The Rise of The Safety Extremist

By Phil La Duke

 

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

fa·nat·ic (fuh-nat-ik) noun

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

ex·trem·ist (ik-stree-mist) noun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extremism Is Rooted In Fear

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

Extremism Loves Company

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

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

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

Misleading Indicators

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

By Phil La Duke

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

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

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

Causefusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

A @#$# Storm In Texas

by Phil La Duke

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phil La Duke is Full Of @#$%

By Phil La Duke

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

The Values of A Safety Culture

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

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

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

D + V + N > R

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

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

Value One: All Injuries Are Preventable

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

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

Value 2: Compliance is Not Enough

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

Value 3: Prevention is more effective than correction

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

Value 4: Safety is everybody’s job

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

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

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

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

Value 5: Safety is a strategic business element

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

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

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

Value 6: Safety is owned by operations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fraidy Cats: Is Fear Jeopardizing Worker Safety?

by Phil La Duke

“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself”—Franklin D. Roosevelt

FDR famously said, “the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself”.  That was easy for him to say, as president during the Great Depression and World War II he was probably the most heavily guarded man in the western hemisphere. Even so, I think he might have been on to something.

Now we have the Great Recession, and the malingering global economy has created, in many workplaces, a pervasive climate of fear. Now we’re afraid of Cyprus for crying out loud,  Honestly, until about a month ago, I wasn’t completely sure Cyprus was still around, I mean, when exactly did Turkey and Greece stop fighting over it? Finding out that the fate of Cyprian banks could break up the European Union is a bit like waking up tomorrow to find that Malta has obtained nuclear weapons and has decided to become a rogue nation state.  Possible? Sure. Something to be afraid of? Not really.  But one thing we can all agree on is that the economic uncertainty has created a lot of fear in the workplace, and fear can undermine worker safety in many ways. So unless we understand the nature and origins of this fear, we can never implement effective countermeasures.

Fear of Being Injured

Certainly a big fear in the workplace today, especially among older workers, is the fear that one will suffer a career ending injury.  Many people believe that getting injured will not only jeopardize their existing job, but also make it more difficult to find a new job should they become unemployed.  For other workers, there is a real fear that if they raise an issue about safety the employer is likely to move the operations overseas in search of a more relaxed safety standard and a government more sympathetic to companies. These workers are far less likely to balk when asked to do something that is unreasonable risky.

Recently a large manufacturing operation had a hypothesis: layoffs would increase injury claims (mostly fraudulent) as workers preferred to go on disability rather than on unemployment. They did a small study and were surprised by the results. Instances of injury claims (and most notably fraud) decreased. But under recording of injuries skyrocketed. The reason? Workers feared that an injury on their record would make them more likely to be laid off, and what’s more, a medical leave would make it far more difficult to find employment elsewhere if they did lose their jobs. Of course this is only a single example, and one study does not a trend make, but it convinced me, and it convinced my customer.

Fear of Reporting Injuries

Speaking of manufacturers, I was recently on a plane with a supervisor at a very large steel manufacturer.  The manufacturer has been under the gun to reduce its injuries owing, in part, to several fatalities and severe injuries.  The solution? Anyone who gets injured gets a five-day suspension until they can determine whether or not the worker was at fault.  This had the not surprising result of significantly lowering reported injuries.  Workers can’t afford to lose five days pay so they go to their own physicians.  All the while, some block-headed regional safety director takes credit for making the work place safer. When they kill someone, and they WILL kill someone, I hope they put him in a hole so deep even the other convicts will avoid it.  This mouth breather has found a way to make himself look good, improve his record, and impress the executives, but scaring the beejeezus out of the workers.  Yes, there are still these neanderthals working in safety and yes, there are still executives who praise them for not taking any shit from these “so-called, injured workers”/

There are other cases where the fear of reporting injuries can manifest in unexpected ways. In some environments, where a single injury can spoil the safety BINGO or even cost coworkers a quarterly bonus, not only is the fear present its palpable and reasonable. Its unwise to mess with someone’s paycheck in the best economic time, but in a recession it can be downright dangerous.

