New Year’s Resolutions for Safety Professionals

By Phil La Duke

I know it’s kind of a cheese-ball move but I thought I would devote this week’s blog to New Year’s resolutions for safety professionals.

Resolution #1: Less Focus On Preaching More On Teaching

Awareness campaigns are important for the unaware. But most workers who ultimately get hurt do so knowing something they know is dangerous, or at very least that they suspected COULD be dangerous.  Too many awareness campaigns make safety professionals feel good about themselves but come off as smug and condescending to workers.  So in 2013, safety professionals should resolve to spend more time and effort teaching workers core skills and competencies and less time telling them trite stories about workplace bogeymen.

Resolution #2: Open A Dialog.

Recently I posted about the dangers of complacency only to have many well-meaning safety professionals commented on how battling complacency underscored the need for daily safety talks.  This set me to wondering about the entire notion of lectures on a given safety topic each morning.  In the minds of so many workers, safety talks are just so much blah blah blah; yet another lecture from a guy who doesn’t have a clue what they do or how they do it.  But most safety professionals I know don’t mean for the safety talk to be a one-sided conversation.  Few safety professionals that I know actually think that they know the job better than the workers themselves, so why not enter 2013 resolving to engage the workers in a dialog about safety.  Instead of a Safety Talk, led by the safety guy or supervisor, safety professionals should be facilitators of conversations between the workers themselves on where the risks of the jobs lie.

Resolution #3: Expand the Scope of Safety

Safety professionals tend to be fairly limited in scope: protect workers from being injured. Many safety professionals focus so intently on the specifics of the job that they lose sight of opportunities afforded to them by partnering with other functions.  The Continuous Improvement group can help safety to streamline the jobs such that the jobs become more efficient and safer.  The Quality group can provide important tools for quantifying the value of safety and help safety to better communicate in terms that business leaders understand, and the Human Resources department can help the Safety professional to craft safety policies and work rules that make sense and are better able to meet the dynamic needs of the modern workplace. 2013 will be the year that Safety collaborates with as many other functions as possible.

Resolution #4: Get in the Game

Safety professionals have been on the sidelines for too long.  Too few safety professionals see themselves as being essential contributors to the company’s bottom line.  Safety professionals should resolve to contribute more value to the company’s bottom line.  Safety professionals should look for ways to negotiate better rates for safety expendables (like gloves, or safety glasses), anticipate the need for training like hazard mat or other training that workers might need to enable them to go places and do things that competition can’t.  Safety should resolve to make itself an invaluable contributor to the core business and reduce the overhead costs of the company.

Resolution #5: Get Competitive

Safety professionals should be as hungry for competitive advantage as the sales force.  The best in safety aren’t looking to do what the other guys are doing, rather, they look to one-up the competition.  Safety needs to be about more than injury statistics and numbers, safety should be a differentiator—a means of being better than the competition. Safety should resolve to not only make the workplace safer, but in so doing make it a more competitive company.

Resolution #6: Embrace the “Healthy” Side of Health and Safety

Almost every safety professional I know has the word Health (or at least the initial H) in their titles. But even though it is ostensibly the responsibility of the Safety professional scare little is done to improve the physical condition of the workers.  Even if there isn’t budget for improving worker health there is certainly a financial incentive for improving worker health.  Sometimes workers resent campaigns aimed at getting them healthier. Safety professionals should resolve to reduce the stress in the workplace and to make worker’s lives better by keeping them healthier and feeling better.

Resolution #7: Turn Safety On Its Ear

Safety needs a shake up.  Too many organizations have created bloated safety infrastructures that are slow to move and unable to react to the nimble business world. As companies start to shake of the economic malaise that has beset business worldwide many leaders are more open to ideas that they previously wouldn’t have considered. Safety professionals should resolve to try new things in safety this year.

Resolution #8: Question Everything

Part of turning safety on its ear involves rethinking many of the cherished truisms of worker safety. Safety professionals should resolve to question everything it does and be able to defend all the things it has taken for granted.

Resolution 9: Take Chances

It’s no secret that Safety as a profession tends to attract more than its fair share of risk adverse people.  But taking calculated chances leads to innovation and discovery. Safety professionals should resolve to take more chances, try new things and explore different ways to make the workplace a better and safer place to work.

Resolution 10: Enjoy Life More

Sometimes working in safety feels like working under the Sword of Damocles when injury rates are high, safety professionals feel the crushing pressure to get things under control and when injury levels are down, safety professionals feel the chronic unease that comes with waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Safety is important, no question. But working in safety can be rewarding, intellectually stimulating, and well…dare I say it? Fun.  Safety professionals should make 2013 the year that they cut themselves a little slack and learn to enjoy their accomplishments.

#new-years-resolution, #preachy-safety-professionals, #safety-talks, #worker-complacency, #worker-safety

Doing It Right: Investing in Basic Skills Training Is a Key to A Safe Workplace

 

By Phil La Duke

An efficient workplace is typically a safe workplace. Injuries are a cost waste—last week on the Rockford Greene International website I spent a fair amount of digital ink exploring the many direct and indirect costs associated with injuries.  When workers are injured the company has effectively invested in hurting workers and the investment yields nothing of value.  Hurting workers is bad business. Few will contest the waste that is endemic to worker injuries. But preventing injuries has become a cottage industry and despite the billions companies spend in this pursuit; despite all the convoluted models and onerous infrastructures scarce few organizations are any closer to figuring things out.

I learned a long time ago that when faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem the best thing to do is to return to the basics.  Several weeks ago I posted my take on the pillars of an effective safety management system http://rockfordgreeneinternational.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/the-pillars-of-successful-safety-management/ but I didn’t really have the space to explore these pillars in detail.

There are five kinds of training that are important for creating an efficient and safe workplace: On boarding, core business skills, problem solving, technical competency, and regulatory training.

