simpering apology detailing all the regret that his words may have caused some of the readers; screw that.  I stand by what I WROTE and bear no guilt for what someone infers from my writing, and frankly those who took offense did so solely of there own volition. Whether it be because of fragile egos, general neediness, penchants for drama-queen hissy fits, or legitimate guilty conscious, I refuse to plea mea culpa for something I neither said nor intended. This week, with its flood of crybaby hate mail helped me to realize a deeper truth about one of my favorite targets: Behaviour-Based Safety (BBS).

One of the strongest criticisms of BBS is that it “blames the worker”, this tends to be dismissed by BBS proponents as patently untrue and a construct of organized labour who, they contend, oppose BBS because it holds workers accountable for unsafe behaviours.  For the record, I don’t speak for organized labour, but their opposition to BBS goes far beyond the propensity, in its mind, for BBS to blame the workers.  Furthermore, it isn’t just organized labour that accuse BBS of fomenting a “blame and shame” environment.  So who’s right? I really struggled with this, because a) some really bright people who I respect immensely support BBS and they assure me that BBS doesn’t blame workers for injuries and b) I have first-hand knowledge of BBS systems that HAVE created environments where workers feel as if they are being blamed for being injured.

Intent Is Meaningless

The backlash from the Texas post taught me a lot about blame and shame, and, in so doing, taught me a lot about BBS and blame. First, and most importantly, if someone feels blamed and shamed, they ARE blamed and shamed.  Blame is something someone does, but the resulting shame is a feeling wholly originating within the recipient. We can’t control how we FEEL and if we feel that we are being blamed than our emotional reaction is the same as if we were actually being blamed.  So perception, not intention is key.  Whether or not I intend to blame someone for being injured—and this applies not just to BBS but to any safety system where workers feel as if they are being punished, denied reward, or ostracized for an injury—is effectively immaterial, what matters is whether or not the other person feels blamed.  It should matter whether or not we intend to create those feelings, but it doesn’t; if people feel persecuted there really isn’t any emotional difference between that state and instances where the person is indeed being persecuted.  It’s a bit like the old saying, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t out to get you”; perception IS reality.

Right and Wrong Don’t Matter

Emotions are powerful, often ugly things.  Hit someone at a visceral level and you are likely to see a side of them you would have preferred had gone forever undisclosed.  Whether the person has correctly interpreted your words and intentions or is so far off base that they leave you wondering if they are from this planet, in the end it doesn’t matter if they are right or wrong in their conclusions, the emotion still remains and we need to deal with them.

Guilt By Proxy

People love incentive programs—I’ve seen grown men and women sink to the pettiest of indignities for a free baseball hat with a logo on it or some dopey trinket that they neither want nor need—but even the finest incentive program can leave feeling people left out, blamed, and victimized simply because they didn’t get a prize.  The person who blows the safety BINGO by being injured may feel blamed and shamed (irrespective of intent, stay with me people). Even the person who doesn’t get recognized for contributing a suggestion to make the work place safety may intensely resent the person who receives the award who eventually begins to feel blamed.

When Is Enough Truly Enough

Political correctness and sensitivity witch-hunts happen when an organization worries so much about the potential for offending a minority of the population that it takes ridiculous measures to prevent anyone from ever possibly taking offense.  Should we buckle under to the pressure to make sure that no one gets offended? It will come, I’m sure, as no surprise that I think people should grow up.  I am against any attempt to deliberately offend people for offense’s sake, but do we really have to shut down programs that the wide majority of the people in our organization like and enjoy simply because someone complains? I think not.  Sometimes people just need to feel the hurt and let it go.  The real question is how much inadvertent blame and hurt feelings can your organization tolerate? Emotions are powerful and difficult to defuse and they can lead to everything to strikes to workplace violence, so we can’t just decide to let the crybabies whine.  Where is the line between common sense and political correctness? I don’t know and frankly that is really for each organization to decide, but as is so often the case I don’t know where the line is until after I have crossed it.

Filed under: Safety, BBS, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, blame, blame and incentives, Criticisms of BBS, Safety Incentives, Worker Safety

Snakeoil Salesmen in the OHS Management Business - Help Me Drive Them Out!

Reblogged from Safetyresultsblog - Hosted By: Alan D. Quilley CRSP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil

These irresponsible buffoons don't realize...when they are wrong in this business...people can DIE.

Thanks for letting me vent!