Fear of Uncertainty

I’m no economist, nor do I play one on television (although I do occasionally lie to women in bars about being one) but I believe the single biggest influencer in lack of consumer confidence was the “share the pain” craze of the last five years. Time was where when their was a downturn the company laid of 10% of the workforce, and the walking wounded who were left behind licked their proverbial wounds and then got back to work. We mourned our dear departed and then went back to our daily routine. But the practice of forced furloughs, unpaid shut downs and other economic chicanery left everyone wondering when the axe would fall. Faced with a feeling of impending doom workers everywhere stopped spending in anticipation of a layoff that would never come. Reductions in staff hurt, but the pain quickly fades. This constant state of fear and worry creates stress and stress, worry, and fear increases our mistakes. The next time someone at your company suggests we “share the pain” you should suggest extinguishing a cigarette in their left eye; if that isn’t painful enough, do both eyes.

Fear As A Performance Influencer

In the Just Culture philosophy they talk about the inevitability of human error. Everyone makes mistakes to err is human, blah blah blah. Even while we can’t prevent people from making mistakes, we CAN increase the likelihood of making mistakes and bad decisions. The things that make things worse—harder to focus, more difficult to think, and make it easier to make mistakes—are fairly easy to identify. Fatigue, stress, worry, distraction, and yes, fear. In these cases the frightened worker is markedly more likely to omit a key step, take a dangerous shortcut, or otherwise increase his or her likelihood of injuring him/herself or others.

An automobile manufacturer with whom I worked saw a strong correlation between employee assistance line calls and injuries. Judging from their data, the safety leadership inferred a strong relationship between people who were worked up about something and injuries and near misses. They may be guilty of causefusion (attributing cause and effect to situations where only a correlation exists) but they believed that they were seeing these performance influencers inaction. As the economic slowdown turned into The Great Recession, both the calls to the hotline AND injury levels stayed flat, but the nature of the calls changed. Instead of calling with job related issues, more and more of the workers called about problems outside the workplace. Problems with coworkers or supervisors were replaced by worries of foreclosures and other financial concerns.

Fear of Loss of Livelihood

Fear of job loss and the subsequent financial consequences can increase the likelihood of workplace violence, as well. Studies in the causes of the postal shootings found a correlation between fear of job loss and the outbreak of the shooting. Postal workers were constantly threatened with the loss of their jobs while at the same time reminded that their limited education and background made it highly unlikely that they would ever have it as good as they had it at the post office. Whether or not these statements were true, workers believed them and when faced with nothing else to lose a handful of mentally ill workers reacted violently.

When fear is replaced by a feeling of fatefulness bad things are going to happen. Companies can only push workers (from the executive suite to the rank and file) so far before the system breaks down and bad things start to happen.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Injury reporting, Just Culture, Phil La Duke, Fear, fear as a risk factor, fraidy cats, worker fear

Wake Up: The Life you Save May Be Mine

By Phil La Duke

I am slowly migrating my posts from my other blog (the decommissioned Rockford Greene International blog that has since been renamed Worker Safety Net) to this blog.  But in the interest of not boring the socks off those of you who used to read both blogs, in each case, I rewrite and give a hard edit to these pieces. In short, while this may not be a entirerly new post I believe it is different enough to be worth the read.)

Tens of millions are spent reminding workers to work safely and be mindful of the many hazards they will inevitably face in the course of their workdays, but scare little focus has been cast on one of the biggest contributors to workplace injuries: the lack of sleep. The tentative recovery has employers gun-shy about hiring and as things pick up workers are increasingly fatigued as they try to do more and more with less and less.

Many of us worry about not getting enough sleep, but how harmful is the lack of sleep? Very. Consider the following:

• Almost A Third Of Us Don’t Get Enough Sleep. According to Fox News, 30% of all American workers don’t get enough sleep (not on the job, of course). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that 50 million to 70 million American adults suffer from sleep and wakefulness disorders.
• Lack of Sleep Makes Us Sick. According to USNews.comlack of sleep has been tied to mental distress, depression, anxiety, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol and certain risk behaviors including cigarette smoking, physical inactivity and heavy drinking.
• Drowsy Driving Is a Major Issue. The most common workplace fatality is a traffic accident on the job. Drowsydriver.org reports that 60% of adult drivers—about 168 million people —say they have driven while drowsy 37% (or 103 million people), have actually fallen asleep at the wheel. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), more than 750 people die and 20,000 more are injured each year due directly to fatigued commercial vehicle drivers, and an estimated 20% of vehicle crashes are linked to drowsy driving.
• The problem is bigger than just highway safety, according to Joseph Hallinan, in Why We Make Mistakes: How We Work Without Seeing, Forget Things In Seconds, And Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average nearly a dozen pilots fell asleep in mid-flight between 2003 and 2007, and when medical students reported working five or more marathon shifts in a single month caused the chance of making a mistake that harmed a patient went up 700%.
• The Economy Isn’t Helping. Apart from the financial problems that keep you up at night, the floundering economy has made the workplace more dangerous in other ways, for example, studies have shown that workers with more than one job were significantly more sleep deprived, so those workers forced to moonlight to make ends meet are more likely to be sleep deprived.
• Sleep Deprivation Contributes to Poor Decision Making. According to Hallinan, even moderate sleep deprivation can cause brain impairment equivalent to driving while drunk AND has been shown to significantly increase an individual’s willingness to take risks.

  In effect, sleep deprived workers make more mistakes, poorer decisions, and take more risks…all things that have been repeatedly shown to increase the probability of worker injuries.

What Can Be Done About it?

The last thing that anyone needs or wants, is another thing for the safety guy to carp about, but all is not lost; experts at the National Sleep Foundation and elsewhere offers tips for getting a good night’s sleep:

1. Don’t sleep in on weekends; maintain your weekday sleep schedules.
2. Wind down. Experts recommend that people establish a regular relaxing routine to transition between waking and sleep. Soaking in a hot tub and then reading a book before retiring can greatly improve the quality of sleep one gets. Make your bedroom sleep friendly—dark, quiet, comfortable and cool.
3. Use your bed for sleeping. Experts warn that watching television or working on a computer (and butchering chickens I would suppose) can impede your ability to truly relax when it comes time for sleeping
4. Avoid caffeine nicotine and alcohol for several hours before bedtime. It makes sense that not ingesting chemicals that increase your metabolism and make you jittery right before retiring won’t help you get restorative sleep.
5. Allow enough to time for sleep. Before you raise your hands in protest that you would if you could, consider that people who get enough sleep are significantly more productive than those who are deprived.
6. Nap. A twenty-minute (no more) nap followed by exercise will make you feel refreshed and provide you a pick-me-up that will make you more productive.
7. Finish eating at least 2-3 hours before your regular bedtime. The act of digesting food takes a lot of energy and things that require your body to work hard make it more difficult to go to sleep.
8. Exercise regularly and complete your workout a few hours before bedtime. The goal of exercise (at least cardio exercises) is to raise your heart rate, increase your metabolism, and generally do the opposite of what you should do right before bedtime. But regular exercise several hours before bedtime will actually help relieve stress and relax you sufficiently so that you can get a good night’s sleep.
9. Recognize that one of the most common reasons for insomnia is worrying about not getting enough sleep. Lying quietly with ones eyes closed can be very restorative, and while it is not as healthy as deep REM sleep, it can be a short-term solution to the sleep deprivation problem.

Safety professionals should raise the awareness of this problem among workers and share tips for getting enough sleep, especially on the night shift or for workers assigned to swing shift.  While there has been no conclusive link between a lack of sleep and mortality, studies have shown that employees who work swing shifts tend to have shorter life-spans.