On Boarding

On boarding is the cutesy term Human Resources give to the period from the time of hire to the first 90 days or so on the job.  Effective on boarding (formerly called new employee orientation) is critical—it creates the strongest sense of the corporate values that employees will ever get.  New employees have a strong desire to learn the corporate norms and conform to them. On boarding is more than walking the new employee through the new hire paperwork, effective on boarding will introduce the workers to the expectations the organization has for safety.

On boarding is easy to screw up. Workers understand that what the company SAYS is important isn’t always what it rewards and reinforces.  The tone and values communicated in the on boarding process generally are more powerful than any other form of training.  Presentations by speakers and time spent in the classroom should be a very small portion of this kind of training. And veteran coworkers should be prepared to reinforce the standards and safe practices.  In fact, preparing veterans for their roles in on boarding new employees is an ideal way to reconnect them to safe practices from which they may have drifted.

Core Business Skills

It’s mind boggling how many companies ignore the need for their workers to have a basic understanding of how the business makes money. Years ago, I travelled to Communist Hungary where I provided, among other things, training in the business of manufacturing.  Workers can only be a meaningful part of process improvement and world-class operations when they have an application-level understanding of the practical considerations of operating a business in a given economic sector.  While companies are often quick to dismiss potential vendors because they lack insufficient experience in a business sector, these same organizations are content to hire workers who possess only the most marginal experience in their industry. Beyond the obvious, and oft repeated, need for worker to possess the core skills required of their jobs, training is also essential for workers to participate in problem solving, understanding the subtle nuances of their jobs, and to truly internalize the risks associated with their jobs.

Providing core business skills to all employees typically pays handsomely. Years ago I remember a study (from Harvard Review I think) that claimed that businesses tend to see a 35:1 return ratio for training (that means they saw a return on investment of $35 for every dollar spent.) Of course that ratio is only as good as the training, and there is a lot of crap out there so businesses should really retain only the most skilled and competent training providers.

Problem Solving

Perhaps the most overlooked training that has an important role in making the workplace safer is Problem Solving training.  Good problem solving training should provide analytic skills that workers can use to spot potential hazards, contain them, and recommend ways to correct the issues and prevent them from recurring. Problem solving teaches workers to think and to look for ways to improve the business. Toyoda, Drucker, Deming, et al believed that workers were the best source for improvement ideas. After all, they reasoned, those closest to the most basic business processes are best equipped to make informed suggestions for process improvement.

Technical Competency

When I joined the workforce of a Big Three automotive company in 1985, the extent to which I was trained was my boss handing me an air gun and telling me where to drive the screws to build the front seats for luxury cars. I grew up on a farm and had no occasion to work with compressed air-driven wrenches. I did my best and after months of self-instruction I managed to do a passable job.  I learned safety like most people, through near misses, injuries both minor and recordable, and anecdotes shared by veterans. This was a poor way to train new employees, but the company—like most companies of that time period—reckoned that training was a waste of money and valuable time. No one equated the skill level with which I did my job with the quality or safety with which I performed it. My quality was questionable and the fact that I was injured now and again was thought to be expected.

Training workers such that they masterfully perform their jobs.  When workers perform their jobs with mastery-level competency not only they are capable of working more safely, they tend to value safe work as part of their mastery.

Regulatory Training

Regulatory training is important for more than checking a box. Regulatory training should provide workers with important information that they need to do their jobs.  But regulatory training that is completed in good faith, presented contextually, and connected to meaningful parts of the worker’s jobs also send the message that organization is deeply concerned about safety for safety’s sake.

Training On Purpose

Too many people mistakenly believe that training can just happen. Training should be the tactical response to a strategic initiative  not an after thought or a cursory event. And training should be a lot more formalized than most safety people believe, and should be tracked and occasionally reviewed in the context in which it is most appropriate (for example confined space training should be conducted in a confined space for example. Training should be tracked by the safety professional—not just safety training—all training; it is essential that first line supervision has a complete understanding of the competency of each worker.  Safety professionals should work with the training professionals to assess the risk points of the job and together craft learning solutions that address the areas of greatest risk.

Training should focus on hazard recognition so that all workers can vigilantly approach the identification and containment of the hazards of their work areas. Only when workers have been trained in the safest ways in which to perform their tasks by providing them with good foundational training in the tasks they are routinely expected to do can the organization ensure that workers achieve some modicum of safety.

#on-boarding, #safety, #safety-training, #training, #worker-safety

When it Comes to Safety the Surest Way to Lose Is to Think You’ve Won

 

 

Note: I wrote this six years ago and it is as relevant now as it ever has been.

By Phil La Duke

Injury rates are down, the Safety function is running like a well-oiled machine and senior leadership is happy, so now you can relax right? Wrong.  If safety is the probability of injuries and we know that the risk of injury is never zero, then most of us understand that we have to remain vigilant in our efforts to create a workplace with the lowest possible risk…blah, blah, blah. But realistically do we really need to keep trying new initiatives after we have licked the biggest hitters in safety? Isn’t that just some academic argument? Well, yes and no.

In some cases, we truly can wind down some of our safety efforts.  After all, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to be hyper-vigilant in workplaces where most of our hazards are well managed and quickly contained or corrected—that’s like continuing to look for your car keys after you’ve already found them (“where else MIGHT they have been but weren’t?”) Unfortunately, most of us aren’t working for organizations that are quite there yet and still have some work to do.

In fact, it’s highly unlikely that we will ever get there.  We tend to think as safety (and other business systems) as its own system when, in fact, all our business systems are interconnected in highly complex ways.  What’s worse is that all our business systems operate in a dynamic business climate and this continuously changing environment that is pushed and pulled by every shift in the marketplace and this makes it impossible for us to ever pronounce the workplace permanently “safe”.

Acclimation

When we are confronted with a new situation we generally feel nervous, or tentative, or unsafe in some way.  Even the boldest among us is likely to exercise heightened care when first confronted with a new situation, but as we get used to the situation we become more comfortable. We acclimate to the changes and feel more comfortable taking what a less seasoned observer might describe as unwarranted or even reckless. This same process of acclimation that allows us to perform our jobs with greater levels of skill also puts us at higher levels of risk.