When Hunter S. Thompson was a struggling 21-year old writer he said (in a cover letter to the New York Times) "Some people find it exceedingly difficult to get along with me and I have to choose my jobs carefully. I have no patience with phonies, hacks, dolts, or obnoxious incompetetns and I take some pride in the fact that the people invariably dislike me. I admirre perfection or any effort toward it and I would not work for anyone who disagreed with me on this score. This is not to say that I refuse to work with people I consider incompetent. It merely means that I consider incompetence something to be overcome, rather than accepted." I want to just echo Alan's sentiments. Alan and I often disagree, wind each other up, and generally banter back and forth sometimes agreeing sometimes not, but we both share disdain for the people in safety who revel in their stupidity, enjoy and defend incompetence, and generally make everyone embarrassed to share a profession with them. Nice work, Alan. Keep up the fight.

Filed under: Safety

The Biggest Threat To Worker Safety Might Be You and I

By Phil La Duke

As efforts to improve worker safety become more sophisticated so too have the dangers that workers face.  Much has been written about the role of the individual worker’s behavior in workplace safety, and much has been written about the role that a lack of leadership commitment plays in worker injuries.  But for a moment I would like you to consider perhaps the most serious threat to worker safety: the attitudes of the safety professionals themselves.

These attitudes range from the “defenders of the faith” to the “backslappers” and each poses a significant threat to the safety with which we work.  I would like to take a brief look at these attitudes and ask you to take a hard look at yourself and your peers and ask how closely that attitude aligns with your personal beliefs.

Before I get into the individual attitudes that put us at risk, I think that it’s appropriate to discuss change, and why we are programmed to resist it. In  biological terms, change is bad.  If you are a white crested tern, and you live in an environment that affords you a bountiful supply of food, good mating prospects, temperate weather, and few predators then all change can bring is ruin.  The human animal has evolved keen defenses against change and resists it at an almost molecular level.  Yet, on some level nature also knows that an inability to change results in the inability to adapt and an inability to adapt leads to extinction.  It puts us in a pretty tight bind.  If we change we die, but if we can’t change we also die.  It’s a tough row to hoe.  And the safety profession is the organizational personification of this dichotomy.  But before you look to lay blame for the inadequacies of your safety system on some unsuspecting victim, take a look at these attitudes of safety professionals that are doing more harm than good and ask yourself “am I my own worst enemy?”

Defenders of the Faith

I’ve seen a lot since I started working with safety almost 10 years ago.  Let’s be clear, I’ve worked “in safety” for a lot longer than 10 years, but for the last 10 years I have been working diligently to effect change in safety and that has not been easy.  Bringing change—sometimes radical change—to people who by their nature are extremely cautious individuals is tough. Add to that, the fact that many of these same individuals report to Human Resources departments that view themselves as keepers of the status quo, defenders of the faith, and you will perhaps get some sense of what those years have been like.  Defenders of the Faith are the safety professionals who ostensibly espouse a desire for radical change in the way we approach worker safety, but, in fact, most of these professional don’t want change at all.  The Defenders of the Faith will outwardly admit that change needs to happen but then chip away and passively resist change.  These individuals never tire of the blame game and have umpteen excuses for why they aren’t successful, but meanwhile people continue to get hurt. The primary motivation of the Defenders of the Faith is to ensure continued employment and deflect any negative attention from themselves.

Heggs

Luther Heggs was the character played by Don Knotts in the film The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Heggs was a cautious to the point of being afraid of his own shadow, and there are a lot of Luther Heggs working in safety today.  I am not trying to be ironic when I say that safety professionals are a cautious lot.  The profession attracts more than its fair share of individuals who enjoy regulation, rules, and formulas.  As a rule, these individuals don’t like change and actively (or passively) seek to subvert it.  Whether they realize it our not, these individuals would rather continue a course of action that consistently fails than to adopt a new (and in their minds risky) course of action.  These individuals will only embrace corrective actions that have been time tested and proven effective beyond a shadow of a doubt.  They will make all sorts of excuses as to why these process changes are inappropriate to their situation.  Heggs don’t understand process, and haven’t a clue at the deeper implications and underlying organizational flaws that injuries represent.  In their minds the job of the safety professional is to count bodies as they bear witness to the carnage.  It’s not their fault that people are getting hurt, nor their jobs to fix it. If you find yourself reluctant to accept a new idea until there has been years of research on its effectiveness before you consider it you might be a Hegg.  Unfortunately and ironically, the caution shown by the Heggs actually increases the risk of injury.