There comes a point where telling people what they need to do to be safe outside the workplace is intrusive and inappropriate; expecting workers to get enough sleep isn’t one of them. When the worker has a lifestyle issue—whether that be substance abuse or insomnia—that emperils him/herself or others in the workplace it is within the company’s right to act.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Risk, Safety, Worker Safety, getting a good night's sleep, managing personal risk, performance shaping factors, sleep deprivation, Worker Safety, worker safety and sleep deprivation

Road Rash: Business Travel and Injuries

by Phil La Duke

Last Saturday and the Saturday before that I made no posts to my blog. It was an unfortunate result of my having been away on business. This is not an excuse mind you; I had every intention of writing and posting using the infernal timer that has vexed me every time I’ve tried using it. In hindsight I’m glad I waited. This week I’d like to talk a bit about an area of safety that I think goes largely ignored: safety while travelling.
While safety professionals understand very well that a injury sustained while travelling for business is, in fact, a recordable injury and a recordable injury effects your overall Incident Rate and DART irrespective if it happened in a hotel room, a rental car, or an airport. How big a problem is it? In the U.S. the most lethal jobs are consistently sales positions and automobile accidents are the leading cause of accidental death among sales professionals and while other parts of the world the problem isn’t nearly as severe as the U.S., many of the basic hazards that confront business travelers are essentially the same.
Those who travel for whatever purpose are at heightened risk because they are constantly bombarded with unfamiliar stimuli. The subconscious mind takes in millions of bits of information (much more than that actually) and sorts according to whether or not the information is indicative of a threat. The subconscious does this by comparing the information with other information that it has stored in a sort of a database that one collects based on one’s life experience when the new data matches up with benign memories the brain decides that the new data is harmless and disregards it. When the brain detects danger it activates the fight: flight response and floods the body with adrenalin (or releases it in little drips depending on the degree of perceived threat) and well, I think we’ve all heard wild tales of the fantastic feats of strength caused by a good adrenalin rush so I won’t belabor the point here. But when the brain doesn’t quite know what to make of a piece of information it assumes it’s a threat, in much the same way we tell our children not to take candy from strangers (even when everyone knows that strangers have the best candy!) Are most strangers a threat? Certainly not (although the 24-hour news machine often creates the impression that there is a greater danger out there than there really is), but if we assume a stranger is kind and harmless and he or she turns out to have malicious intentions our child is left unprotected and likely victimized, but if the inverse is true and our child avoids contact with a benevolent stranger there is no harm done.
When we travel we are bombarded with a barrage of unknown and uncategorized data and our brains treat that data as potential threats. As the brain collects more and more information that we are in danger it raises the adrenalin drip and our bodies get stressed. Stress, in addition to creating long-term health problems also inhibits our decision making process and causes us to make more errors. (So basically we are making poor choices AND making more honest mistakes.) Add to this the disruption of sleep from which so many travelers suffer and the resultant rise in risky behavior, and you have a circumstance where injuries are all but certain; in hazard recognition terms the likelihood of an injury is greatly increased. Depending on the activity, this cocktail of poor choices, human error, and at risk behavior can be a deadly drink indeed.
Perhaps the most dangerous activity is driving, and again, this is skewed against the U.S. and Canada where fewer business travelers are employing professional drivers, using public transportation, or riding in taxis (although if you have been on anything like some of the truly harrowing cab rides of which I have been a party and you would join me in wondering why there aren’t more business travelers killed in cabs.) Business travelers routinely drive rented vehicles that are largely unfamiliar to them and do so on unfamiliar routes.
Data on injuries of business travelers is seldom accurately collected. Neither the safety professional nor the traveler him/herself is mindful of the need to record near misses, first aid cases, or even recordable—it’s not that they don’t think it’s important they typically don’t think of these incidents as work-related. Think about it: when you are travelling for business where exactly is the workplace? It’s in the airport parking lot, the airport, the plane, the car rental office, in the rental car, at the hotel, at the customer site or remote corporate location, the hotel lounge, the restaurants, and…well you get the picture. And when exactly is a business traveler “off the clock” and does that even make a difference?
Several weeks ago I was on the road and awoke from a deep sleep with the typical dry mouth one gets when living the sweet life that is business travel. I got up to get a drink of water and while returning to my bed in the dark caught the corner of a poorly placed credenza and tore a painful but not life threatening scratch across my soft white underbelly (my side actually but I thought the former sounded better.) I took pictures and sent them to the hotel manager who acted like I was pulling the cockroach in the salad grift from “Paper Moon”. In short, he either didn’t believe me or couldn’t have cared any less, he went so far as to tell me “we searched the room thoroughly and can’t find the piece of furniture in the photo”.
And really should we care? I think so. While my injury was minor it could have been much more severe and had it been I would have had a recordable incident. Had my scratch become infected that too would have been a recordable incident. But the real question is, would I have thought to report it, and if I were to report it, how well received would it have been by my organization. In my case, I work for an organization that takes these matters very seriously, but what about those business travelers who work for companies who preach “thou shalt report” with one breath and “thanks for spoiling the safety BINGO” with the next? I’m not picking on safety incentives here, because, let’s face it, it doesn’t matter where you work nobody is excited to hear about the latest recordable.
Until we find a place where we can welcome injury reporting as a source of important information on our process weaknesses and not a gig against the person injured (and even in the most enlightened workplaces there is still a lingering resentment that our safety record was ruined by one stupid accident.) we will not be able to get a real sense of the risk we face. Sadly, business travelers are least likely to report an injury and at significant risk of injury.

Filed under: Injury reporting, Near Miss Reporting, Phil La Duke, Safety, injuries during business travel, mixed messages for safety, Near miss reporting, Worker Safety

The Greatest Threat To Safety Might Be Your Safety Training

 

By Phil La Duke

To assert that most safety training sucks is to reveal no great insight; it’s practically an O’Henry short story: training professionals steer clear of safety courses for fear they might miss some important point and imperil the learners and safety professionals lack the requisite knowledge of knowledge of adult education to construct an effective course. The result is well-intentioned organizations wasting millions annually on weak safety training that not only doesn’t protect workers; it puts them at risk.

There are a couple of basic things you have to decide whether you believe or not before you can draw any accurate conclusion. First, you either believe that safety training protects workers or you do not. (It’s something of a mute point, because in most countries Safety training is required.  It’s not required to be good mind you it’s just required that people complete it.) Second, you either believe existing safety training is sufficient or it is not.

Researchers in adult learning paint a fairly bleak picture of training in general.  Research has shown that up to 85% of the skills learned in training courses is lost before it ever has a chance of making it to the workplace, and further research shows that no skills taught in a class are retained unless the skills are applied within 48 hours of the course.

Before we continue I should make something clear. I use the term “training” not “learning” not “teaching” and not “education”. I know some people bristle at the term, “you train dogs, not people” but I was taught the difference between teaching and training through the following analogy: “you might be in favor of your sixth grade daughter receiving sex education in school, but you probably don’t want her getting sex training”.  Some of you might be offended by that example (lighten up) but I think it creates a visceral mental image of the precise difference between training and teaching.  As far as I’m concerned, education is learning ABOUT something and training is learning how to DO something.

This distinction has profound implications in worker safety.  Safety professionals pull their hair out in frustration, concoct elaborate schemes, and tilt at ludicrous organizational windmills in an effort to influence, motivate, coerce and cajole workers into working safely, when I put it to you these workers were never taught to work safely, they were taught ABOUT working safely.   This might sound like I’m playing semantic games here, but think about it.  What do people learn how to DO in a hazard communication course? That’s not to say that safety education isn’t important, and awareness too, while were at it, but if we want people to change how they behave—and despite whatever position you take on behavior and its relationship to safety I think we can all agree that safe behavior and good decision making is an essential to a safer workplace—we have to first give them the skills they need to behave safely.

This distinction also lies at the heart of why so few safety professionals, academics, and consultants have any real credibility with workers.  Credibility is only really gained when a person knows how to DO the job, irrespective of how much the person knows ABOUT the job.  This creates a problem for safety training; many decision makers assume that subject matter experts will make great trainers because they will have so much more credibility with the learners.  Of course not all grizzled veterans are horrible trainers, but many are really bad at teaching people the skills they need to do a job.  Any time I have endured a training course on any subject where the instructor takes pains to brag about his or her having spent 87 years doing blah, blah, blah…I knew I was in for long, pointless class.