Over Confidence and Complacency

Many organizations fail to recognize that the hazards shift and evolve.  These organizations, reckoning that they have solved the safety puzzle become less vigilant.  It’s a dangerous phenomenon.  Hazards insidiously grow while the perception of danger diminishes, leaving the organization open to unexpected catastrophe. Some of you may be skeptical; it’s often difficult to accept that you may be losing ground when all indications are to the contrary. But as long as the work environment changes and your safety management system stays the same, you are at significant risk.  And the kinds of catastrophes that strike seem to come out of nowhere.

Turnover

A key source of variation in organizations is turn over.  We talk a lot about the effects of employee turnover on the safety organizations (well at least I talk a lot about it) but one of the most destructive changes to the organization is executive turnover.  Executive turnover can throw the vision of the organization into a tailspin, but even moderate turnover at the middle of the organization can change the environment enough to cause variation sufficient to pose a significant hazard to the workplace.

 Disruptive Technology

A prime driver for change in an organization is disruptive technology.  Clayton M. Christensen Harvard Business School professor coined the term “Disruptive Technology” to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology. Most companies are successful because they have mastered sustaining technologies.  But disruptive technologies introduce hazards far beyond the changes brought by the technology itself.  Disruptive technology generally produces ripple effects that, owing to the organization’s lack of experience and familiarity with the nuanced nature of the new technology, can manifest in lethal hazards.

Drift

Drift is the natural tendency to move away from a standard or a norm.  When we drift we tend to believe that risks are justifiable and fairly benign—like driving a car and thinking yourself safe even though statistically the faster we drive and the longer we drive we will make dozens of poor choices, risky choices and errors.  Our subconscious minds experiment with ways in which we can drift from the norm; it causes us to make mistakes to test the safety of quickly moving from one environment to the next. This process allows us to quickly adapt when our survival depends on it. It makes us nimble, but it also subjects us to the risk of injuries.

All these factors—from acclimation to drift—build to put us in harms way.  But the biggest thing we have to fear, isn’t, as FDR once said, “fear itself”, but the absence of fear.  We are often most at risk when we believe ourselves to be “safest”.

Freeze! Should You Restrict Smart Device I The Workplace?

By Phil La Duke

The ubiquity of smart devise and myriad ways to stay in touch has blurred the lines between the traditional workplace and the rest of our lives.  There was a time when there was no expectation that workers would respond to requests when they weren’t “on-the-clock”. But email, voicemail, cellphones, Wi-Fi, and texting have changed all that.  The concept, at least for salaried professionals, of being on the clock has effectively disappeared. Customers—internal and external—and supervisors have a much more aggressive idea of exactly what constitutes a reasonable response time.  Professionals are essentially on the clock 24/7 and the workplace can be a restaurant, the grocery store, and most perilously the car.

As my hometown, Detroit, prepares for its international auto show, the media is abuzz with all the new features that will make it easier to conduct business in a car or truck.  In one news spot, a spokesman extolled the features that “could make the difference of a contractor getting the job or not”.

I find this trend troubling; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one of the most consistently lethal professions (the jobs that are most likely to result in a worker death) are sales jobs, and the most frequent sales death are resultant from traffic accidents.

You Might As Well Be Stoned

To make matters worse, studies have found and reaffirmed that the nature of the distraction is largely irrelevant, and that the nature and duration of the distraction is the real source of danger.  One study found that the largest and potentially most dangerous source of danger was a conversation with a passenger. Another study concluded that driver distraction was at least as dangerous as a driver that is moderately (well above the legal limit) intoxicated and in some cases even MORE dangerous.  This makes sense; while the impairment comparable may the degree to which drunk driving interact with other drivers is statistically less (the later in the evening the more intoxicated drivers on the road) than otherwise distracted drivers (people are texting, talking on cellphones, etc.) who do so in both high traffic circumstances as well as when traffic is light. Driver distraction is a real threat to public safety, and I find it unreasonable to believe that adding everything from Wi-Fi to waffle irons to vehicles will lesson driver distraction.

Laws Aren’t Enough

An increasing number of municipalities are moving to restrict distractions while driving, but most miss the mark.  Exemptions for hands-free and global positioning systems in many of these laws ignore the fact that the primary hazard is the lack of attentiveness of the driver not merely taking one’s eyes off the road. Keeping one’s EYES on the road but failing to keep one’s MIND on the road is a recipe for disaster.

Similarly, many organizations are taking increasingly aggressive measures to mitigate the risk associated with distracted drivers, and they should.  Think of the liability associated with an employee who is conducting company business—from a simple business phone call, to reading and responding to email—who subsequently is at fault in a fatal car accident.  Most companies have existing CYA (cover your assets) policies forbidding such activities, but if there is a policy with complicit breaches (and by that I mean, a case where company forbids an activity but then encourages it by rewarding results that are only possible by violating the rules or punishing people when for failing to achieve results that are only possible when people violate the rules) these policies aren’t like to provide much protection.

Staying Connected Is Killing Us

The temptation to stay connected is often far greater than the desire to comply with company policy and both employer and employee have a shared burden for ensuring that the spirit of the requirement is met.

First, companies should adopt zero-movement policies for smart device and phones.  One company adopted such a policy when a forklift killed a worker while he was talking on a cellphone and walking through an area that was off limits to pedestrians.  The distraction of the pedestrian was the proximate cause of the fatality, although other factors contributed to his fate, the company quickly enacted a policy where people were not allowed to be in motion while talking on cellphones, reading mail from a smart device, or engaged in any activity that would distract one from hazards in the workplace.

Taking It A Step Further

While this policy is laudable, I think we can do better.  Companies need to use a parallel strategy to attack his problem. First, ban communication devices from the vehicles.  Drivers and pedestrians should be prohibited from using any electronic communication while in motion, including hands-free devices. I have taken to stowing my iPhone in my center console while driving.  (I got this idea from a top safety professional that admitted that he struggled with the temptation of using his PDA during his commute. Although I didn’t adopted it until I was pulled over for monkeying about with my phone while driving.) Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, organizations must recognize that travel time is, in and of itself, work and no more should be expected of the individual while driving. This means the company has to adjust its expectations of responsiveness and recognize that individuals will not be able to maintain constant contact.