Bandwagon Jumpers

Opposites of the Heggs are the Bandwagon Jumpers, and they are every bit as dangerous.  Bandwagon Jumpers have never met a dumb idea that they didn’t love, especially an idea that absolves them of culpability of a failed initiative.  You can find Bandwagon Jumpers at every conference eagerly jotting down notes in the professional development sessions or loading up on the newest fad literature in the bookstore.  This attitude is dangerous because even when the Bandwagon Jumper happens into a good idea he or she seldom gives the idea time to work before scurrying off to the next hair-brained scheme.  You can spot a Bandwagon Jumper by his or her love of jargon; they jabber on for hours spewing meaningless crap that they really don’t understand themselves. Operations leadership seldom respect the Bandwagon Jumpers because the leadership expects and values results, and for all the sound and fury generated by Bandwagon Jumpers very little gets done; it’s all activity and no meaningful consequences.

Snake-Oil Salesmen

I’m fond of the old adage, “when you sell hammers, all the world is a nail”, and never was this more true with the Snake-Oil Salesmen.  These safety professionals glommed onto a scientifically dubious safety process years ago and like a terrier with a rat in its mouth they just refuse to drop it.  Some of these people learned a methodology that worked for them in a very narrow scope and continue using it even though it creates an infrastructure that is too costly to sustain.  Others paid to get certified in a given methodology and admitting that it is of questionable effectiveness erodes their Curricula Vitae; these people understand that allowing the possibility that their methodology is bunk is, by inference, calling their qualifications into question as well.  You can’t blame one for preserving one’s professional values but it becomes problematic when one places more value on one’s own credentials than they do on the safety of the workplace.  It’s easy to be a Snake-Oil Salesman without meaning to—after all, every conference hosts seemingly inexhaustible populations of people who make their living selling processes, methodologies, and ideas that don’t work.  You can find the Snake-Oil Salesmen shouting down each other in LinkedIn chat rooms and on-line safety forums.  Snake-Oil Salesmen are adroit at using a statistically insignificant sample size to refute the evidence that their malarkey is junk science.  They will seldom support their arguments with any research done in the last 50 years, in fact, most will just keep repeating their own opinions until the opposition dismisses them as idiots and walks away.

Backslappers

Without a doubt, Backslappers are the most dangerous attitudes in safety today.  Backslappers are content with what they’ve already done and brag about how safe their workplaces are.  By using industry averages, dubious rates and trends, and antiquated views of safety (as the absence of injury instead of the reduction of risk) Backslappers congratulate themselves for a job well done, at least until there is a serious injury or a fatality.  Backslappers feel that they’ve conquered worker injuries and they don’t have to worry anymore, their jobs are done.  Safety professionals who are Backslappers can’t wait to show the new boss what a terrific job they’re doing, and will waste vendor’s time by inviting them in the guise of learning more about the vendor’s offerings when in fact, they only want to brag about what a swell job they are doing.  Backslappers are the most dangerous of these attitudes because it belies the misconception that we can ever relax or let our guards down when it comes to workplace safety.  When complacency becomes the safety strategy the risk of serious injury grows unchallenged and unchecked until a the probability of a fatality rises to virtual certainty.

So What Can We Do?

I’d like to think that these posts do more than deride a particular fault I find in something and that I also offer something constructive that one can use to correct the undesired state. In that spirit, here goes…

1. Ask operations if, in their eyes, you fit any of these attitudinal types.
2. Investigate the trends your safety against national trends; you really need to discount improvements that are part of a national or industry trends.  You also don’t need to congratulate yourself too much for being “better than average”.
3. Actively seek to improve the safety of your workplace by getting engaged and partnering with Operations.

It takes a lot of courage and moral fortitude to be an effective safety professional, but then this is the career we chose.  If we can’t challenge our own belief-sets, if we can’t call our own attitudes into question, how then can we effect real, lasting, sustainable change?