The secret to better safety training starts with a professional designed course. I’ve explored that topic in greater detail in previous articles and blog posts so I won’t go into it much here, except to say that a well-designed course is like having a concrete plan for imparting the skills; a “learning road map”, if you will. The development of the course requires two kinds of expertise: expertise in the content, and expertise in adult learning.  There are no short cuts to this formula. If you try to cut corners you will end up not only wasting time and money, but potentially putting workers at risk.

But a professionally developed course is only the start.  The delivery of quality safety training is every bit as specific and important a skill as any other. Just because someone LIKES to present in front of a group or that fancy themselves a trainer.  A good safety trainer should be an expert in the discipline of training. Of course the instructor has to have credibility in the content, but that doesn’t mean that the instructor has to have complete mastery of the subject and have 150 years doing the work.

In the best classes, either a subject matter expert has been given training in presentation skills or is teamed with an experienced trainer.  But too often those charged with ensuring that courses are delivered simply trust the subject matter expert to “pull together a course” or worse yet, trust them to deliver the “course” they’ve been regurgitating for years.

As I’ve said in so many other posts, the best safety training isn’t the regulatory training most of tend to think of when people mention safety training. Rather the most important safety training is effective core skills training. Unfortunately, this training tends to be even worse than regulatory training and is even less formal than the worst regulatory training out there.  This is where things get dangerous, if we don’t provide quality training in how to do the tasks required of a job the workers will figure out a way to do it, and the way they find to do it will be the most lasting learning.  It’s tough to unlearn something that you learned from your own experience and even tougher to change those behaviors.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Performance Improvement, Risk, education versus training, poor training makes the workplace unsafe, Safety, safety training, Worker Safety

When It Comes To Unsafe Behaviors There’s Plenty Of Blame to Go Around

By Phil La Duke

If you’ve made even the most cursory read of my articles and blogs you probably already know that I don’t hold much stock in Behavior Based Safety (BBS).  I believe that except for the odd statistical outlier nut-job, nobody WANTS to get hurt and unless they were designed my the Marquis De Sade you processes aren’t intended to hurt people.  If those two things are true no amount of behavior modification—whether it be incentive programs or telling people to be more careful—is going to change much of anything.  But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe unsafe behavior is the single largest cause of injuries, and if so, we have to manage those behaviors.

Before we can manage unsafe behaviors we have to understand the context in which the behaviors occur.  We can’t take effective action unless we understand precisely why people behaved in an unsafe manner.  A couple of days ago an acquaintance told me about how he had been injured on the job during the third week of February on two consecutive years (he was nervously praying for the first of March to come so he could relax a bit).  “It was my own fault,” he explained, “I was rushing to get things done because my boss was standing over my shoulder saying ‘we gotta get this order out’”.  Unsafe behavior? sure;  the fault of the worker? I don’t think so. Most traditional BBS programs focus on the unsafe behaviors of workers. Productivity is sapped as millions of hours are wasted insisting that supervisors watch people work and coach them on their unsafe behaviors.  Don’t the people whose unsafe decisions and insistence and encouragement of unsafe behaviors bear any culpability in worker injuries? I think they should.

Here are some incredibly unsafe behaviors (attitudes + action) up-stream in the process that organizations need to address:

• “I Don’t Care How; Just Get It Done.” Whether it’s manufacturing, or construction, or mining or oil and gas there are supervisors, and site managers, and even executives who reward the people who ignore safety protocols and procedure to “get things done”.  This sends a strong message to the workers: you will get rewarded for violating the rules.  Ask these leaders about this behavior and you will likely get a sermon on how they will never tolerate unsafe work and a worker has a right to go home in the same condition…blah, blah, blah.  But when the rubber hits the road and they are faced with falling behind schedule and giving a nod-and-wink “work safe” while telling the workers that the job must get done by Thursday at all costs.  Workers aren’t stupid; they know that they can take risks and nine times out of ten nothing bad will happen.  They understand that probability favors them not getting hurt and if they “get the job done” they will be seen—and more importantly treated—like heroes.  It’s the guys who get things done who get promoted, get the plum assignments, and get fat raises.  They will take unnecessary risks because they are rewarded for doing so, while the people who work safely are punished.  A pizza party at the end of the month for zero loss time injuries can’t compete with the raises, opportunities, and job security afford to those who “get things done”.
• “I Don’t Care If the Safety Rule Makes It Impossible to Do the Job You Must Follow The Rule.” This behavior is most prevalent among the “command and control” safety professionals who neither know, nor care to know how the work is done.  It’s an ignorance borne out of laziness.  Workers are told they can’t do the job in the most expeditious and efficient manner because doing so is unsafe, are given an unworkable solution, and an expectation to perform to standard. Faced with this choice they take unjustifiable risks, and why wouldn’t they? We can cluck our tongues at the violations of the workers but really whose unsafe behavior is truly to blame for the hazardous situation?
• “What Can I DO? I Can’t Make Them Work Safely.” In the grand scheme of things there is no such thing as working completely safely.  Sure we can work in ways in which we minimize our risk but even the best set of rules can only protect us from hazards that have been anticipated. It’s tough to anticipate every conceivable hazard in a dynamic and rapidly changing environment.  Too many safety professionals act like institutional eunuchs, trumpeting their emasculation to anyone they think might listen.  The lack of a safe behavior can be the same as an unsafe one.  When safety professionals or supervisors turn a blind eye toward hazards—behavioral or physical—the effect is every bit as dangerous as the unsafe act itself.
• “I Don’t Have Time”. The lack of time has become the rallying cry for every aspiring martyr. Where the quality of a person’s work was once the measure of his or her performance now, in many organizations, bellyaching about how little time you have has become the new hallmark of an employee’s contribution.  I have heard so many safety professionals, supervisors, and operations managers whine about their lack of time to get everything done that I involuntarily roll my eyes when I hear it.  What am I supposed to do with that information? Praise you for doing a half-assed job? Sympathize because you can’t manage up? Studies have shown that people tend to do work in the following order: tasks they enjoy, tasks that are easy, tasks that are fun, and then everything else.  If you don’t have time for safety—from the maintenance managers who can’t find the time to maintain equipment or repair facility issues to the safety person who can’t find the time to do a proper incident investigation to the materials manager who doesn’t have time to get stock out of the aisle ways, to the site manager who padlocks emergency exits because he doesn’t have time to discipline the people who are using it inappropriately, to the supervisor who doesn’t have time to inspect the work area to ensure it is free of hazards—you need to either reprioritize your work or get out before someone get’s killed.
• “They Wouldn’t Get Hurt If they would Be More Careful.” Blaming the injured is a staple of many Safety Management systems. I have heard safety professionals describe workers who have suffered repeat injuries “frequent flyers” and plant managers insist that workers are hurt “primarily because they take short cuts to get more ass time”.  I have heard that safety is everyone’s job so many times that I want to vomit.  If safety truly is everyone’s job then where is the culpability for those of us who make decisions who jeopardize the safety of others?

So maybe behavior is a key component in worker safety, and maybe we bear some responsibility for our own behavior.  If safety truly is everyone’s job than there is blood on our hands every time someone gets injured on our watch.  We bear as much of the responsibility for the gore and carnage as anyone. Maybe it’s time we take a hard look at OUR behavior before we start pointing fingers of shame at the injured worker.  Maybe it’s time for us to ask ourselves what did we do TODAY to help worker’s make safe decisions? Maybe it’s time to turn the lens of judgment on ourselves and ask what we could have done to prevent the injury that took the life of a coworker, and how we will change our OWN behavior to help workers make better, safer choices from now on.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Phil La Duke, Risk, 88% of injuries caused by unsafe behavior, At risk behavior, Behavior Based Safety, improving worker safety, Safety, The myth of 95% of injuries are caused by unsafe behaviors, Worker Safety

Trust Me

By Phil La Duke

There isn’t any magic bullet when it comes to making the workplace safer but the thing that comes closest is trust. No change, no improvement, no carefully crafted organizational change initiative will ever come to fruition until and unless workers trust the leadership of the organization. If workers mistrust their supervisors, the leadership, or the safety professional even the best safety efforts will fail. It sounds simple, but in my career I have seen more organizational change effort—whether aimed at improving safety or changing benefits—fail because of mistrust.