What About Emergencies?

Such policies invite excuses and “what ifs?”  Chief among these complaints is the objection in the name of safety.  If I comply and there is an emergency I can’t communicate and be touched.  The answer is that a cellphone in the glove box can be used after the driver is safely parked.

But Is It Practical?

I don’t like the idea of not using my cellphone for the 90 minutes a day that I commute, and I recognize that many of you may see this policy as one of those “safety guy goes overboard with overly zealous rules”, but there are an increasing number business leaders who are recognizing that this problem is not going to go away without intervention.

#communication-and-safety, #dangers-of-smart-devices, #driver-distraction, #driving-while-distracted, #expectations-of-productivity, #texting-while-driving

Sailing The Seven Cs of Change

Sailing The Seven Cs of Change

Photo courtesy of Asmundur

By Phil La Duke 

More and more safety professionals are coming to the conclusion that real, lasting change can only come as a result of a change to the culture.  For some, this means relabeling the same old schlock and positioning the same tired method as a new, “culture transformation”.  This trend concerns me.  While there are a handful of good (in fact, really good) change professionals out there, there are far more conmen out there whose only experience with change is nickels, dimes, and quarters.

For the record I am not against entrepreneurs making an honest living. But if we aren’t careful we can really screw up and have an uncontrolled and unplanned change with dangerous and unpredictable outcomes.

In my experience, change comes in distinct phases that sometimes overlap and may even move forward and backward.  These phases can be conveniently described using words that begin with the letter C allowing me to make my title pun.

Crisis

It’s said that change only happens when the pain of not changing exceeds the pain of changing.  Organizations, like people, tend to actively resist change. Even positive changes that they know need to happen. Change, biologically speaking, is stupid and dangerous. If you are an organism that is flourishing—you have amply food and shelter, good breeding grounds and prospects, and low predators—changing even the seemingly most insignificant element can lead to extinction. Our central nervous systems are designed to resist change because it puts us in unpredictable situations. Of course we also live in a dynamic environment that is constantly changing and remaining static in a rapidly changing environment leads to extinction.
Organizations tend to resist change until the dissatisfaction with the status quo hits a critical level.
Not all change, is as Mao said, borne out of the barrel of a gun, but the more disruptive the circumstances the stronger the drive for change.

Creation of Vision

Unless leaders can construct a compelling vision, change will be stifled and obstructed. Change grows out of dissatisfaction with the current state, but change that is driven by dissatisfaction alone creates environment where the organization can go from bad to worse. An environment where change is made without a clear vision of the desired state leads to chaos and confusion and can quickly devolve into organizational anarchy. That may sound melodramatic, but in companies that I have seen fail, the failure tends to come gradually as systems breakdown and processes stop working. People still come to work, there is no reign of terror with the aristocracy being dragged to the guillotine, but there is a perceptible shift in work ethic. The good and capable leave the organization and the population reduces to incompetents who are too fearful to leave.

A compelling vision of a desired state focuses the population on a singular purpose, a common cause and an understanding of what they as an organization is trying to create.

Commitment

Legend holds that Hernando Cortez burned his ships when he arrived in the New World to demonstrate to his men that retreat was not an option. Irrespective of your feelings toward Cortez, his actions, however apocryphal, are an excellent example of how commitment to a goal can drive change. Faced the with the choice of either achieving the goal or certain death, it’s fair to say that Cortez’s men were deeply committed to change. Obviously, change can’t always be driven as ruthlessly or aggressively as Cortez, but leaders must aggressively push change by figuratively burning the ships, i.e. they must make it unmistakably clear that anything shy of  100% support for the vision will not be tolerated and those who can’t change attitudes will be forced to change jobs.

Communication of Vision

It’s not enough to have a vision; leadership must make a compelling argument for the vision and inspire passion for the desired state among the population.  Communicating a fierce vision that inspires the population is paramount to a successful organizational change.

Chaos

As the chances are implemented the organization quickly devolves into chaos. As theories become practices the numerous glitches make the change impossible and frightening. It’s easy for leaders to falter in there commitment to change when all seems lost.  Unless leaders are courageous and stick to the course they will not last long enough for the change to put down roots and grow.
Connection

As people struggle to create the new normal out of the howling chaos, they begin to see successes and reasons to hope.  At this point in the change, people start to connect these successes with elements of the vision.  They begin to connect with the desired state as something tangible and real.  These connections begin to forge the foundation of the new processes, tools, mores, and values on which a new and better corporate culture can be built. People tend to fiercely protect these newly forged connections and build norms around them.

Capability & Confidence

Slowly these connections and new practices start to yield real, tangible results and the population’s confidence rises. The organization becomes more capable as it repeats the new practices.  The reliable results that come with organization and personal capability builds confidence and the two form an improvement spiral, which ultimately makes the desired state a reality.

The desire state rarely comes to fruition exactly as envisioned or expected (remember change takes time and the vision often evolves and is refined as time elapses.) This isn’t a bad thing, often the ultimate state far exceeds the organization’s wildest expectations and desires.

 

#change, #communication-of-vision, #organizational-change-2, #safety-culture

Can OSHA Survive the Fiscal Cliff?

By Phil La Duke

Two debates rage these days, one regarding the most appropriate response to the so-called fiscal cliff, and the other concerning the effectiveness and the continued need for worker safety regulations.  The convergence of these two debates makes the future of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) both as a law and as an enforcement agency.

For some, the real question is not “will OSHA survive?” but “should it?” The lessons of the rapacious deregulation—the housing crisis, the orgy of banking abuses, and the rape of the poor resultant from usurious payday loan businesses—go largely unlearned or ignored, by those who argue that OSHA is an anachronism.  In effective and bloated, they assert, it’s time for OSHA to go.