Filed under: Safety, are we our own worst enemies, Safety, Safety professional's attitudes, threats to worker safety, Worker Safety

A @#$# Storm In Texas

by Phil La Duke

“Who takes all the glory and none of the shame”—Elvis Costello

 

As safety professionals all over the civilized world continued to congratulate themselves on the swell job they’re all doing, someone had to piss on the picnic and blow up a fertilizer plant.  Thankfully, it didn’t get much news coverage what with the Boston Marathon, and who can blame the media? There won’t be a cherubic face on the Texas blast, and the glamorous backdrop of the Boston Marathon, and if there are stories of selflessness and heroism, we won’t hear them.  As for far as most people are concerned it’s just a bunch of dead, working class Texans, and what are 40 dead Texans more or less?

The bombings at the Boston Marathon had a lot to get us excited about, at an estimated 500,000 people involved in the event, it’s New England’s most watched sporting event, and it’s undeniably a big deal.  And this event had all the pageantry of an Ian Fleming novel before a parade of increasingly bad Bond film turned his work into cerebral pabulum. A big sports event is attached by rogue former USSR denizens, a small boy dies, a massive man hunt, gun fights, throw in a contrived love story, and Matt Damon and you have it all.  As I type this, I imagine there are numerous celebrities championing the victims of the Boston Marathon, collections will be taken, kudos heaped on the brave. Memes posted on Facebook from political whack jobs from both extremes blaming Obama for not doing enough or extolling him for doing so much better than Romney would have done. ”Repost this if…” as if anyone gave two tenths of a crap what anyone reposted on Facebook. I’m not denigrating the gravity of the situation, or of the heroics of those who ran to help when good sense should have sent them scurrying.  I know that at least a score of you mouth breathers are already so outraged that you struggle to read through furrowed brows and the labored breathing of the deeply offended.

Save it, yet again I am unimpressed and unswayed.  It’s been more than a week since the explosion in Texas and they still don’t seem to know exactly the death toll (up to 15 dead? When did news (I refuse to call the excrement that the modern hackneyed purveyors of “newsertainment” produce “journalism”) get so sloppy? We expect and accept fatalities in the workplace.  Sure the West, Texas explosion shook and alarmed business owners a bit, but things have already settled down, like mud sinking to the bottom of a sullied stream, clearing the waters of collective consciousness. Since the Texas explosion there have been industrial explosions at on  barge at a dock in Mobile, Alabama and at an Oil Refinery in Detroit, MI.

We’ve learned to expect and accept workplace fatalities as a cost of doing business. It sickens me that we chip away at worker safety in the name of case management—exactly what percentage of disability claims are in entirety fraudulent? And yet we treat all as if the are liars and cheats.  Politicians boldly decry the over protection of workers? When was the last time a politician died doing his or her job save for the assassin’s bullet, a bad liver, or the hyper excitement of a woman’s ministrations?

We sit and congratulate ourselves because injuries fall—we take all of the credit, we cheer and high-five, we proudly proclaim ourselves the saviors of the workingman. Yet when things go wrong we deflect any blame or accountability—“If the idiots would only follow the rules” “operations leadership doesn’t support me”.

We can’t have it both ways; these are two diametrically opposed standpoints. Either we save lives and butcher workers, or there is no relationship between what we do and whether or not people go home safe.  To paraphrase Yoda, (I won’t mimic the goofy Muppet syntax that Frank Oz compulsively adds to all characters making them sound like Fozzy Bear after he suffered a stroke) either you do it or you don’t, there’s no “try”. As my sainted, departed father used to tell me (after I defended a half-assed attempt with “I did my best”) “I can get a damned baboon in here to try hard, you get no points for being stupid.” That may seem harsh, but losing a loved one in an industrial explosion is also harsh.

Should we be more concerned about terrorism than we are about industrial explosions, the release of lethal gas into our communities, or wildfires that erupt from lumber yards? Well, certainly it’s not a contest, but WAKE UP people, the thing that will kill you is far less likely to be a mad bomber at a crowded public event than it is to be the chemical plant, grain elevator, refinery, or barge that explodes in your neighborhood. These are workplace accidents that aren’t just killing workers, they are killing first responders, and our neighbors, and people blissfully unaware of the dangers until it’s too late.

