Let’s Forget the Perfect World

 

As I write this someone, somewhere is designing a system based on the erroneous assumption that things will run perfectly.  So many things—from products to complex processes ignore the simple fact that no system is perfect, and because these systems ignore this fact the systems fail.  Why do we develop systems based on a perfect world when we all know that not only do people make mistakes, so do computers, products, and even robots.  Ideally, we would allow for this imperfection, and in fact, many systems do.  Unfortunately, leaving the perfect world takes time and forsight and these days both are in scare supply.

The Curse of Variability

 

Too often we create “perfect” systems that are corrupted by unforseen factors.  These serpents sneak into our processes and wreak havoc as we sit helplessly nearby wondering how we could have ever prevented such a disaster.  I call this the “Eden Effect”. Whether we call these process disruptions gremlins, ghosts in the machine, SNAFUs or viruses things nobody counted on enter our system and make us shake our heads.  Take for instance the American black bear who wandered into the parking lot of a customer of mine.  They jokingly asked me how to record this hazard in our database.  Clearly this was a safety issue—you can’t have a bear wandering around the parking lot—and yet there was nothing in the safety process (or security process for that matter) that dealt with how to remove a bear from the premises.

Not all process failures are quite as far-fetched.  In fact, many of the most destructive things in our processes aren’t statistical outlyers at all.  They are simply common place things that we didn’t forsee, and our completely understandable lack of foresight leads to disaster and even death.  We describe these things as “freak accidents” or  “acts of God” and excuse ourselves because there was no way we could have seen it coming. The reality is that we often can predict things and take no measures to prevent them; there is nothing wrong with that.  In many cases the likelihood of a failure is so incredibly remote that it doesn’t warrent any preventive measure or counter measure to reduce its severity.  Take our bear example; there had been reports of bears wandering into populated areas and certainly the safety professionals could have had some inkling that there was a possibility that a bear would come calling, and yet they did nothing.  An encounter with a bear is highly likely to cause a sever injury or even a fatality.  Should we judge the safety professional’s behavior as reckless? Was he negligent? No.  Most would agree that the very remote chances of a bear coming into the parking lot did not merit a counter measure even in though the consequences could be fatal.  Any measures to protect workers from bear attacks (likely a once in a couple of lifetime occurence) would be judged as financially irresponsible and ridiculously over protective.

How can a safety professional know the balance between improving the safety system and being over protective?

• Stop trying to do the impossible.  People make mistakes; that as much of a universal truth as you will ever get in this life.  We have to make our peace with the fact that smart, highly skilled, cautious people will make mistakes and there is nothing in this world we can do to prevent them. We CAN, however, reduce the likelihood of mistakes and the severity of the consequences to the point where mistakes don’t kill people, by managing the things that increase the likelihood of mistake making:
  • Stress. People under stress think differently than those with less stress.  Some brain research has even shown that excessive, prolonged stress can change our brain chemistry.  When we are stressed it signals our subconscious that we need to adapt and the brain starts to experiment with the safety of our environment by causing us to make mistakes.  Mistakes are our subconscious mind looking for the safest route for a quick exit, but unfortunately it tends to find out that something isn’t safe by falling victim to an accident.
  • Incompetance. People who are physically or intellectually unable to do there jobs correctly are going to make more mistakes than those who are better suited to the job requirements. 
    We do no one a service by putting them in a position where they face the real possibility of serious injury by doing the job.  Training can eliminate some incompetance but it can only take us so far.  We also need to beef up post offer screening and our over all recruiting and hiring process if we are going to drive incompentence out of the workplace.
  • Fatigue. As we get fatigued we make poor choices and mistakes.  Safety professionals should take a hard look at fatigue levels of workers in areas of the most frequent near misses and injuries and modify work schedules to reduce fatigue. 
• Recognize that Systems Also Produce Unexpected Results.  For decades business has worshipped automation, and anyone who works in automation will tell you that you can’t always predict, or count on. what an automated system will produce.  An aggressive Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) System will go a long way in improving equipment reliability, but even TPM can’t tighten your process to the point where everything produced by it is perfect.
• Build Systems that Can Tolerate Drift.  Not only will people (and machines) make mistakes, they will also slowly (even inperceptably) move from the design standard away from the norm until they ultimately have moved outside the processes tolerance for drift.  Saw blades dull, drill bits get brittle, people take short cuts, until the saw won’t make a clean cut, drill bits snap like pretzels, and people get hurt.  The key to building a system with a high tolerance for variability is to study the factors that must be true for the process to perform and compare them to the likely amount of drift.  This sounds hard, and it is more difficult than it sounds, but until we build better systems that can tolerate variability in materials, environment, machinery, and most importantly, human behavior we will still be counting stitches and bemoaning the fact that we don’t live in a perfect world.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Influencing Human Error, mistake proofing, process control, variability, Worker Safety

What Is Your Safety Legacy

by Phil La Duke

This Monday, the U.S. will celebrate Memorial Day.  In the global community Memorial Day is one of the lesser-known U.S. holidays; that’s shame.  The U.S. is often seen as the impudent child in the world community, accused of having no sense of history, no sense of legacy. Memorial Day started after the American Civil War to commemorate the fallen soldiers.  Now Memorial Day is a day where Americans remember all those who have died in service to their country.

I am not a veteran and I won’t wrap myself in the flag.  People who use occasions like Memorial Day to make themselves look good by thanking a stranger for his or her service sicken me; I find the gesture disingenuous and self-serving. While I am certainly grateful for those who served, and even more so to those who sent loved ones to pay the ultimate price for freedom, that is the purpose for this post.

This is not to say thanking a veteran is wrong or that I am discouraging it in some way.  But if you are truly thankful for the service a veteran has paid you than hire him or her.  Every day I am contacted by veterans who despite having served in a safety role while in the armed forces who cannot find work (because despite having extensive training in safety they lack a degree).  As so many military conflicts wrap up world-wide we have a responsibility to help veterans transition to civilian work.  If you want to show your gratitude hire a vet.  But as I said, I don’t want to get up on that particular soap box this week (I will be revisiting it often and adamantly, but not this week.)