For others, OSHA is a sacred cow; to even suggest that OSHA needs to be reorganized is blasphemy. In their minds to dismantle OSHA is tantamount to abandoning safety to the unscrupulous businesses that use workers like chattel.  Without OSHA, they argue, a hundred years of safety will be unceremoniously unraveled.

Both the debate over the fiscal cliff and over the need for, and relevance of, safety regulations, belie deeper conflicts; both are expressions over values.  In the case of the fiscal cliff debates people are arguing if things we as a society are worth the money we currently spending on them, in other words, are we getting our money’s worth for the things we collectively purchase. For many, this debate is about a very basic principle: the role of government.  Some see the fiscal crisis as a golden opportunity to significantly reduce big government, while others see it as an essential battle to defend decades of social advancement. Add to this debate, international controversy surrounding whether or not safety requirements have become excessive and overly burdensome. At the heart of this debate is whether or not we believe that business, left to its own designs, will do the right thing in terms of protecting workers.

I won’t take a side in these debates, but I will say that OSHA is likely to be the big loser.  To some degree OSHA has been the victim of its own success. We just don’t see disasters on the scale of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire anymore.  The success of safety regulation and enforcement has created a global public opinion (far from the consensus, but with enough sympathizers to make it significant) that the workplace is safe enough, and even if isn’t there is scarce little that government can do about it.

OSHA currently lacks the resources to do much more than to respond to complaints.  It offers a myriad of valuable free services that most businesses refuse to use. I have actively promoted OSHA’s free products and services among my customers to whom I consult only to be told that I was crazy if I thought they were going to invite OSHA into their facilities. Each one ended up paying me to do what they could have received free from OSHA. If OSHA is to survive, it needs to proactively cut funding for VPP, training, and its other highly valuable and disappointingly under-used programs and reallocate a portion of the monies saved to investigation and enforcement. Doing so will not only create public good-will as it sees OSHA as actively participating in cost reduction; it will also raise public awareness of the programs.  Increased funding for enforcement will likely bring to light the true state of safety in business today.  Perhaps there will be public outcry at widespread abuses by business or perhaps it will confirm what many believe: that business in America today value safety and do a good job protecting workers. In either event, the public good is served.

For the many of the great unwashed (and uninformed) have been swayed by campaign ads that safety costs jobs. Politicians play free and lose with insinuations that workers had better toughen up and decide whether they want to safe at work or to be unemployed. And if safety costs jobs, it follows that OSHA is a government agency dedicated to eliminating jobs, forcing high-paying low-skill jobs off shores where foreigners do the jobs for pennies on the dollar. If you believe that OSHA does this then you believe that the government is essentially spending your tax dollars to screw you out of your livelihood. Forget whether or not OSHA can survive in this environment and worry can America survive in this environment.

Safety professionals haven’t helped OSHA’s cause.  The propagation of the belief that 90% (or more) of safety is behavioral has created (in addition to a cottage industry of snake-oil salesmen) a belief that OSHA is useless—after all, why have a government agency devoted to ensuring safety by dealing with only 10% or less with the things that actually cause injuries[1] when you can just kick the stupid, lazy, and careless workers in the ass? If one believes that the secret to a safer workplace lies in behavior modification, recognition and reward, and other carrot-and-stick policies that what relevancy does OSHA have? Would we expect OSHA inspectors to audit for motivation? Would it establish standards for recognition and reward?

For many people, OSHA is a vestige of days gone by. They no longer feel the pain of losing loved ones in the workplace and have convinced themselves that it can never happen again. If OSHA hopes to survive (in any meaningful and useful sense, let’s face it there isn’t a politician alive with the gut and gumption to truly end OSHA, but there is a fair chance that it will become so emasculated and underfunded that it will cease to be more than hollow symbol. If OSHA is going to survive and thrive it will have to reinvent itself even if it is only in the public.

---

[1] For the record I reject the premise that 90% or more of injuries are caused by unsafe behaviors and I understand that OSHA addresses far more than physical hazards and addresses (or seeks to address) behavioral choices through training and awareness.