This isn’t an indictment of any particular industry.  While it’s true that the closer an industry is to harvesting raw materials the dirtier and more dangerous it tends to be

So safety professionals either step up or shut up. If you aren’t going to take responsible for these catastrophic breakdowns than shut your gaping pie hole about saving my life. If you did your best and this still happened than do us ALL a favor and get the hell out of the business. And for those of you, who are sitting there thinking that it can’t happen to you, know that those who suffered these disasters likely felt the same way.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety, Worker Safety, Boston Marathon, community danger, explosion, fatalities, Fertilizer plant explosion, marathon oil explosion, Mobile Alabama explosion, Safety, Shit storm, workplace explosions

Safety Vendors: Stop Wasting My Time and Your Money At Trade Shows

 

By Phil La Duke

Last week I presented Hardwiring Safety: 7 Tips for Changing Culture at the Michigan Safety Conference. The Michigan Safety Conference is one of the best organized, biggest and longest running regional safety training conference—in fact, at upwards of 800 attendees  (with a large percentage of decision makers) it compares favorably with many of the international conferences at which I’ve presented. And with around 130 exhibitors it has a nice, attendee-friendly and manageable expo floor.  This year I tried a little experiment and the results of that experiment inspired me to write this article.

The experiment was simple: walk path every booth and see how many people supposedly working the booth would in any way shape or form engage with me.  Simple right? All I wanted to see is how many people would effectively do their jobs.  Like the Walmart greeters all they had to do is look me in the eye and say hello. Actually my expectation was lower than that of a Walmart greater, I would have settled for a nod.  Pretty tough to screw that up, wouldn’t you say.  So how many of these vendors passed the muster? Three, and while I make it my point not to do product review or endorsements I think they warrant mentioning. The three venders were SVS Safety  (a company that sells prescription safety glasses), Slice (a company that sells ceramic cutting tools) and FRG (an incentives company).

Years ago, I exhibited extensively; from ASSE to the National Safety Council and many points in between.  When my company exhibited at the Society of Safety Engineers EASTEC, SME sent all exhibitors a book, titled Stop Wasting Your Time Exhibiting at Tradeshows[1] The book was a God-send, and many of the tips I will share either came from that book, or were inspired from the advice given from the book.  I think it was self-published, but if you are serious about exhibiting you should check this book.

Here are my tips for people who either exhibit or attend tradeshows (I will delineate the two later in the post).

• Make the most of your show experience.  Too many people focus on the show as a single event.  You can get a lot more out of the show if you think of it in three separate sections—before, during, and after.  Before the show you should plan the time that you will be on site.  I always try to find out who else might be at the show (customers, prospects, LinkedIn connections, and old friends). Once I know who will be at the show I can schedule my breakfasts, lunches, and dinners and either maximize my business or network with people who I might otherwise have to travel great distances to do so.
  From a attendee perspective, getting the most out of the show means research; most of us have at least a cursory idea of what technical sessions we want to attend (mine of course) and what topics best fit with our current or future plans, but beyond this, you should also research the vendors who will be exhibiting.  If there is something for which you are in a particular market, see if there are any prospective vendors exhibiting.  By doing research up front, you can ask intelligent questions about the products or services and not feel pressured by an overly aggressive salesman.

  Similarly, exhibitors should have also done their homework. Instead of finding out a particular company is going to be at the show and hoping they stop by the booth, exhibitors should be working the show weeks or even months in advance lining up meeting with prospects and customers and generally using the time together wisely.

• Set Goals. If your primary goal in attending a professional conference is to have fun, get drunk, golf, or engage in similar activities unrelated to business, do everyone a favor and stay away.  Your boss,  your network, and anyone else you can think of doesn’t benefit from you “putting in an appearance” before scampering off to the pool.

  But if you ARE serious about deriving benefit from a trade show  then you better have goals.  Goals should be SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely—but in this case balance that against simplicity.  No one says you CAN’T have fun at a convention, so don’t get so focused that you suck all the fun out of the room, but a couple of simple goals, “I want to attend at least two technical sessions on ergonomics” or, for a vendor, I want to get 2 qualified leads per hour of working the booth.  Having goals will help you to improve your overall conference experience.

Now a couple of quick tips for attendees:

• Don’t Chat Up A Vendor Because You Want A Giveaway.  Too often attendees waste there time posing as buyers because they want the construction hat squishy.  Be up front. If you want one ask for one.  You don’t have to pretend to be interested  when your not.
• Don’t Express Interest Just To Be Polite.  People working the booth love the “send me some information”; they can point to these inquiries as sales leads and they will stalk you like furies as you duck call after call. If you have no interest just say so. It need not be weird  or awkward,  a polite no thank you will suffice.