This week I want to remind all of us who work in safety to consider our legacy. We stand at a cross roads in safety.  We are beset on all sides by those who think we are superfluous; people who dismiss us as over-protective fuss-budgets who want to protect workers into unemployment and others who see an opportunity to roll back safety protections that were hard fought by people who are long dead. 

This weekend I want to remember those of us who came before us, those who served, their not only their countries, but people everywhere, in pursuit of a safer workplace.  From Tiananmen Square to the Battle of the Over Pass people have faced death for a better life, not just for themselves but for countless strangers as well.  We each have an individual responsibility to avoid squandering the advances they have made. 

It’s easy to forget the sacrifices made by strangers on our behalf.  Read Sinclair Lewis’s gut wrenching account of the plight of workers and ask yourself have we come so far that we can forget the people who worked under these conditions?

Remembering the fallen and abused is important, but it is only useful if we act on it.  What will you do differently in response to the sacrifices others have made? What line will you draw; on what is the hill you are prepared to die? 

Remembrance of those fallen may make us feel good, but they didn’t die to make us feel good.  If all we offer for the sacrifices the giants on whose shoulders we stand are platitudes we disgrace their memories.

So fellow safety professionals, I ask you, what will be your legacy? Love me or hate me, I am here every week confronting you with the question: is this the best we can do? If people speak of me when I die I hope some will say that I pushed the profession, that I called out the lazy, challenged the complacent, and decried the hypocrites.  But I also hope their will be those among you who have the courage to call me fraud, to denounce me as heretic.  If I leave this planet without people arguing about my message I have failed.

So this weekend I challenge you to consider your legacy.  What will people say of you when you have shuffled this mortal coil? Will they say that you did your best (remember, I can get a baboon in here to try hard)? Will they say you had the courage to do what it took when everyone tried to shout you down? Or will they say you were a dried-up, burnt-out turd of a person who shouted down new ideas, took boon-doggles to Brazil, and congratulated yourself for a job half-done? Will history judge you hero or villain? Will history remember you at all? 

Will your children’s children’s children remember you at all? We all have only one chance to do something meaningful with our lives, will you contribute to the world of safety at all? Will you have tried, or will you simply collected a paycheck? In the end all we can do is try to honor those who came before us by protecting those who come after us.

Filed under: Safety, legacy, memorial day, Safety

Talking Dollars, Making Sense

 

The Great Recession likely has forever changed Operations leadership’s view of safety.  Gone are the days when safety professionals could lean on “it’s the right thing to do” to justify their actions and initiatives.  Operations leadership rightfully expects that the Safety function will contribute to the bottom line and show a return on investment for the funds it is given in its budget.

Quantifying the value provided by the safety function isn’t easy—most of what it does is cost avoidance rather than profit, and when one talks about cost avoidance, the conversation can quickly turn hypothetical. Despite these difficulties it is still possible to put together a compelling business case for safety.

Know What’s Important

Every industry has some measure that is more important than anything else, and that measure is seldom safety.  In mass production, downtime is an area in which Operations leadership is keenly interested, in other industries sales are what gets the most attention, still others it is delivery time or days in production.  While most (if not all) of these companies care about safety, safety is not seen as “keeping the lights on” and typically efforts to keep the workplace safer are seen as completely divorced from the other business measures.

The key to creating a compelling business case for safety is to express injuries in terms that Operations understands and to which it can relate.  Safety professionals must demonstrate the relationship between safety and whatever metric the organization links most closely to its success.  Years ago, I worked with a heavy truck manufacturer where a sharp safety professional was able to express the cost of injuries in terms of the additional number of trucks that the plant would have to produce to recoup the costs incurred because of injuries.

Know Your Costs

An organization’s cost of injuries should include both direct costs and indirect costs.  Direct costs are generally easy to gather and/or calculate.  These are costs like fines, medical treatment for the injured worker, and Worker’s Compensation costs.  Surprisingly, many organizations jealously guard Worker’s Compensation cost information from the safety department despite the obvious connection between the two areas. Indirect costs include things like loss of productivity, damage to products, and damage to the company’s image or brand.  Indirect costs are difficult to calculate and Operations leadership may see attempts to quantify indirect costs as juking the stats.

For example, let’s take a look at an injury where the worker cuts his hand and requires stitches.  Halfway through an eight hour shift a worker cuts his hand. The injury requires production to stop for 12 minutes, and a supervisor has to drive the injured worker to the clinic that is 10 minutes away.  It takes an hour to treat the injury after which the injured worker is sent home.

Direct Costs

• 12 minutes loss of production (average wage of idled workers x average hourly pay x .2).
• Wage of injured worker (wage x 4 hours)
• Wage of supervisor while driving the worker to the clinic, waiting during treatment, and driving back to the workplace (wage x 1.4 hours)
• Wage of janitor to clean up blood (wage x 15 minutes)
• Cost of treatment
• Wage of safety professional to complete required paper work.
• Wage of the safety professional to conduct the incident investigation
• Wage of the supervisor to participate in the incident investigation
• Wage of witnesses who participate in the incident investigation
• Wage of the Operations manager to read and react to the incident investigation
• Wages associated with OSHA inspection
• Fines

Indirect Costs

• 12 minutes loss of production (average wage of idled workers x average hourly pay x .2).
• Increase in insurance premium
• Costs associated with decreased morale
• Cost of legal consultation
• Court Costs
• Legal fees

 

It’s wise to present only the direct costs as actual costs, but it is also a good idea to reference the indirect costs as costs above and beyond those that you can quantify with hard figures.

Depending on how hospitable your Operations leadership is to safety, you may be able to skip the actual hard figures in favor of a estimated rate.  OSHA has a wonderful tool for calculating the costs of safety that includes both direct and indirect costs that the agency provides for free on its website. (http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/safetyhealth/mod1_estimating_costs.html). The tool estimates the cost of a worker fatality at $910,000 (a ridiculously low number based on a National Safety Council study from 1998—but realistically this cost has probably not dropped from that time), $28,000 for a Lost Work Day injury, and $1,300 for a recordable injury. By entering one’s injury figures into the calculator one can estimate a fairly reliable cost figure.  This same website affords you the opportunity to calculate the impact of the cost of injuries on profit and sales as well.

Make It Personal

Several years ago I discovered a way to save companies millions of dollars by reducing their Workers’ Compensation costs.  After saving companies an average of $2.5 million (in one case saving a walloping $8.5 million in less than 8 months) I spent the next four years unsuccessfully trying to convince other companies to engage me for my services.  I learned later that I was not speaking the same language as my prospects.  On one hand I safety professionals who tended to be risk averse and shy about introducing me to the decision makers in Operations. On the other hand I had safety professionals who couldn’t see how what I was suggesting was different from what they where already doing or were reluctant to engage outside services.  In cases where I did have access to the Operations leadership I was equally likely to either make a sale or stiff resistance.  Nothing I said would pique their interests.  I was flabbergasted; didn’t they WANT to reduce injuries and safe millions in months?  Ultimately that particular business venture was a victim of the great recession and I parted ways with the company for whom I had invented it.  Recently I was talking about my puzzling dilemma with the COO of a manufacturing firm and he told me that the average plant manager didn’t care about Workers’ Compensation costs since that was considered a corporate cost and generally wouldn’t effect the plant manager’s bonus.  With that explanation things started to make great sense.  People respond to the things that affect them personally.  If I had positioned things just a little bit differently I probably would have been wildly successful.

If safety professionals want to be successful they have to find a way to make the decision makers successful and that is easier than most people think. The answer is simple: find out what is important to decision makers and relate safety in terms that they can understand.  Safety professionals need to be careful however, and never EVER exaggerate or misrepresent the costs.

 

Filed under: Loss Prevention, Safety, Worker Safety, calculating the cost of injuries, direct and indirect cost of injuries., safety and costs

Post delayed this week

This week’s post will be delayed for at least 48 hours

Filed under: Safety

Response to the Open Letter From the 4695 Fatalities

St. John’s Cemetery, New Orleans

Dear Victims of Workplace Fatalities:

I received your letter last week, and while nothing I say or do will ever erase your tragedy I do hope I can help you to understand the state of workplace safety today. I hope you can receive this in the spirit in which it is intended. First, you are right I am a safety guy, but I am not THE safety guy. The workplace is complex system, and as such, there aren’t any easy solutions to problems.
Most workplaces are intrinsically unsafe, and it is only through all of us working together actively trying to make it less dangerous that we can ever see any real improvements in safety.
You seem to think that I am indifferent to your death; I can assure you that is absolutely not the case. Every safety person that I know who has lost someone on his or her watch carries that person’s death with them for the rest of his or her life. Do you think we are monsters? I have parents, siblings, in-laws, children and friends. Each of them could have just as easily have fallen. I know it may be tough to see now, but I can assure you that I care about your passing. Somehow you got the impression that you and I are different and that I somehow see myself as superior, it saddens me to think I might have said or done something that made you feel that way.
I am also an employee and I sometimes do stupid things, in fact, all of those things that you list as having lethal consequences I have done at one time or another. I took risks and I violated rules, and like you, I never expected that those things would get me killed. That doesn’t make me a hypocrite, it makes me human. As to your comment that it was my “job to make sure that your job didn’t kill you” well I’m afraid you are mistaken. Keeping the workplace safe is a shared responsibility, and before you ask “then what do we need you for?” I’m here because I have specialized skills and tools to help you work more safely. I’m here to coach you, train you, and mostly just to make better decisions. I didn’t squirm when you held me accountable. Nor did I take offense when you blamed me for your untimely demise. Believe me when I tell you that I will hold myself more accountable than you ever could. But blame is a useless exercise. There are many people who will blame you for your injury—whether it is warranted or not. Blame answers the question, “who is at fault?” and the discussion stops. I prefer to ask “what can we learn from this tragedy?” and “how can we prevent similar tragedies in the future?” As you point out, everyone makes mistakes, but nobody should have to die because of it. You counted on me to anticipate and correct hazards before I got hurt, but I needed you to help me. You understand the job better than the people who designed it, you are the expert and I need your help to make the job safer. I can’t correct these hazards if I can’t find them. I need you to report near misses, make suggestions on how to make the job safer, and to actively seek out and report hazards.
Speaking of mistakes, the way we used to handle the safety BINGO, and bonuses for zero injury days was a big one. In safety, we understand that the biggest cause of injuries are unsafe behaviors and our attempts to encourage workers to be more mindful of safety actually provided incentives for under reporting. People were going home with blood in their pockets to secure those bonuses. In my defense I will say my heart was in the right place, I’m just sorry that these things may have contributed to your death. I was deeply disappointed to learn that worker fatalities in the U.S. has spiked, but not for the reasons you seem to believe.
For the record, I had no say in outsourcing dangerous work. I would much rather have found a way to do the job’s profitably, efficiently, and safely. I have collaborated on kaisens to make sure that as we improve our processes we don’t do so at the expense of safety. I don’t see myself as a victim. I am management. I AM a leader. And most importantly I am a champion for worker safety. My success depends on your cooperation, compliance, and communication. If I resign and the only thing that changes in that equation is me; I think we will see a lot more bodies. Change is needed, but not just in me.
Are you being too hard on me? Well with 13 people dying in a workplace somewhere in the U.S. everyday I can honestly say we need to improve, but that’s not really what’s important. What’s important is that we continue to have a dialog about worker safety and fatalities. Yes, there are a few reactionary crack pots who fire-off poorly-spelled, frothy, poison pen letters to authors with whom they disagree. And yes, there are some misguided safety professionals who boot people out of groups on LinkedIn because they don’t like the message, and yes there are even some closed-minded professionals who want to silence all debate in the name of civility. But that is the minority in our profession. Many of us actively seek out opinions different from our own, and agree with the criticisms and honestly want to have those discussions. Our culture must change. But I can’t lead it. In fact, I play a relatively small role in improving the culture such that it values safety. You play a much bigger role in improving our culture’s view of safety. The culture didn’t kill you, and maybe your death will be the catalyst for you change; I can’t say, but I hope so. I don’t see myself as under-appreciated or doing a thankless job. My thanks comes from the satisfaction that while my work may never get to a place where the workplace is completely safe, I know things are getting better. I will never know how many lives I’ve saved or how much human suffering I have prevented, but deep in my heart I take great comfort in knowing that in this battle for workplace safety I took a stand. And I know that I made a difference. I will never get wealthy being the safety guy, some will never respect me, and still others may mock me, or accuse me of being out of touch. But come tomorrow I will be here, fighting the good fight and carrying your death with me. My best may never be good enough, but let’s see your baboon do that. Sincerely, The Safety Guy

Filed under: Safety

The Safe Side: May Edition Just Hit the News Stand

The magazine asked me to write a series on the different specialties with safety.  This is the third in the series (click the link to read the article).

Filed under: Safety

An Open Letter to Safety Professionals from the 4,690 Workers Who Died on the Job in the United States in 2010

St. John’s Cemetary, New Orleans

Note: I thought long and hard about writing what you are about to read.  Whenever I have taken issue with the self-congratulatory tone and self-righteous complacency that I see dangerously prevalent among safety professionals the ensuing storm of bile and abuse heaped on me has, at times, made me consider bagging it—stopping the blog, ending the speeches, and retiring from my gigs as a safety columnist.  But after more than a decade of decline the workplace death toll in the U.S. has risen.  In 2010, while some of you were jetting off to Brazil on your citizen diplomat boon-doggle an average of 13 workers died a day.  If you get offended by the truth; stop reading.  If you do read on, save us both time and aggravation and spare me your outraged venomous hate mail, I don’t want to hear it and all it does is convince me of the veracity of my message.  What follows is perhaps my magnum opus of provocative work. I dedicate it to my father who died of me, my brother-in-law who died of lung cancer after working for decades on Zug Island, once listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the dirtiest square mile on the planet Earth, my brother who suffered permanent memory loss after an industrial accident, my many friends who died in industrial accidents but most especially to Patrick Burger (and others like him) who has taken such extraordinary measures to try attack and insult me in an effort to silence my message.

Dear Safety Guy:

I hope you are doing well and are enjoying this lovely weather with family and friends.  I don’t want to your harsh buzz or bust up the barbecue, but I died in the workplace this week and I want you to know that I am deeply disappointed in you.  You see, I trusted you and you failed me. And not just me, 12 other guys died along side me and 13 of us died yesterday, and another 13 tomorrow, in fact, every day; day in and day out.  4,690 of us in all…wait that’s not quite right another 50,000 or so died from illnesses caused by working waste deep in poisons or breathing in chemicals that would kill us slowly, horribly.

Some of us died because we did stupid things, some of us weren’t adequately trained, some of us under estimated the dangers we faced, and some of us over estimated our skills, but none of us expected to die. None of reported for work expecting to get killed. None of our lives were any less valuable than yours and before you get all self righteous it wasn’t my job not to die, it was YOUR job to make sure my job didn’t kill me.  But I DID die, and I doubt you will ever get a verbal warning.

As I write this I can see you squirm.  Does it make you uncomfortable for me to hold you accountable? Is it unfair that I blame you for something that I did that killed me?  After all, how—you ask—can I hold you accountable for my own stupidity? You didn’t tell me to do the things that I did to day that ultimately got me killed.  But it was your job to keep me alive.  I certainly didn’t do those things that I did because I wanted more butt time (as I’ve heard you describe to your colleagues at conferences or huddled around a coffee talking about how stupid we all are).  I screwed up, and that screw up got me killed.  Everyone makes mistakes, but nobody should have to die because of a mistake made at work. I counted on you to anticipate and correct the things that would kill me before I got hurt; where were you when I died?

I really liked the safety BINGO, and I sure loved the extra money when we got as a bonus for zero injury days.  Were you too stupid to know that these things created an environment where we were essentially bribed to stay quiet about injuries? Or did you just recklessly disregard the fact that you were creating incident statistics that lulled the decision makers into a false sense of security regarding our risk level? I knew what you were doing was wrong but I wasn’t about to turn the whole company against me and speak up.  Congratulations on having such a great safety record; how does my death look on your resume?

I can only imagine how disappointed you were to learn that worker fatalities in the U.S. has spiked—I think we all figured that when we sourced all that the really dangerous work out to the Third World that we were home free.  I feel kind of bad about it now—the after life is full Third World workers who bought it because their lives were thought to be so much cheaper than mine. It turns out they weren’t that much different from me.  They had families who loved them, wives and children who counted on them. All they wanted to do was go to work, make a buck, and come home safe. They had lives snatched away from them same as me; just cause we showed up for work.

I know that as you read this you are tempted to excuse yourself and tell yourself that my death isn’t your fault.  That management put profits before safety; that the Union shut down what you wanted to do; that you can’t protect people when they won’t listen to you, and all that other crap I’ve heard you say a thousand times.  Stop feeling sorry for yourself; you aren’t the victim here.  Before you blame management… the last time I checked most of you ARE management.  The same goes for leadership—isn’t that what you are supposed to be, a leader? If a juggler can’t do his job guess what? he drops a couple of balls;  no harm, no foul.  If YOU are incompetent, people DIE; I DIED. 4,695 other people died. If you can’t hack it, get out of the game.  Stop worrying about the condition of your 401K and retire or change careers; become a florist, that way the only thing at risk of dying because of your ineptitude is a dozen carnations.

Remember how much we all enjoyed your children’s safety poster contest? Now it just seems sad.  How about all those pictures of people doing unsafe things? Remember how we’d laugh about how stupid they were? somehow it’s just not that funny anymore. Did you really think you were making a difference with that crap?

Think I’m being too hard on you? Think you deserve some credit for doing your best? Screw you, I can get a baboon in here to do its best. Your best doesn’t measure up.  Your best gets people killed.  And I don’t believe for a second that you were doing your best when I died.  It’s not like you weren’t warned.  When people posted things on blogs or magazines that were critical of your profession you chose to get indignant and hammered out a “how dare you insult the hard working men and women of the august profession of worker health and safety blah blah blah”, you remember that don’t you? It was a hell of a lot easier to write an indignant email telling your peers to tell that guy to shut up than it was to consider for one microsecond that you might have to do something different.  And now even in the face of my death you are still too arrogant to consider that there might be a better way.

Was it the culture that killed me? Did you see all the signs that we were ripe for a fatality?  Did you storm around the office saying if someone doesn’t do something that someone was going to die? Did “you tell the bastards”?  Well if you continued to take a paycheck in a hopeless environment where leaders didn’t care about the safety of the workers I decry you as a craven and fool.

I know you see yourself as under appreciated and doing a thankless job.  Well I’m dead and thanks for nothing. You aren’t a hero; you don’t even deserve a footnote in my obituary.  You get no thanks because there is nothing you’ve done that deserves the smallest modicum of gratitude.

Before you wrap yourself in the blanket of “there was no way I could have prevented his death” there are plenty of people working for change and we NEED change.  These people work against impossible odds against people just like you. You have a decision: you can either be on the side of change or be part of the forces lined up against it.  You can either save lives or save your twisted sense of self righteousness; you choose, and for the first time in your life be prepared to live with the consequences of your choices; I doubt you have that in you.So what now? My role in this argument ends at the grave.  What will you do next? Between now and Monday, 26 more workers will die in the U.S. and ten times that worldwide.  Will it just be a statistic? Will it be a shame?  What will you differently in response to my death? Do you care even a little bit? Are you more concerned about saving lives or saving your own ass?

Sincerely,

4,695 dead workers and counting

Filed under: Safety, 2010 worker fatalities, Safety, worker fatalities

When is Safe Safe Enough?

By Phil La Duke

Four Burros in the Back of a Pick Up Truck

As is frequently the case, last week one of the editors of one of the premier safety public reached out to me (as well as a lot of other top safety professionals) to ask a question that he hoped would generate some discussion.  While his question was limited to the U.S., I think it is of universal interest. The question revolved around the general opinion that safety, as a discipline was no longer necessary, more succinctly put, has the world reached the conclusion that the world is safe enough? And if so what should the safety professional do about it?

Worldwide there is a growing attitude that we have achieved a point of acceptable and manageable risk of workplace injury. In other words, more and more people are beginning to see safety as anachronistic, out-dated, and excessive. With workers, employers, the public, the media, and lawmakers all seemingly having reached this conclusion, I am haunted by the deeper question, “are they right?”

There is a growing population that believes that safety, as a function, has outlived its usefulness.  After all, they argue, injuries are down and workplace fatalities have continued falling.  The low hanging fruit has been picked and the kind of improvements that remain will be too costly to ever return anything on the necessary investment.

How Safe is Safe Enough?

For decades now, the safety profession has been working without a goal.  We have preached the heretic gospel of “zero injuries” even though wiser men from other disciplines have told us such goals were counter productive.  We have embraced fad after fad, lie after lie, and goofball methodology after goofball methodology.  Hell, we can’t even agree on a standard definition of the word “safety”. We have been so remiss in establishing a vision of what exactly constitutes acceptable risk that the public, employers, and governments have finally decided for us.  Last year 141 people died in Michigan workplaces. This number doesn’t include those who died from illnesses after spending a career working in poisonous work environments.  There was a time when 141 dead would be an outrage, but now it’s barely considered a shame.  This is a war of public opinion and we lost it.  We’ve openly and ferociously embraced quackery that lead to gross under reporting.  We’ve trumpeted our accomplishments in lowering workers’ compensation fraud.  Basically we’ve spent the last three decades worrying more about convincing the world what a swell job we’ve done and now…well congratulations nobody needs us.

But Is It Fair?

Maybe the workplace has gotten safer but why?  About 25 years ago, I worked at an automotive assembly plant.  Injuries were frequent, but seldom recorded. A lot has changed, but that doesn’t mean that factories are now “safe” places to work. If we assume that injuries remained constant for the past 30 years how could we account for the data that shows otherwise? Fact don’t lie, right? Wrong.  First of all as awareness of the importance reporting injuries rise so too does the reporting.   For many years workers didn’t know that they were expected to report injuries, weren’t encouraged to do so, and may even have been ridiculed or disciplined for trying.  Then, as enforcement and awareness grew, more people reported injuries and the rate seemed to rise, even though the number of injuries may have stayed flat (or even fell).  Decades of questionable safety improvements (as well as many legitimate ones) brought the number of recordables down.

The data we have are statistics and it’s been said that statistics lie and liars use statistics.  In fact, 43% of all statistics are made up.  Again, let’s assume that the number of actual (not recordable) injuries has remained static over the last three decades what could account for a decrease in recorded injuries if actual injuries remain flat? Several variables can skew the data:

• Increased awareness by corporate doctors and clinics on how treatment decisions can impact safety statistics (the difference in medication can make the difference between first aid cases and recordable injuries.  Simply teaching doctors and clinics how their decisions impact corporate safety performance metrics can account for a decrease in recordables without an appreciable difference in the frequency or severity of injuries.

• Incentive programs that reward or encourage under-reporting of injuries.  Too many programs (and I have beaten this topic to death) punish people for being injured while rewarding the “blood in the pocket” syndrome where workers seek medical care outside the workplace to avoid spoiling the safety record. In this scenario the actual number and severity of injuries can remain static while under reporting improves the safety stats.

• A move toward subcontracting of the more dangerous jobs.  Faced with a financial decision of removing a hazard or subcontracting the work to a smaller and less enticing a target of enforcement many companies pass the risk on to contractors.  Many smaller contractors are far less devout in their adherence to the law and safety policy.  In these cases, the client company appears to approve its safety record when it has done nothing to reduce injuries or risk.

• Shipping the most dangerous jobs to third-world countries.  In the slobber of corporate greed that has typified the last several decades countless jobs have been exported to the third world.  The most common explanation is that these emerging economies have far cheaper labor markets; this is true.  But it is also true that these countries have little or no environmental or safety standards.  While it is accurate to state that many of these countries have more stringent environmental or safety standards than the U.S. but the agencies tasked with enforcement are either so lax or corrupt that they might as well not even exist. Improving workplace safety by exporting the most dangerous jobs to more accommodating environs is like improving public school performance by expelling all the stupid kids (or all the students who can’t earn a C+ or better grade if you prefer a more politically palatable analogy.)

• Fear of Job Loss.  It may be counter-intuitive that injury rates fall in tough economies.  Many believe that, fearing job loss; most injured workers will fake an injury and collect Workers’ Compensation rather than unemployment.  Unfortunately, this opinion is not supported by the facts.  Many workers fear that an injury—even a minor one—will make a dismissal more likely AND make it more difficult to find another job. Again, we have a situation where injury rates appear to fall when they are actually remaining steady or even increasing.

To what extent have these factors muddied our view of safety? No one can say.  But let’s not kid ourselves about the veracity of the data that suggests that the workplaces in the U.S. are necessarily any safer.

Taking Credit Where None Is Due

Safety, as a profession, has been quick to claim responsibility for the utopian workplace in which we now find ourselves.  But there are plenty of things that have made the workplace safer that had little or nothing to do with the performance of the safety professional:

• Process advances.  Let’s face it, everything from PPE to machine controls to Kaizen has had a profound impact on what improvements, to what extent have these advancements improved worker safety? No one can say for sure but many believe this contribution has been substantial and the evidence of this is the millions of dollars spent by industry on Lean, Six Sigma, ergonomic assists, and similar efforts.

• Automation.  Walter Ruether once predicted that “automation will be the salvation of the working man” and, at least as far as safety is concerned, he may have been right.  Similar to technological advances automation has eliminated many of the most back breaking jobs once done manually.  When I worked in that assembly plant they still used lead to fill the seams in the bodies of automobiles (no I didn’t work in the lead filler booth so save your wise cracks), bumpers and fenders were man-handled into position, and seats were loaded by hand.  All of this work is now down by robots (or at very least using lift assists). It depends on how loosely one defines “safety professional” but much of this equipment was purchased to improve production speed and to eliminate labor not to protect the worker.  Was there an ancillary safety pay-off? sure, but that was just a serendipitous boon for most companies.

When Does Safety Go Too Far?

Years ago I was working with an aerospace manufacturer who was purchasing some equipment from one of the Big Three auto companies.  As the equipment was loaded into the truck fifteen people stood around ensuring that no one was harmed completing the task.  I was just finishing an engagement implementing an organizational change with the aerospace company and the scene made a profound impact on the management team. At one of our monthly safety strategy team

What can the EHS profession do to prevent being marginalized?

1. Wake Up. Denial is a nice place to visit but you can’t live there.  I have been the obnoxious voice nagging safety to recognize that as a profession it has lost touch with reality. We convinced the world that we have won the war on workplace injuries and now we are terrified that the public wants to bring the troops back home.  After polio was cured, what happened to funding for polio research? What happened to the demand for polio researchers?  There is a reason that items are always the last place you look for them, because continuing to look means you’re an imbecile.
2. Stop wasting time and money.  I’ve already written a body of work on how the EHS profession needs to look for ways to support and align with Operations strategy and to make a real contribution to the bottom line.  The reaction has been…well let’s just say I don’t get a lot of thank you notes from the Safety establishment.  Safety has to broaden its scope and probably will follow Quality into corporate extinction.  This isn’t a bad thing.  Safety professionals can make a far greater impact as part of a continuous improvement and productivity enhancement effort than it ever did telling workers to watch their steps and to be careful because their kids love them.  While a world without a safety professional may seem scary it should excite and reinvigorate those who have always yearned for greater respect and credibility in the organization.  Safety professionals who have long bemoaned their inability to effect real change take note; this will allow you to make a difference.
3. Wait for the next Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to get the public riled up. Before we get ourselves all twisted and frothy about winning the war on injuries, let’s remember that a lot of what the public believes about workplace safety is a fragile, excremental, fable that will come crashing down after the next horrific workplace tragedy.  In a world of uncertainty, one absolute remains: corporate greed and the lust for profits will eventually turn the tide of public opinion.  The conditions are all in place for a truly abhorrent workplace slaughter and when it happens public opinion will swing 180 degrees.

Filed under: Safety, Have we gone overboard on Safety, public opinion of safety, Safety, Worker Safety

Brother Can You Spare A Time?

By Phil La Duke

Phil La Duke presenting in Lima Peru at the XIV Seminario Internacional De Segurida (sorry I don't have one from the Michigan Safety Conference and i like this picture)

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
    —Margaret Mead

This week I delivered to speeches at the Michigan Safety Conference to standing room only crowds at the DeVos Center in Grand Rapids, MI. This conference has been around for 80-some odd years and was founded by businessmen who decided that the number of injuries in Michigan workplaces had become unconscionable. (An interesting aside is that one of the founders was the father of the late U.S. President Gerry Ford.) For years, buoyed by the auto industry, furniture manufacturers, and other booming industry the Michigan Safety Conference thrived.  But the Great Recession has really hit the safety shows hard and that is an issue for all of us.

This isn’t going to be an impassioned plea to save our poor beleaguered professional conferences. In fact—at least the Michigan Safety Conference—professional conferences are thriving (well at least as much as any not-for-profit can be said to be thriving in today’s bruised and battered economy.) Nor will this be a condemnation of the out-of-touch and bloated international organizations that justly deserve to dry up and blow away (look for that in this week’s post on the Rockford Greene International blog www.rockfordgreeneinternational.wordpress.com).  Instead I thought I would devote this week’s post to the need for you (yes, YOU) to get more involved in this very important, if not essential, element of the safety profession: the professional organization.

As I said, my speeches were well attended (thanks to the many of you who stopped by and introduced yourself it was truly great meeting all of you), and better attended than most.  That, I believe, had more to do with my shameless self-promotion than the quality of my speeches, but that’s a discussion for another time.  Because my speeches were so well attended I had many conference organizers put the bite on me to become a board member, lead a professional group, or take on some other pivotal leadership role in the organization.  I turned them all down flat.  Not because I am lazy.  Not because I don’t have time. And certainly not because I don’t think these positions aren’t important.  No, I turned them down because I have seen too many organizations that were ruined because the leadership drifted away because the leadership was taken over by vendors.  While it’s true that Rockford Greene International drives the bulk of it’s income through my writing and speaking, about a third of the income still comes from “fixing broken companies” or, more correctly stated, helps companies move from good to great when it come to one or more of the SQDCME elements of business.  Does that sound like a commercial? Is it irritating? Is it something you would be happy if you had to pay to hear it? Well that’s what you get when vendors are running the organizations.

What Do We Need?

There is a lot of work that goes into making a professional organization successful and many hands make light work. A good professional organization teaches the novices the tricks of the trade, alerts the veterans of new and emerging issues, and informs everyone of changes in the laws or innovations that make our jobs easier.  For that these organizations need people who work in the field and struggle with the issues that are most important to their peers.  Why is it so important that people with field experience take on these roles:

• Credibility.  A conference planned by cross section of safety professionals from across a variety of industries can defend the choices of topics, policies, speakers, location of conferences, etc. You know what is important to you and you know what you DON’T want in a professional organization.  Don’t turn that over to academics and vendors; you won’t like the result.
• Knowledge. One of the most important roles of committee members is selecting the speakers and being able to vet the ones who are experts from those who are boring, unprofessional, or full of…well…let’s go with “hot air”.
• Impartial Commitment To the Improvement Of the Profession.  Sure there are some vendors out there who are sincerely trying to push the profession to new and exciting areas. I would like to think I am one of those people.  But when you sell hammers the entire world looks like a nail and even the most altruistic vendor tends to succumb to a sales pitch if given the opportunity.   Even though I am basically selling expertise, I doubt I could remain fair and impartial when planning events that clearly promote things that I routinely denounce as excremental drillings of mouth breathing brutes.  Additionally, I am a safety journalist and my helping to plan events that I am ultimately responsible for covering as part of the safety press puts me in situations where I might face conflicts of interest.
• Practical Experience.  Someone who works in the field understands what their peers will find valuable and what they will find wastrel (although I am beginning to wonder about this after the American Society of Safety Engineers sponsored a People to People Citizen’s Ambassador delegation that sent safety professionals (largely on their employer’s dimes) on the mother-of-all-boondoggles trip to Brazil in the worst part of the Great Recession. Don’t take my word for it check out the proud write up on its website http://societyupdate.asse.org/2011/12/asse-delegation-travels-to-brazil/ . ) And because you work in the field you can be a better judge of what will make sense to your constituency.
• Expertise. Many of the people who come belong to these professional organizations do so because they are struggling with a professional issue.  Your expertise can help thousands by volunteering to lead your professional organization.
• Leverage.  In the U.S. (and listen up Europe because this is a lesson you need to learn) the cost of attending professional conferences is kept to affordable levels in a large part because of the fees paid by vendors who exhibit at the expos that so frequently accompany the shows.  The cost for exhibiting is not inconsequential, but if gently prodded by a customer that represents a substantial amount of business, even the most reluctant vendor can be swayed.  Vendors, academics, and the press don’t have any leverage; you can do what the rest of us can’t.
• Pull Within Your Organization.  Corporate sponsorship is another key to keeping the price of attendance down, and having an inside contact who can solicit this important patronage is invaluable and unique to someone who works in the field.  Sure, it’s true that vendors are also key sources of these sponsorships they are even more likely to continue to do so if asked by their customers rather than by an employee.

I’m not letting academics, vendors, and the press off the hook.  We still need to participate by making speeches, covering the events in magazines and blogs, and exhibiting, but we need to stay off the boards and committees.  I have seen more than one professional organization ruined because the vendors and academics took the wheel and drove the organization into the nearest ditch; a ditch of irrelevancy, inappropriateness, condescension, pretension, and pedantic garbage.

Filed under: Safety, Professional Organizations, Volunteering

Making Safety Talks Better

This week I will be delivering tow presentations at the Michigan Safety Conference in Grand Rapids, MI.  With between 1,500 and 2,000 expected attendees, the Michigan Safety Conference is one of the largest regional conferences in the world (in fact, it is far larger than many International safety conferences.) For those of you who won’t be attending, I thought you might like to see an advanced, sneak peak, of my talk.—Phil

Somewhere in the world right now a worker is being injured, and the response to that injury will be a ham-fisted, hackneyed “safety talk” that will amount to little more than an admonishment that workers had ought to be a damned site more careful in the future..

All over the world the same scenario plays out: a worker is injured, a likely cause is determined, the safety professional is asked to put together a safety talk, that a supervisor may or may not do a quality job delivering a brief speech to the team. Far too often, the delivery of a safety talk is a lackluster, half-hearted, non-event that bores the worker and inconveniences the supervisor.

Why Safety Talks Need to Be Better

Safety talks are the single most common device used to communicate a hazard that has already injured someone.  When done well, a safety talk can be instrumental in helping to contain a hazard until it can be permanently corrected.  Safety talks are quick to deploy, easy to deliver, and inexpensive.  But safety talks are often slapped together, poorly planned, and not taken seriously by supervisors and workers.

Issues With Safety Talks

A principle problem with safety talks is that they tend to be reactionary and external to our safety strategy—scarce few safety talks are given before someone has been injured, rather they tend to be given to alert workers of a danger that has already harmed someone else.  Even as organizations try to be more and more proactive, safety talks remain a reactive and ineffectual response to a single contributor instead of a well thought out discussion about a hazard or system problem. Beyond poorly created or ill-timed safety talks in many case the “safety talk” consists of a supervisor passing a written “talk” around and having the team members read and sign the “talk”; the entire exercise is a pointless waste of time.

Another issue I have with safety talks is that they perpetuate the idea that safety is somehow external to the core business systems. Far from hardwiring safety within our business systems, safety talks remind us that there are inconvenient little impediments to our job that the safety department wants us to address in addition to our work.

Tips for Making Safety Talks Better

• Discontinue the yearlong safety talk schedules. Many organizations buy or create a year’s worth of safety talks and carefully schedule a weekly or monthly talk months ahead of time.  Here is a newsflash—YOU AREN’T WRITING A SAFETY MAGAZINE.  It’s cute that you like to pretend that your safety talk program has an editorial agenda, but “cute” turns off workers, embarrasses supervisors and generally trivializes the topic being presented.  Your safety talk topic should be directly aligned to changes in operations that temporarily heighten a particular risk.
• Create Safety Dialogs Not Monologs. Believe it or not, the people who have the most exhaustive and highest quality body of knowledge about the safety of the workplace are the workers themselves.  By structuring the safety talk as a conversation instead of recrimination or condescension not only can the supervisor communicate important safety information but he or she can also receive important suggestions for making the workplace safer.  The safety talk should be a conversation, not a speech.
• Eliminate Safety Sermons. Having a dialog about the potential process failures is important, but unless the person initiating the dialog is very careful, the talk can quickly degrade into a lecture about how people ought to be more careful. Those who initiate pre-shift dialog must be mindful that the intent of such activities is as much to gather information, as it is to disseminate it

So instead of having a supervisor read a script designed to warn workers of a hazard, the focus should be on engaging the workers. A pre-shift dialog might sound something like this:

Leader: Good morning everyone, let’s take a look at what we have in store for us today. For starters, our standard production number is twenty, but we have four special orders that we need to work into our shift. We will also have a customer visit today and they will be in our area at about 11:30 a.m. So what are the challenges we’re likely to face making today’s goals?

Team Member 1: Well, at 11:30 we are scheduled to take our lunch break, so that shouldn’t effect us in any way.

Team Member 2: Yes, but if it’s possible maybe it would be smart to move the time? I’m just thinking that the customers might want to see us working. I know that having visitors in the area means we have to be extra alert, but I think it’s worth it.

Leader: I think that’s a great suggestion, but I don’t know how full their schedule is. I’ll check it out.

Team Member 3: We also need to consider that they may have a particular process that they want to see . . . it’s not necessarily that they don’t care what we do here, but they may have other priorities.

Team Member 1: And we need to remember that just because they are scheduled to be here at 11:30, they may turn out to be early or late. And if they are expecting production to be down, they may not wear the appropriate PPE. We should have some on hand just in case.

This example may seem implausible to some, but I have seen actual meetings very much like this on a regular basis. The focus is on the process and protecting both the people from the process and vice versa. Notice that the tone of the discussion centers on changes and what that means to the process. Since the process is ostensibly designed so that no one gets hurt, even the smallest changes to the process can heighten the risk of disrupting operations, mistakes, defects, and injuries. Discussing safety in the context in which the work is performed is far more effective than reading a sheet about blood-borne pathogens.

• Ask the workers to suggest topics. As I previously mentioned, workers have a wealth of information about the dangers in the workplace, and a good way to address the topics they feel are most relevant is to ask them for their suggestions.  You may get the occasional wise crack, but even wise cracks can be important windows into the overall mood and atmosphere of the workplace.
• Involve the supervisor in writing the talks. Perhaps the greatest influence on the level of success of a safety talks is the performance of the supervisor, to whit, if a supervisor thinks the safety talk isn’t necessary or credible he or she will likely not be able to deliver the talk with the sincerity it requires.  A key way to ensure that the safety talks resonates with supervisors is to enlist their aid in developing a safety talk that is appropriate to the specific hazards associated with their work areas and processes.
• Embed safety topics in pre-shift huddles or rounds. Consider, for example, a daily pre-shift meeting where the team discusses unusual circumstances that they will face in the work for the day ahead.  In law enforcement and security they call these meetings &”roll calls”, in manufacturing these meetings are called & “huddle meetings” and in healthcare these meetings are often referred to as “rounds” (okay rounds are a bit different, but for our purposes they serve a similar purpose) but whatever the sessions are called, the intent is the same: to identify the process variation that jeopardizes the optimum performance of the tasks required. The purpose of a pre-shift huddle or making the rounds in a work area is to discuss the challenges associated with the day’s work.  Safety needs to be embedded into these talks not treated as a separate topic.
• Be timely and relevant.  It may seem like it goes without saying that safety talks have the greatest impact when they are delivered in propinquity to an event or hazardous situation. For example, if a manufacturer is running a batch of prototype parts or a hospital gears up for a holiday weekend it would be wise to have a safety talk about the issues associated with these deviations from the standard shortly before those events.
• Be proactive. A good safety talk should be the result of an analysis of changes from the standard operating conditions. Using the examples above, the model changes may change the physical foot print of the process and workers may need to work outside the normal work area. Or the holiday weekend may bring more injured and inebriated into the Emergency department of the hospital.  In either case the safety talk should be a proactive discussion of the contingency plans that Operations has developed for dealing with these possible situations.
• Create safety talks in-house. There are many high quality safety talks that are commercially available.  These products should be used as templates and must be customized for use in your environment.  Commercial safety talks can never address your specific needs, but they do form a nice template from which to work.
• Link safety talks to near misses. Near misses—situations where an injury could have occurred but didn’t—provide excellent opportunity to talk about safety in real-life and relevant terms.  Workers will respond far better to something that almost happened over something that theoretically could happen.  While it is often difficult to get workers to report near misses it is usually quite easy to have them share their experiences through the telling of “war stories”. Using safety talks to share the results of read across (the practice of determining where else in the organization a similar problem might exist to cause problems.
• Avoid the safety horror stories. Too often safety talks become horror stories like those devised to frighten children into behaving.  Adults don’t respond well to condescension or scare tactics.  Present the fact of the hazard openly, honestly, and accurately and spare the hyperbole.

Preparing The Supervisors To Make Better Safety Talks

The biggest factor in whether or not safety talks/pre-shift dialogs improve the competency and credibility of those who deliver them.  Many safety professionals are quick to criticize the performance of the supervisor far fewer are prepared to do anything about it. Supervisors and team leaders should be trained in active listening. The safety professionals should coach these individuals in how to draw individuals into a conversation by talking to them rather than at them. Ideally, the safety professional will demonstrate the correct way to have a dialog about safety in the larger operational context and will model this behavior in his or her everyday work.

Safety talks shouldn’t be discontinued, but they do need to be dramatically redesigned so that they are a part of a larger conversation about keeping the organization running smoothly. After all, what organization can accurately claim that it is efficiently operating and successful at anything when it injures its workers in the pursuit of its goals?

Filed under: Safety, Michigan Safety Conference, Safety Improvements, safety talks