#bbs, #behavior-based-safety, #fiscal-cliff, #osha, #worker-safety

Playing It Safe Is No Path to Safety

safe

 By Phil La Duke

Uncertain times make us risk adverse. And in a tenuous economic recovery it’s easy for safety professionals to play it safe. Making waves when the organization is looking for ways to cut costs is professional suicide. As the old Eastern-European adage holds: “the nail that sticks out gets hammered.” I suppose you can forgive safety professionals for wanting to stay out of the fray—to just keep their heads down, do their jobs and hope against hope that when the people wielding the axes look to make cuts, the safety professional emerges job intact. While it makes sense to be concerned about your job; it seems like every day there is some new attack on safety. Unfortunately and ironically, the very nature of the safety professional’s job makes playing it safe impossible. Operations leadership needs efficiency gains and overall improvements not just to compete, but to survive, and any function that doesn’t support this is cannon fodder. Businesses just can’t afford to retain safety professionals who aren’t obsessively pursuing better ways to do things. Playing it safe requires you to stay out of sight; do your job well, but not too well. You certainly aren’t going to recommend some risky initiative. What if it doesn’t work? It’s your name and reputation, if not your job itself on the line, why risk it? All these arguments seem to make sense except risk is our business. Safety professionals have to monitor the health of the organization and recommend adjustments—sometimes radical adjustments—where necessary. The days when you could do the same old mediocre job and survive are over. The safety professional’s job is all about taking chances. We have to confront ignorant supervisors who take inappropriate risks in pursuit of production improvements. We have to intervene when maintenance shortcuts put workers in jeopardy. And we have to confront leadership when their priorities are out of whack. But most of all we need to take aggressive steps before intervention is necessary. When times are toughest is when workers need us the most. We have to fight for funding while cuts are being made all around us. When operations slow, we need to go to bat for training (it is practically an O’Henry poem the way businesses are either too busy to provide adequate training or to slow to keep people on the payroll, and thus unable to train them) and preventive maintenance. But one thing we can’t do is remain silent and look the other way while inappropriate risks are being taken. It sounds like I am talking out of both sides of my mouth; last week I went on and on about how safety wasn’t necessarily the number one priority. But consider this: safety is changing, and yes it isn’t always the top priority it is always a criteria for success. So how can you serve two masters? How can you take risks, keep your job, and make the workplace safer? A couple of ways actually: • Do Your Job Better. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and rethink much of what you’ve been doing in safety. Take a hard look at your safety management system and ask yourself if you can achieve the same results (or better) using some other approach. Can you get there cheaper, faster, using a simpler model, or with less infrastructure. Even if you decide to keep doing what you’ve been doing, you should ask yourself these questions (and not just now, periodically, even frequently.) Strip away all the fads and dump any safety activity that doesn’t provide demonstrable and quantifiable value. Forget get what you think you’re achieving through these activities and focus on what you can prove. Oh, and getting results isn’t enough, you have to demonstrate that the effort and resources to achieve these results are actually worth it. While many vendors will tell you that their way is the best way to achieve a result, they are in business to make money, not protect your job. • Re-engineer the Safety Function. It’s not enough for you to do your job better if your safety function isn’t particularly viable. Tear down your safety department and start over. Start by re-writing your charter and re-establishing your goals. Your business has likely changed since you last reorganized your function and you need your goals and activities to align with the changes in business climate and function. We either change or we become extinct. • Renegotiate. Contact everyone with whom you are currently doing business and start over. Too often vendors raise their prices when they find themselves in an economic pinch. Instead of putting up with vendors who take your business for granted, put everything from gloves and earplugs to consulting out for bid. • In-source. The best way to protect your current staffing levels is to stop sourcing their work out to vendors. When the bean counters are looking to save money they aren’t automatically looking for heads to cut from the payroll. • Get Out In Front. Don’t wait for your boss to come to you and tell you that you need to cut costs. Approach your boss with a simple goal of cutting your operating costs by 10% and then do it. When times are good we tend to add little niceties to our function and these “extras” tend to become relics that we carry with us long after we can afford to keep them. • Become Self-Funding. One trick I learned a long time ago is that self-funding departments (that is, functions that save or take in more money than they cost) are the ones most likely to survive drastic restructuring. Identify those areas where you save (or in some rare cases, make) money. Prioritize those activities that bring in the most money while requiring the smallest amount of effort. You’ll typically find that the other activities aren’t as important or crucial as you once believed. It’s never easy to stand up for what you believe, and changing to adapt to a tough environment is never easy. But playing it safe often makes leadership think that you aren’t doing enough to warrant keeping you around. When it comes to protecting your job as a safety professional you gotta take risks.

#playing-it-safe, #re-engineering-safety, #worker-safety

You’re Only As Safe As Your Contractors

Phil La Duke

 

You can have a robust, innovative hazard management system that is the envy of all other safety professionals. You can have a high-functioning incident investigation process that drills down to root causes and contributors and cascades awareness of risk across the organization. You can even achieve unprecedented gains in incident reduction and risk management. But all this is meaningless if you’re contractors don’t effectively manage worker safety.  A high-profile injury or fatality at your contractor can wipe out decades of hard work, reputation, and community good will in an instant.

For decades, large organizations (manufacturers chiefly, but not exclusively) have been outsourcing dangerous and labor-intensive jobs to contractors.  From a business perspective it’s a pretty good deal, large companies are able to lean-out their operations and focus on their core businesses while eager suppliers gobble up contracts like greedy dogs at the dinner table.  Even some unions are able to pressure the sourcing companies to refrain from union-avoidance activities as consolation for the move from high-wage/benefit jobs to lower paying. Of course the workers are paid less and receive fewer benefits, and many of their jobs end up in the third world with little safety oversight.  (But this piece isn’t about the immorality of outsourcing.) One of the most attractive things about outsourcing is the seeming ability to outsource risk and liability for injuries.

But other cases the jobs only move on paper. Floors once mopped by employees are now mopped by contractors. Instrument panels once assembled by traditional employees are now assembled by contractors, sometimes only a couple of feet from where employees once did the work. The move to contractors that work under the sourcing company’s roof has created an environment where some employees don’t count. When a contractor dies in many workplaces he dies largely unmourned.  The sourcing company is so unconcerned about the injury that most can’t even screw up enough moral indignation to point a finger. For its part, the contractor takes a Doritosesque “crunch all you want; we’ll make more “ approach.  All parties agree that the loss is a crying shame, but after all,  life goes on.  Safety isn’t a priority for most contractors; at least not really (a good share of them THINK it is, but it really isn’t). Sure  they put up the “___ days without an injury” poster and may even have a green cross tacked up in the dingy little cube of the beleaguered, over-worked, and part-time safety professional.

Where the sourcing company sees it incumbent on the contractor to address safety training and enforcement and the contractor feels that—because the sourcing company controls the physical environment in which the workers do their jobs—there is a reasonable expectation that the sourcing company will “own” safety.

Contractors Aren’t the Problem

Contractors aren’t necessarily to blame. Often contractors are unsophisticated in the their management of safety. Entrepreneurships tend to focus on high-profit, aggressive growth, and customer service. Focusing on one business element means that you aren’t focused on others.  Workers in entrepreneurial contractors tend to be more transitory than in more mature organizations that tend to lead to a view of workers as replaceable.  These organizations rarely invest in training or safety—it doesn’t make sense to invest in workers that won’t be around in a year. But even those contractors who want to invest workers will find a rough row to hoe. Activities like safety and training often fall by the wayside. The job of managing safety (and training for that matter) remotely is challenging even for the most sophisticated companies. And the customer’s relentless demands for cost reductions compound the problem.

The Law Hasn’t Helped

Government regulation hasn’t helped a whole lot. If a contractor has not received the mandatory safety training the government doesn’t go after the sourcing company, it fines the contractor, not the sourcing company. Workers’ Compensation (and its overseas equivalents) costs are the problem of the employee of record (that is, the contractor) and so little attention is focused on the sourcing company. Contractors continue to be squeezed and when costs are cut they tend to gut training and safety budgets.

A Shift Is Emerging

 Government agencyies are rapidly working to close this loophole.  Auditors are paying far greater attention to how vendor safety  is ensured. And, mindful of this shift, many sourcing departments are concerned about the safety record and management of prospective contractors. Many large companies use the safety records and safety management approach as criteria for awarding contracts. This practice is particularly common in the construction industry, but is steadily growing in in other industries.  Because the responsibility for safety enforcement and training can be murky in these situations, it can be easy for companies to lose sight of responsibility and accountability.

A Shared Burdon For Safety

In the U.S. outsourcing jobs to vendors who work under your own roof is wide-spread and growing. This creates two environment one where a facility houses many employees of another company, and another where the population of the company is spread over numerous location (typically customer sites).

When an organization outsources worker to contractors both the sourcing company and the contractor have a shared responsibility for safety. This legal requirement[1] is an exception to the laws prohibiting “co-employment”. This important because there are yowling HR people in many organizations that erroneously contend that it is illegal for the sourcing company to provide training (even safety training). There is a similar exemption for disciplinary actions as a result of safety violations.

Where There is Confusion, There is Risk

As long as there is confucion around exactly who is responsible for safety training and enforcement companies (both sourcing companies and contractors) face significant risk.

What To Do About It

Clearly there is an on-going problem, but what can and should be done about it? The first and best solution for addressing this issue is collaboration. Safety professionals from both the sourcing and vendor organizations need to collaborate to find optimal ways to manage safety. In terms of how safety is managed there should be no distinction made between employees and contractors. This is pretty easy to do when we are talking about enforcement or safety training but these are only a very small part of what needs to be done to ensure workplace safety.  Safety professionals must also cooperate to make certain that everyone is trained to competency level before they begin the job.  Here’s where it can get tricky. Training in the worker’s core competency is generally seen as the legal responsibility of the employee of record (that is, the contractor), while the host company must provide esoteric training that is specific to the workplace.

This issue is complicated, and is not likely to get any simpler anytime soon.  But when worker’s lives are at stake no one can shirk their duties simply because they are hard or complicated.

 

---

[1] In the United States, although similar requirements exist in other industrial nations as well.

#contractor-safety, #responsibility-for-contractor-safety, #worker-safety

The Most Frequent Reasons That Safety Fails: When Good Safety Systems Go Bad

By Phil La Duke

 

For many organizations the great recession has forever changed the way organizations gauge the success of its safety efforts—and for a lot of us—our safety management systems that were once judge effective by senior managers are now considered failures.  There are a relatively few reasons that safety systems fail.

 

Lack of Vision

To truly accomplish anything, an organization must have a clear and specific vision of “what success looks like”.  Unless the organization knows what it means to accomplish any progress toward the shadowy goal is only luck.  But what does a vision for safety look like? For many under-performing safety organizations safety is as simple as “nobody has died recently”.  This may sound crass, but the reality is that decades of inappropriate incentives and hackneyed quasi-behavior based safety (which for me, is redundant, but I am trying to acknowledge that there are a handful of elements of BBS that an even smaller population has managed to achieve some meager results.) have created corporate cultures where the only acceptable response to being injured is to conceal it and seek treatment outside the workplace. What’s more, safety professionals who are asleep at the wheel are content in their ignorance.  These safety professionals rationalize their under-performance systems with an “if-it-aint-broke-don’t-fix-it” attitude that is likely to get someone killed.  Wake up people! The injuries are still there and risk is climbing until it will someday soon reach the threshold where catastrophe is all but certain.

An Over Focus on Tactics

I’m not knocking tactics—heck, tactics are the activities that get things done.  Organizations that have marginal safety functionality tend to over-emphasize the tactical while ignoring the strategic.  Let’s face it, the Safety function is fraught with tactical, we keep records, file for permits, track training, and a host of other tasks that really don’t keep people safe.  In other cases, the tactics are misaligned against the strategy.  In organizations where the long-suffering safety professionals labor tirelessly in pursuit of nothing in particular, you most likely looking at a failing safety system.

Lack of Change Management Expertise

We would ask an accountant to retool a machine, or an electrician to manage your cash flow, but for many companies, it makes perfect sense to entrust the safety professional (or worse a pig-eyed, mouth-breathing, BBS vendor turned culture expert) to drive change in the organization. Tragically, the opportunity presented by C-suite executive’s dissatisfaction with the status quo is being squandered by schemes that put the safety professional in the driver’s seat of organizational change.  This is not to say there aren’t good organizational change vendors who truly understand safety, but if they were advocating a BBS model five years ago and have not shifted to a “leadership-driven” or a “culture change” model, chances are good that the “next big thing” that they are selling will be a costly disaster.

Lack of Measurements

The world’s safest companies understand the relationship between safety and overall operating efficiency.  Poor safety performance is typically symptomatic of deeper organizational problems.  It should surprise no one that companies that perform most efficiently overall also perform better at safety than companies that struggle in other areas.  One of the keys to becoming (or remaining for that matter) a high performing organization is score carding and measurements.  Safety score carding requires a company to collect, display, interpret, and act on a combination of leading and lagging indicators.

No Return On Investment

For half a century the safety function has been allowed to exist in a world where money was no object. (At this point a fair number of you have jutting your bottom lip out in a petulant pout, because you were told at one time or another that you couldn’t go to that year’s conference boondoggle to China for four weeks. Suck it up, you know what I’m talking about.) Safety was seen as the right thing to do in the best case and a necessary evil in the worst.  Companies who are successful in terms of safety  (and even those who are fairly indifferent to safety) expect the safety function to produce a quantifiable return on investment.