And for the exhibitors:

• Look alive.  You’re there to work; look like it.  Reading an eReader, talking on the phone, talking to another exhibitor, flirting with the booth babe next door (she doesn’t want to go out with you), or otherwise looking uninviting won’t make sales.
• Make Eye Contact and Greet the Attendees.  A simple, good morning, will go miles toward inviting conversation, and unless you are talking to the attendee you will never know if he or she is a prospect, a competitor, or a pick pocket.  Many decision makers walk by booths simply because they weren’t engaged by the person working the both.
• Know Your Goods and Services.  Nothing is more frustrating than the exhibitor who doesn’t even know the elevator speech.  If I am interested in what you are selling, I expect to be able to speak to someone who knows the ins and outs of your business, not a place holder who will tell me that I really ought to talk to Earl and he is wandering the show but will be right back, real soon.
• Stick to Business.  Stop with the “Win and iPad” by dropping your business card in the bowl (let me let you in on a secret, I don’t give a damn about your ergo matts, I don’t WANT to get your mailing list.  But I will give you my business card on the outside chance that I will win. (Even know we ALL know that most of these contests are rigged in favor of you hottest prospects.) And you might as well skip the booth babes, yes they bring in traffic, but it’s for the wrong reasons. The curse of the booth babes is this, you attracted a crowd of over stimulated men who exaggerate their  desire to buy and their position to impress the model.  Both will  bring in traffic, but is that really what you want? Wouldn’t you want business instead?
• Appropriately Follow Up.  I can’t count the times that I gave my business card to an exhibitor, told him that I was covering the show (usually for Facility Safety Management Magazine) as a safety journalist,  and would like to interview someone from their company.  Instead of a follow up call from their marketing department, I get put on another list, or worse yet, get the “our salesmen is going to be in your area and I would like to see if we can schedule an appointment”. To date I have NEVER gotten an appropriate follow-up on my visits to a booth.

In two weeks I will be a speaker at ENFORM Banff 2013 and I’m sure I will face the same gauntlet of pointless stupidity at the conference. But what can I say? I’m a glutton for punishment.

 

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[1] Or something like that.  I don’t know and I don’t feel like going through all my books to find it just to satisfy the one or two pedantic jerks who read my work and smirk because I don’t do this or that.

Filed under: Safety

Phil La Duke is Full Of @#$%

By Phil La Duke

On Tuesday of this week I will be presenting Hardwiring Safety, Seven Tips for Changing Culture; it’s a topic I know well, having spoken on it in one form or another for the last nine odd years (if you know me, you understand how odd these years have been).  I thought that given my familiarity with the topic I would blow it up here and see what new insights I might be able to glean from it.  Too often safety pundits keep parading out the same old tired schlock in a marginally different package.  Not me; I’d like to think that I’ve grown over the last decade and a half (my waist-line sure suggests it) and so here is my attempt to tear down all I’ve said on the subject and start anew.

The Values of A Safety Culture

In my original speech, some years ago I prattled on about the values of a safety culture; I was an ass. The term “safety culture” is a misnomer.  At best safety could be a subculture, but it is not—in even the broadest sense of the term—a culture.  A culture is the codified set of shared values, rituals, rules, and taboos of a population.  In simple terms (and I am over simplifying it here) culture is how a group of people with common interests view various topics, like, for instance safety. So every organization has a safety culture to some degree—some have cultures that think safety is a bunch of nonsense while others feel it is the only true measure of their success.  Furthermore, changing a culture is more than just about changing the way a population does things, it’s about sharing what it values.

Changing the Culture Is More About Understanding Change Than it Is About Understanding Culture

Noted thinker on the topic of culture change, Edgar Schein developed a simple formula for organizational change.  Shine believed that change could only come when:

D + V + N > R

In this model D = Dissatisfaction, V = Vision, N = Next Steps, and R = Resistance.  In real terms, Shine’s model suggests that we can only exact real, lasting change by increasing dissatisfaction; creating a compelling vision of the ideal state; creating practical and easy next steps, and/or reducing resistance.