It’s a shame, because every day, we ask—no expect—worker’s to trust us, and let’s face it, in many cases there is scant reason why workers’ should believe us when we tell them that everything will be better if they just do this or that or when we tell them that this time things will be different.

Workers’ Aren’t Stupid (Well Most of Them Anyway)

Workers’ do stupid things, we all do, and like most (if not all) workers are skeptical when they hear that the “flavour of the month” will be the salvation of the workingman. Most don’t want to invest time, effort, and emotions into something that they know in the deepest recesses of their souls won’t last as long as the life of the alpha fruit fly. And with the safety community trotting this dog and pony show after that can we really blame them? Workers want to do their job, collect an honest wage and return home safe unharmed. It sounds simple, maybe even trite, but it’s true.  The problem with getting people to change the way they conduct themselves in a business setting—whether or not they follow the rules, whether or not they take unreasonable risks, and the very basis of their decision-making—depends on the level of trust within the organization.

The Nature Of Trust

When most of us think of trust we think about our willingness to believe that people wouldn’t deliberately harm us, whether the nature of the harm be physical, psychological, or financial, or some other means I’m too lazy or intellectually limited to ponder.  In basest possible terms we count on the fact that they, as The Simpsons barman Moe Szyslak put it, “wish (us) no specific harm”. When we trust someone we count on them to consider our best interests when they act, and not “screw us over” in some way.  Most safety professionals are trust worthy in this respect.  But there is more to trust than just believing that given have a chance your safety rep won’t mug you in the men’s room.  In fact, there are several different kinds of trust.

1. Trust in motives.  When we mistrust someone’s motives it’s generally because we suspect that they have an alternative agenda, about which they aren’t being completely honest and above board.  We suspect that the person we mistrust is putting their own needs  (or the needs of the Elvis impersonator who lives next door, for all we know or care) before our needs, and if momma ever taught us anything it’s that if we don’t look out for ourselves no one else is likely to. When workers mistrust the organization it’s not that they necessarily think the safety professional or the leadership are looking out for themselves at the expense
2. Trust in competence.  Sometimes we don’t trust people, not because we believe they have a larcenous heart, rather because we believe they have cheese and sawdust in their heads.  And when it comes to safety we want to know that the people making decisions about how work is completed actually know what they are doing, that their decisions won’t get us killed or leave us horribly maimed. We may believe that people making the decisions hear t is in the right place
3. Trust in Judgment. I know some safety people who have never met a dumb idea that they didn’t immediately love. The rest of the organization just rolls its collective eye when it hears the details of the hair-brained scheme-d’ jour
4. Trust the facts. It’s one thing to trust people have your best interests at heart and another thing to believe that they have the facts straight and still another to believe that they are properly interpreting the facts.  We live in an age where people are bombarded with facts. Facts without context, facts that are often confused and sometimes just made up. More and more people seek out the most ludicrous information to support whatever they want to believe, and its tough convince them otherwise.  So it stands to reason that workers will openly question the facts presented to them.  Just look at the practice of smokers.  There has been evidence linking cigarettes and cancer (not to mention heart disease) and yet as I write this, countless thousands will spark up another one. Why? Because sometimes even when the facts are known a person simply choses to ignore them.

It takes a lifetime to build trust and only a simple lapse in judgment or bad decision to wipe it out. Mostly trust is built on two things, past experience and consistency. And while we can’t change past experience we can develop a climate of consistency.  People tend to trust what they  can predict.

And let us not forget that trust is a two-way street; leadership can’t expect workers to trust them unless they first trust workers.

Filed under: Organizational change, Phil La Duke, Safety, culture change, nature of trust, organizational change, Phil La Duke, Safety, trust, Worker Safety