Excessive Complexity and Bureaucracy

Perhaps the most destructive practice to safety is the tendency for Safety to empire build.  Many of the systems currently in vogue require numerous players to actively engage in complex and or bureaucratic activities.  In workplaces where Operations is expected to do far more with unprecedented fewer resources the idea that a supervisor will routinely watch each of his or her team members perform their job and offer feedback is beyond absurd.  When you give smart people limited options and expect them to do time-consuming tasks that provide not tangible pay off you had best realize that they will only pretend to do those tasks (well, expect for those who simply get frustrated and quit).  Eventually the complexity and unsustainability of these systems combine to create a catastrophic breakdown in safety. If you are reading this and happen to be selling one of these systems, my advice is that you better learn to simplify your system and reduce its operating cost.

Insufficient Leadership Commitment

It’s said that when Cortez came to the new world he burned his ships, to demonstrate the inevitability of change.  There was no turning back, to waiver was to perish.  It’s this kind of unmistakable and impermeable dedication to change that leaders (and I would include the safety professionals in this group) must exhibit to successfully drive change (the great management thinker, Peter Drucker, once said that “you don’t manage change, you create it.”  Drucker believed that we needed to continuously drive change toward improvement.  Safety leaders who are content with their same old tired inefficient methods will ultimately see decline to the point of ruin.

Certainly the failures of management systems aren’t complete and utter system failures; but just because the system doesn’t crumble into ruins don’t mean the problems that many organizations aren’t serious.  To defend inaction by claiming that things aren’t as bad as they could be is akin to claiming that you needn’t repair the damage done by a house fire simply because the flames failed to burn the house down to its foundation..

#broken-safety-systems, #safety-measurement, #why-safety-systems-fail, #worker-safety

What Can The Hawthorne Electric Studies Teach Us About Worker Safety

By Phil La Duke

Last week I spoke at the National Safety Council where the behemoths of safety gather. I saw some really cool new products—work pants with need pads sewn into them, the latest in ceramic cutting technology, and even an amazing device that prevents industrial vehicle and pedestrian accidents—but I also heard a lot of the same old drivel some repackaged but mostly unadulterated snake oil sold in largely the same package, and a fair amount of the same old hackneyed arguments.  There isn’t much new under the sun, at least not in worker safety.

One of the supposed “tried and true” safety tactics is conducting behavior observations.  Behavior observations lie at the heart of many safety management systems. Exactly how these practices are performed can vary widely from organization to organization and the efficacy of these practices similarly varies from location to location.  I’ve remained largely silent (well as silent as I can ever be) on the practice, because I know many smart safety professionals for whom I have the utmost respect who value behavior observations as important components of their overall safety tactics and strategy.

The thinking that drives behavior observations is that a supervisor (or in some cases, another worker or a safety professional) watches a worker do his or her job after which the observer offers tips on how to do the work more safely. I’m over simplifying, but not a lot.  Proponents of the behavior observation believe that the combination of intervention in cases of unsafe behavior and positive feedback for safe behavior reduce injuries. Those that support Behavior Based Safety proudly point to their love of scientific study and organizational psychology but in doing so they ignore one of the most important studies of the workplace in history, those at the Hawthorne Western Electric Company (and other research conducted by conducted by Fredrick Taylor and others.) For five years, researchers studied the effects of physical, social, psychological, and environmental factors would influence the productivity[1] of workers.  The most famous finding was the dubbed the Hawthorne effect — which referred to an increase in worker productivity produced by the psychological stimulus of being made the focus of the study. One could easily extrapolate that workers too can be temporarily manipulated into working safely, but the results are neither lasting nor indicative of a lasting behavior change. If the Hawthorne Effect is true of safety, than it doesn’t matter whether the feedback is positive or negative, skilled or unskilled, well articulated or grunted out by a bonobo, the behavior of the worker will temporarily improve.

But there were other findings as well, researchers found lesser known phenomena, like the fact that research in and of itself alter the behaviors that are studied.  This phenomenon has been replicated many times in many other studies.

But perhaps more germane to safety, researchers concluded:

• Productivity is a group activity. The Hawthorn researchers found that the relationship between the supervisors and the workers played an important role in workplace productivity. It should surprise no one that workers with good relationships with their supervisors will tend to report hazards more frequently.  If the worker believes his or her supervisors care about their safety they are far more inclined to bring safety concerns to the attention of leadership.
• Team Norms Directly Influence Worker Productivity. Researchers have known for a hundred years that workers set the expectations for fair day’s work; but Hawthorn researchers were the first to demonstrate and describe this phenomenon. Similarly, work groups set the expectations of safety and safe work practices. This is the essential core of a corporate culture—that the work group set the rules, even those associated  with worker safety.
• Worker skill is a poor predictors of his or her job performance. The Hawthorne study found that while worker capabilities provide some clues as to the future performance of a worker (in terms  of the physical and mental potential of the worker), exactly how well the worker will perform (again this applies to safety) the real performance is strongly influenced by social factors; it’s less about whether or not the worker is observed, and more about how the worker interacts with his or her peers.
• The workplace is a social system. Fredrick Taylor and his colleagues viewed, the work place as a social construct; a system composed of many unpredictable and interdependent elements.

Beyond the Hawthorne Effect, proponents of behavior observations also ignore several key truths:

• Workers behave differently when they are being studied. From the Hawthorne Electric studies in workplace productivity to studies with animals, researchers now know that the behavior of a research subject is significantly changed simply by the act of observing them.  The tale, it would seem, is tainted in the telling.
• Observations are essentially shoddy training needs assessments.  In those cases where the worker is acting unsafely (or more likely less safely) the result is either that the worker is doing so because he or she needs to be trained in the correct procedures, or the worker has made an error.  Since we know that human error cannot be prevented through behavior observations, the act of observing workers is akin to doing a slip shod training needs assessment.

 Observations are expensive, pointless, and provide little information that could not be gathered more effectively through another method.  It is an overblown, quasi-scientific reaction to a problem that can be readily addressed through an easier and cheaper approach.

---

[1] It’s important to note, that while the Hawthorne researchers were studying productivity, it’s not that far from safety.  Safety is the product of a robust and efficient process; that is to say, a process cannot be considered efficient or productive if it produces poor quality or injures workers.  For the purposes of this post, productivity = safety.

#hawthorne-effect, #safety, #social-effects-of-safety, #worker-safety