So throughout this discussion we will explore how my previous presentation matched up with this model, I suspect it will do so poorly. Before we move into the values, I should note, without realizing it, my efforts were aimed at vision-setting and viable next steps.  And I’ve never failed to change a culture, in fact, I was so wildly successful that many of my customers mistrusted the numbers, even though they gave them to me.  Of course I cheated.   I wouldn’t take on clients who weren’t already deeply dissatisfied with the performance of their safety efforts, so I didn’t really have to do too much to increase dissatisfaction, but if you are going to change your culture you likely will have to create some serious dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Value One: All Injuries Are Preventable

I’ve written several times on the hypocrisy and condescension of slogans like “Safety Is Our Number One Priority” and “Safety First”.  Such platitudes are disingenuous and the people who perpetuate them are either liars or fools or both. For some reading this, this is fairly obvious, while others will furrow their sub-simian brows and hammer out an angry email filled with mouth-breathing outrage.  So why revisit it? I am continually surprised at the shear volume of safety professionals who continue to self-righteously lie about this to his or her constituency.

This particular value conceals a prevalent belief that “that’s nice to say, but that’s not how it works out here in the world”.  I have since come to believe that this value should really read: “Accidents are inevitable, but injuries are not”. Things go wrong all the time, but with enough information about how workers are hurt, we can prevent injuries.  This seems tough, and mainly because most safety professionals work on the probability side of things instead of the severity.  Organizations often overlook the very real human drive toward expediency, and as a result they are surprised when people remove guards, take dangerous short cuts, and in general recklessly put themselves in harm’s way.  If organizations channeled that energy into reducing the severity of contact with a hazard, far more injuries would be prevented.  And while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget that safety is merely a relative expression of probability.  When we say something is unsafe we are describing something that has a high probability of in jurying someone.  There is no such thing as absolute safety, because for that to exist the probability of injury must be zero, and that is never the case.

Value 2: Compliance is Not Enough

Compliance is a poor measure of workplace safety.  Nobody was ever saved by compliance, but a company that doesn’t value compliance as part of an overall safety strategy is unlikely to be successful.  The idea that “okay is good enough” or that the bare minimum as defined by a third party that doesn’t understand fact one about your business, your operating climate, and your work constraints is a pretty good indicator that your organization’s leadership has its head stuffed in an orifice that would make a master yogi green with envy.  Companies need to build a foundation of compliance.  Compliance is a good place to start, and a useful argument to make for those reluctant to do the right thing as it pertains to safety, but making the argument that we have to do something because OSHA requires it is akin to having to convince someone not to torture and kill a child because its illegal.  No, we comply with the law because: a) we aren’t criminals, b) because following the spirit of the law is in the interest, not just of our workers, but our business overall; and c) because if we aren’t able to do the bare minimum how can we ever hope to do better? People who are satisfied with mere compliance have no business working anywhere; the aspire to mediocrity they are the static noise that interferes with the clear signals we try to send to the workers.

Value 3: Prevention is more effective than correction

This value is beginning to seem trite to me. If someone were to come up to me and say, “We’re world-class because we believe that prevention is more effective than correction” I might not laugh in his or her face, but I would almost certainly roll my eyes and make fun of them behind their backs.  I’m not disagreeing with the sentiment, but it seems so painfully obvious that it’s tough to take the speaker seriously.  When I hear some of the things that I’ve said about this in the past, I just want to say to myself, “no kidding? You just figuring that out now?”  The problem is that for this to be a value, instead of a tired platitude, this has to spur some operational behavior.  The response I would have for those (including myself) who spout this rhetoric, would be, “congratulations, now what are you doing about it?” Values have to be more than sentimental aspirations; they have to be the kind of non-negotiable absolute truths against which the quality of the leadership decisions is measured.  They have to be the acid test that tell us whether or not we are ethical or cowards.

Value 4: Safety is everybody’s job

The fact that I every preached this dribble is embarrassing beyond words, but I’ll go on for another couple of paragraphs anyway. Safety isn’t everyone’s job, well at least not the way that people think.  It’s nice to say while you polish the seats of cheaply made office chairs with your ass and think of what a swell job you would have if those idiots out in the field, or on the shop floor, or wherever their jobs take them would just step up to safety and stop hurting themselves.  Yes, I will acknowledge that we all have some responsibility for keeping ourselves safe, but the role the worker plays in keeping themselves safe is minuscule compared to the responsibility borne by the supervisors, engineers, and decision makers who blissfully think that the one thing that all injured workers have in common is that had ought be a damned-sight more careful.

I’ve written about how everyone plays a role in workplace safety, and certainly the worker has the responsibility for following safety rules and doing the job as specified, but many injuries are caused because the operation is working out of process.  I think that everyone has the right to expect that his or her employer has exercised reasonable judgment and taken appropriate measures to ensure that my job is not going to kill me.  A lot of people decry the rise in frivolous lawsuits, but they lose sight of the reason we have the right to bring action in civil court: it keeps people from killing people who have wronged them. Seems like a good system, but then I still pray, “if I should die before I wake…avenge me”; it doesn’t rhyme but then I’ve always been more interested in justice than in poetic meter.

Certainly this value applies to leaders who believe that they don’t have the time or inclination to protect workers from their own stupidity. Show me a safety system that promises to hold workers accountable for their own culpability in injuries and I will show you a system that sells, and a line of drooling consultants with the greedy pinched faces of ferrets and the amoral spiel they intuitively sense in lazy executives.

I think this value should be updated to: “Everyone plays a role in safety, and the organization takes pains ensure that everyone understands their roles and is accountable and engaged in fulfilling the role requirements.” It more wordy I grant you, but do you want it short or accurate?

Value 5: Safety is a strategic business element

I believe this value more now than I did when I first wrote it. People get to wound up in the emotional side of safety. Yes injuries are tragic, yes it leaves people horribly maimed and scarred and yes, it creates widows and orphans. Stating the obvious doesn’t really do anyone any good. And telling people “safety is the right thing to do” is condescending and insulting. In saying it we are implying that but for the intercession and wise advice we would turn the workplace into a site of such carnage that it would leave Pol Pot sleeping with the light on for the next decade.

Beyond the obvious moral and social benefits of safety, it is the smart business decision to make.  I speak to a lot of C+ executives (as in CEO, COO, CFO, somewhere along the line it became cute to call them “C+” executives…get it , they have a “C” + some other letters.  Clever.  I’ve found that in a fair amount of cases the C+ appellation is more appropriate in the grading system before grade inflation meant students got 4.9 gpas (what does it say for the state of mathematics where a student can get a 4.9 on a 4-point scale?) for trying hard and sucking up.  No, I like to think that a lot of C+ executives are just that, slightly above average, but not willing to put in enough extra effort to move that grade up to a B –. I realize I’ve wandered off track a bit. But even a C– executive can understand that hurting workers costs money, a lot of money.  In fact, I’ve never met an executive who said, “I’d love to hurt more workers, (especially that sonofa so-and-so Cranston he’s just begging for it) but I just can’t afford it.

When we are able to quantify in real, honest terms exactly how much it costs to hurt workers we are talking serious money, and that wasted purchase of human suffering gets even the thickest executive’s attention (well, not the thickest, I once met with a healthcare Human Resources Vice President who said that it didn’t cost them anything to hurt workers because they treated them on site.)

Value 6: Safety is owned by operations

It’s heartening to know that I wasn’t completely wrong about everything.  Safety absolutely has to be owned by those with the greatest control and clout in an organization and that is Operations.  Operations, for lack of a better definition, is how the organization makes its money. When Operations leadership say job, typically the rest of the organization says how high on the way down. Only Operations can create the sense of urgency needed to effect real, sustainable change.

So there is the value setting portion of the equation. As for the next steps, well I think you have to figure that out for yourselves, or better yet, hire me to help you find it, but anyone who promises you a universal solution without even asking question one about your organization is either a fool, a liar, a thief or that all too common combination of the three.

Hardwiring safety into all activities cannot be achieved through sermons and scoldings. Hardwiring safety requires a reimagining of the nature of safety itself.

For some safety professionals, the role of the safety professional is cheerleader;  a perpetually perky advocate of all things safe.  Unfortunately, this kind of safety professional typically has only the most superficial understanding of what it takes to make a workplace safer.

Other safety professionals see their roles as parental, eternally haranguing a petulant workforce into straightening up and flying right.  Command and control approaches to safety don’t require much more awareness of the nature of safety than that required of the cheerleaders.

Some safety professionals are witnesses to business.  They walk around the workplace worrying over charts and counting boo-boos.  These safety professionals are too busy looking at what happened that they can’t ever internalize the true nature of safety. In most cases they don’t really care about the nature of safety. They content themselves with passing charts to Operations.

Until safety professionals can see safety as an expression of risk and can advocate for risk reduction through coaching Operations can safety become imbedded into all our activities. Safety has to be more about removing variation from our processes and protecting people from injury when things go wrong and our processes fail.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety Culture, Edgar Schein, hardwiring safety, organizational change, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety