If It Feels Like Blame and Shame…It Is

By Phil La Duke

Blame isn’t pretty

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

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

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

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

Intent Is Meaningless

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

Right and Wrong Don’t Matter

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

Guilt By Proxy

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

When Is Enough Truly Enough

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

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

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

Pulling Safety Out Of Its Rut: The Value of A Different Look At Safety

By Phil La Duke

Let’s be clear, there is no such thing as a safe workplace. Sure we can slap each other on the back and brag to one another about the four years without a recordable injury and we can tell ourselves that we have achieved a Utopian risk free workplace but the reality is, there is always some probability that a worker will be harmed in the course of doing his or her job.

While the level of success in lowering the risk of injuries varies from organization to organization, its fair to say that we can all do better. (For you smug “I haven’t had an injury in my organization in 23 years” readers, I say look harder, do you have near misses? First aid cases? If you think the answer to those questions is “no” you are delusional. You might as well stop reading, because you will never understand the error of your ways until your next fatality; and believe me one is coming.) The problem isn’t just in the way we view safety, it’s also in the fact that for about 30 years the view of safety has remained largely unchallenged.  Consensus thinking on a complex problem leads to a convoluted mess, and in this case safety vendors—both the well meaning and the snake-oil salesmen—capitalize on the confusion to carve out lucrative livelihoods. When people make their livings off the status quo, they aren’t highly motivated to make substantive changes. In fact, most will fight like pumas to preserve their intellectual turf.

The problem with the same old thinking is that it implies that we have forever solved the problem. It’s as if safety is a static problem when in fact, safety is dynamic; every time there is a change in the workplace (which is constant—if nothing else every piece of equipment is getting older. Parts where out, workers get older and aren’t as physically capable as they were the day before. Without intervention, everything in the workplace is becoming more and more risky. Applying a static solution to a dynamic problem lies at the heart of disaster. Too many organizations miss this fact as they pursue improved worker safety. The approach most organizations take to making the workplace safer hasn’t really changed in the last 30 (if not 100 years). Effectively the solution is to modify the workers such that they are better able to interact with workplace hazards.

 “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”—Albert Einstein

If there is to be any sort of important, transformational innovation in workplace safety we have to think differently and explore radically different methods for reducing workplace risk; in short, we have to view safety in a revolutionary new way; we have to think differently.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” —Albert Einstein

I understand that many of you don’t see the problem, after all, things are getting better—injuries are down, fatalities are flat, and in general the workplace seems safer, or at very least safe enough.  But people still get hurt on the job, people still die in industrial accidents. So perhaps you should consider that another approach is necessary.

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”—Albert Einstein

It’s tempting to think that if we are getting good results doing what were doing then there is no real reason to change; if it aint broke, don’t fix it.  But emerging technology, slackening protections for workers, and socioeconomic changes relative to the business climate combine to create a drastically different workplace than we have previously experienced. We need to worry less about the procedural, less about the logical and more about the possible.

“Think Different”—Steven Jobs

Co-founder of Apple, Steven Jobs has had the greatest impact on our lives since Thomas Edison. When he returned to Apple he adopted the slogan, “Think Different”.  Others at Apple protested, “Think Different” they argued was grammatically incorrect, and should rightfully read “think differently, or think ‘different’”.  But Jobs had a specific meaning in mind. He wanted people to think “different”. Not differently from the way they were currently thinking, although that was certainly part of it. No, Jobs saw the credo as a call for thinking that was tangibly out of the mainstream. It was almost as he was calling for a visualization of exactly what the manifestation of what “different” looks like. It was more than a challenge; it was the defiant sneer of a mind that would change the world. If ever there was a place where thinking “different” is needed, it is in the world of worker safety.

Okay…So What?

It’s easy to hammer out a thousand words or so on the need for us to look beyond the traditional in worker safety, but without specifics how useful is the advice?  While the need for change in safety is considerable, the most critical changes need to come in these areas:

• The Role of The Safety Professional.  Seeing the safety professional as the wizened old mage who is the arbiter of all things safety is outmoded.  Whether these sages are policemen or consultants, it’s time to imagine a completely different safety function. One where the decision making relative to safety isn’t housed in the safety office to be meted out by the safety engineer, rather where knowledge is widely distributed throughout population and decision-making regarding safety resides with empowered workers at all levels.
• The View of Behavior As Causation.  Yes, unsafe behavior gets people injured and killed, but the BBS pundits have got to stop acting as if they have discovered the God Particle.  There is a dearth of understanding of sociology, neurology, brain function, group dynamics, anthropology, and even psychology underpinning too many BBS “solutions” (the only solutions offered by many BBS systems is to keep the providers well feed with full pockets). The question isn’t whether or not unsafe behaviors create heightened risk of injuries, but whether or not we can influence those behaviors to the extent that it will lower the risk of injuries.  If you considers other problems associated with populations—crime, poverty, war, etc.—governments haven’t had much luck solving these problems by modifying individuals behaviors; what makes us think we can be more successful in worker safety?
• The View of Safety As A Discrete Element.  Trying to managing safety in a vacuum, that is, without considering Quality, Delivery, Cost, Morale, and Environment is like herding cats.  If you don’t treat the efficiency of your organization holistically, you will most likely shift problems from one area of the company to another.
• Prevention. A couple of weeks ago I posted “Requiem for Prevention”. In that piece I talked at length about how we needed to siphon some of the effort that we currently put into prevention and refocus it on protecting workers when prevention fails.  We need to radically reinvent our view of prevention and how to balance it with contingency planning.
• Treating Injuries As Somehow Different From Other Process Failures.  Safety professionals need to be re-envisioned as problem solvers and process improvement specialists; as utility players on the team. Safety professionals should be capable of making improvements across the SQDCME spectrum; more generalist and less specialized.
• The View of Safety As A Sacred Calling.  Yes, safety is the right thing to do, sure it’s moral, yes…blah, blah, blah…admit it; we don’t save lives. We aren’t doctors, we aren’t searching for a cure for cancer.  The best we can hope to claim is that we might have saved a life in the course of our careers. We need to stop elevating what we do above the jobs of those we serve.

“You May Say I’m A Dreamer, But I’m Not The Only One”—John Lennon

I realize that a good number of you are bristling about what you’ve read here.  That uneasiness you’re feeling is the first stage to opening your mind.  You need to open your mind and stare into the abyss, because if you don’t you have no capacity to change. Those who have no capacity to change and adapt are on the express train to extinction. Open your mind, if you leave us too soon you’ll be missed.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Safety, Safety Culture, A second Look at Safety, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”—Albert Einstein, “Think Different”—Steven Jobs, BBS, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety

Requiem For Prevention

by Phil La Duke

I am a loud (some might say obnoxious) and ardent supporter of prevention.  In fact, I one of my core values is “Prevention is the key to sustainable safety.” So given my vocal advocacy of prevention, you might be surprised to learn that I believe that in many cases prevention has gone overboard and that in many cases companies would be better served by doing LESS prevention and more contingent planning.  Heresy? Consider the  organization that spends tens of thousands of dollars each year preventing accidents that would likely have little or no chance of ever happening.  These companies have 20-person safety committees that meet once a week to argue about why an over-burdened maintenance department hasn’t fixed a low-priority hazardous condition.

Prevention costs money and resources that may well be better spent elsewhere in the organization—and not necessarily safety. Equally damning, organizations that continue funding convoluted safety bureaucracies that unnecessarily add heads, complexity, and cost in the name of preventing injuries.  Too often these efforts focus on one of the most misunderstood sources of injuries in the workplace today: human behavior. These systems seldom deliver what they promise (that is, a sustainable change in human behavior) and can actually impede important business processes and the delivery of goods or services in the misguided attempt to control human behavior; it can’t be done, so stop trying.

I’m not suggesting that we return to reactive safety practices, far from it.  What I am saying is that there is a time and a place for prevention, but its is not a panacea.  Simply put, you can’t prevent every accident, and in some cases you should be looking for ways to protect workers when your best efforts to prevent an accident fails INSTEAD of wasting time on prevention.

Variation in Human Behavior

As organizations, we’d all like to think that we hire smart, capable people, and for the most part we do.  We spend days (and thousands of dollars) screening candidates: we ask them probing questions to find out how they reason, how they solve problems, and how they think.  We do background checks and ask professional references whether or not the candidate is worth offering them a position.  We screen the candidate for illicit drug use, criminal misdeeds, and the things in life that indicate that whether or not the candidate has sound judgment. In the end we confidently hire the candidate and invest time and money training the new hire so that he or she can meaningfully contribute.  And then it happens.  The person that we spent so much time screening and training gets hurt and we think to ourselves, “if only that idiot would have…”  Huh? Now because the employee got hurt he/she’s suddenly an idiot?  You may read this and think that you are immune to such thoughts, but the majority of the people I hear describing injured workers as idiots are safety professionals.

They Call Them Accidents For A Reason

As much as we would like to assign accountability for injuries, the fact remains that in almost all cases whatever happened to injure the person was unintentional, or at very least, the person who committed the unsafe act didn’t fully comprehend the potential consequences of his or her actions; the accident was an unintended outcome; in short, the injury was an accident.  Accepting that things will go wrong, that people make mistakes, is a bitter pill to swallow.  We are taught to believe that making mistakes are bad, subject to punishment, and indicative of poor judgment or out-and-out stupidity. But everyone makes mistakes—we learn by trial and error and without mistakes there can be no learning, at least not organic learning that lasts.

Everyone Makes Mistakes, But No One Should Have To Die Because of A Mistake

I’ve read (I can’t remember where) that the average person makes 5 mistakes an hour. Multiply that by the 2080 hours in the average work year and you have a boat load of mistakes.  Some theorize that because biologically speaking change is reckless and dangerous (nature tends to have a “if it aint broke don’t fix it’ approach to survival; if a species is thriving it resists change.  In fact, change is so dangerous, that our bodies are hardwired to resist it, when we are confronted with change it triggers our flight/fight response and causes us stress.  Conversely, species that are unable to change are unable to adapt to changes in their environments and are driven to extinction.  So it would appear that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.  But if the research that found that the human brain will make 5 mistakes an hour is correct what possible advantage would there be in these mistakes?  Making tiny subconscious, non-cognitive mistakes could be our brain’s way of testing the environment by disrupting our routines in small ways.  If the mistake leads us to a better way of living we make serendipitous discoveries and innovations but if the mistake leads to an undesirable outcome we see it as an error. But in both cases our brains learn about the safety of deviating from its routine and we are better able to safely adapt.

Variation Leads To Errors

Experts in quality, particularly in manufacturing, cannot emphasis the danger of process variation strongly enough; when the process varies things go sour very quickly.  Manufacturing and process engineers have made huge strides in reducing mechanical variation, but the variation endemic to human behavior is so pervasive that it’s all but impossible to eliminate it, or substantially reduce it.  Outside of the military (and quasi military—police, security, etc.) it is very difficult to control human behavior.  Even variation in cognitive behavior is difficult; how many companies have problems with poor attendance? Certainly at least some of the causes of absenteeism are cognitive decisions where the offending employee simply chose not to come to work.

Focus On Contingency Not Prevention

Okay, relax.  I know that I preach prevention above all things, but when it comes to variation in human  behavior you just can’t prevent most of it. If we could there would be no crime, no traffic accidents, and no medical malpractice.  And to make things even more complicated, human behavior can be very tricky to predict, and even more difficult to prevent.  We have to stop pretending that all our problems can be solved through preventive measures; sometimes—despite our best efforts—things go sideways and when they do we had ought to have some contingency in place to prevent a mishap from becoming a disaster or a tragedy.  When it comes to contingency versus prevention it doesn’t have to be an either or decision.  I used to teach problem solving and we used a very simple tool for determining whether to use a preventive countermeasure or a contingency countermeasure.  We would rate both the probability and severity of an error in terms of high, medium, or low.  If the probability that the particular failure mode (engineering speak for a screw up) is high—in other words it is almost certain to happen under the given circumstances—then one should definitely find a preventive action.  If the probability is low (fairly remote, but possible) one would need to temper the response after considering the time and money it would require to implement.  Similarly, if the failure mode’s severity was high (if it DID happen the consequences would be severe) than one would have a contingency in place to protect workers, property, and inventory.  Of course if the severity was expected to be low one would again determine whether the protection offered would be worth the cost of the required resources.

Because one rates the severity separately from the probability, one ends up with two scores that must be considered together.  Certainly if the probability is high AND the severity is high one would implement both preventive and contingency controls.  On the other end of the spectrum, if both the probability and severity were low, one would likely only take action if the countermeasures were cheap and easy to implement. But the scores that are in between (medium probability and low severity, etc.) are subject to a lot more judgment-based decision making. This may seem like a serious weakness to some, but on the contrary, this subjectivity allows an organization to customize it’s countermeasures to its unique environment and situation.

It would be great if we could accurately predict and prevent injuries, but the reality is we can’t. We have to be pragmatic and take important steps to ensure that when someone does have an accident, protections are in place to keep the injury from becoming life altering or fatal.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Phil La Duke, Safety, accident prevention, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, contingencies for safety, Criticisms of BBS, culture change, focus on prevention

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.

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[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.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Phil La Duke, BBS, Behavior Based Safety, Fiscal Cliff, OSHA, Worker Safety

Is Behavior Based Safety The Safety Equivalent of Lobotomies?

By Phil La Duke

Edison wasted so much time trying to discredit alternating current that he missed out on potentially making more remarkable discoveries.

Last week I posted another criticism of Behavior Based Safety (BBS) and was deluged with another predictable wave of “you don’t know what you’re talking about” emails and a fair number of positive comments.  One comment that was sort of in between:  “I have never been a big fan of BBS but I think you are guilty of doing something similar to what you accuse its proponents of doing – making claims without research or statistics to back it up.” I think that is a fair challenge to make, but I can assure you of two things: 1) I don’t make up research or claims that cannot be supported by research.  There are already too many things on the internet that some crackpot made up and promulgated for one dubious purpose or another; and 2) I am not writing a research paper here.  A blog is an opinion piece, so while I may reference research in a vague way don’t look for me to post a bibliography at the end of my posts.  Rest assured I do not claim as my own, ideas and research that are the intellectual property of another, but you can write your own damned term papers.  I will always make it a point to identify things that are my opinions from that which is the work or opinions of another.  I have around 35 peer-reviewed i.e. works that are acceptable as a source that can be cited in academic works, and links are provided for those works so those of you wishing to use my work as a source should reference those works.

So in the interest of citing my sources, I am reading Blunder, Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions by Zachary Shore and his views and research on the factors that influence human decision making and resultant behavior have profound implications for worker safety and (in my opinion) create a scathing indictment of BBS at a foundational level.

Let me begin by stating that my principal concerns with BBS lie less with the methodology and tools than it does with the fanatical devotion BBS proponents tend to exhibit to the approach and their unwillingness to address any of the BBS weaknesses (accept to say that either the organization in question was misapplying BBS, or to add more complexity to an already unduly concept system.

I have long accused the BBS apologists of defending junk-science for the sole purpose of lining their pockets.  I have called them charlatans and snake oil salesmen and while I have met BBS purveyors who were just that, most of the BBS proponents aren’t deliberately promoting hogwash and jeopardizing workers to make money (in fairness to me, they have called me far worse, but that is just me being a baby.)

So why cling to something that is increasingly suspect? Dr. Shore begins his book with the story of Thomas Edison.  You may remember Thomas Edison as the inventor of the phonograph, the light bulb, and a host of other inventions that literally changed the world.  Some of you may also be aware of Edison’s personal campaign against alternating current (AC) as the best way to get electrical power to the places people needed it most.  Edison worked hard to discredit the work of his one-time protégé Nikola Tesla.  Despite overwhelming evidence that AC power was far superior, Edison sought to discredit it and Tesla. (Tesla didn’t help his case much by being a nutcase in his own right).  Edison wasted time, money, and resources battling a competitive approach—instead of inventing new and exciting tools, Edison focused his energy (no pun intended) on destroying someone else’s work.  I suppose one could argue that this is what I do when I criticize BBS, but I don’t want to destroy it, rather fix the gaping holes endemic to it. Shore uses Edison to illustrate a cognitive trap.  Edison was so convinced in the “rightness” of his beliefs that he spent an inordinate amount of effort to destroy any competitive theory.  I think there is a lot of this in BBS.

One of the most intriguing ideas that Shore explores is the idea of causefusion, the act of attributing causation to instances where there is only correlation.  In other words oversimplifying research that shows correlation to demonstrate (erroneously) causation.  Shore uses, numerous examples, but points to the fact that nutritionists will find a correlation between eating a particular food and extrapolating that a nutrient contained in high concentrations in a food would have the same effect in supplement form.  For example, eating foods high in beta carotene reduces the risk of cancer, therefore taking beta carotene supplements must also reduce the risk of cancer.  Studies (and if you want to know which ones, call Shore) have shown that this is untrue and in some cases the opposite is true.  I see this at the root of much of the defensiveness about BBS.  Some time ago, the National Safety Council did research that showed that upwards of 90% of all injuries had some behavioral element.  That study was quickly accepted as gospel and entrepreneurs just as quickly set out to develop solutions based on the fact that 90% of all injuries were caused by unsafe behaviors; this is causefusion—the initial research made no claim to causation; scare few research finding do, rather the study only showed a correlation, i.e. a relationship between two factors. Shore argues that cause fusion tends to make a single cause that is easy to explain (for example, unsafe behavior) appealing when the reality is that the cause is systemic and complex. In support of his argument, he quotes Harvard paleontologist and essayist, Stephen Jay Gould. In the 1990s Gould warned against the new belief that genetics could explain everything. “We naturally favor, and tend to overextend exciting novelties in vain hope that they may provide general solutions or panaceas when such contributions really constitute more modest albeit vital pieces of a much complex puzzle.” BBS is hardly a novelty to safety professionals, but it can be to many Operations professionals and I think this is an apt quote.

In Why We Make Mistakes: How we Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average Joseph T. Hallinan argues that our biases shape so much of what we believe and how we decide that the idea of free will is almost doubtful.  He argues that we learn so little from our experience because we attribute causation to the wrong things. In other words, we begin to seek out things that support what we already believe rather than trying to learn new things.

On the other hand, in The Human Brain Book An Illustrated Guide To Its Structure, Function, and Disorders Rita Carter points out that while phrenology (the study of personality by studying the bumps on people’s head) has long been ridiculed as quackery and lobotomies (damaging or removing portions of the frontal lobe of people suffering from mental disorders) are now regarded as barbaric both practices offered real benefits—phrenology was the first recognition that parts of the brain controlled different things, and U.K. studies of people who had lobotomies showed that 41% of those who had lobotomies were either cured or greatly improved while only 4% were judged to be worse off then before the procedure.  This feeds and supports that our biases tend to impede our judgment (I admit, not exactly an earth-shattering revelation).  Many elements within BBS are valuable, but as BBS fanatics continue to dismiss criticisms we run the serious risk that the valuable elements will lost as more and more organizations see BBS as the new phrenology/lobotomy.

As long as people keep defending BBS as the single greatest approach to worker safety—without allowing for the fact that there may be a better way, or at very least a cheaper and less complex way of achieving the same results.

Did you enjoy this blog? Did you find it thought provoking? Why not share it on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn or by sending it to friends and colleagues via email.  I would sure appreciated it and I’m sure they would too.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, BBS Fanatics, Behavior Based Safety, Lobotomy, Phrenology

In Defense Of Not-invented-Here Thinking

fa·nat·ic noun

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

A couple of weeks ago a post I wrote found its way onto a LinkedIn Group discussion thread. The group in question is devoted to behaviour-based safety zealots who apparently enjoy telling each other how slick they are and how one methodology should be used at the exclusion of all others (or at least as the primary methodology)
This got me thinking about blind devotion to a methodology. And then I read an article that was yet another  criticism of Heinrich’s pyramid of risk. And then I read another article that defended Heinrich and asked if his critics might be too harsh in their comments.

And then it hit me,  the realization that growing  fanaticism, zealotry, and extremism is imperiling worker safety and enough’s enough. Here’s the bad news.  Working as a safety professional is hard.  There is no area of expertise that will make a one a safety superman, no single methodology that has a monopoly on making the world a safer place; there’s no panacea, no magic bullets, just hard work and dedication.

I know this isn’t exactly a epiphany—I’ve been warning people of the rising tide of people who place their ability to make money over the effectiveness of the snake oil that they continue to promote to people who don’t know any better—but it was none-the-less a fairly profound realization.

For those of you who don’t know, Heinrich was an insurance investigator who in 1931 wrote the book, “Industrial Accident Prevention: A Scientific Approach.” In this book, Heinrich asserted that  88 percent of accidents are caused by “unsafe acts of persons”.  Statistical analysis was in its infancy (at least in and industrial setting) and Heinrich’s risk pyramid: that is there is 330 accidents, 300 will not result in injury, 29 will cause minor injuries, and one will result in a major injury or a fatality.

What I realized was a) Heinrich was full of crap  b) it’s not his fault, and c) while he’s not all right, he’s not all wrong either.  His research methods and results are, after 6 decades or so, increasingly questioned.  But even if he didn’t fake his research (personally I don’t believe he did, at least intentionally) his methods, population, and conclusions were hopelessly broken.  The manufacturing environment in which he conducted his studies bear little to know resemblance to today’s workplace.  In those days, asking supervisors the causes of injuries was not likely to yield many answers that didn’t lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of careless workers.  I don’t disparage these supervisors or Heinrich; they reached the conclusion that any reasonable person of that period would have given their time and experiences.  But let’s consider the time,  in 1931 eugenics was considered legitimate science, Social Darwinism was one of the most popular social science theories.  Henry Ford was spouting White Man’s Burden, and Nazism and Marxism were both rising in popularity.  In short, there was a pervasive environment in which workers were believed to be little more than clever primates who once in awhile  could be expected to have the occasional lethal mishap.

In most parts of the world, we it is no longer acceptable to see workers as chattel. And if Heinrich were to have completed his study in these more enlightened times what percentage of worker injuries would be attributed to “unsafe acts of persons” aside from the zealots and fanatics who start with an answer (90%, 95%, etc.) and then conduct research to prove what they already believe.  Beware the man who conducts research the outcome of which can either preserve or endanger his livelihood.  If your livelihood depends on the world being flat, count on finding facts to support your need.  It’s human nature.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Heinrich had the right of it; let’s pretend that his findings were accurate and correct. All that would mean is that given his population his conclusions were sound.  It wouldn’t however, mean that his findings were universal truths.  It wouldn’t be applicable to all industries, all areas of the world, or people. And yet, people continue to promote one methodology as applicable in most cases, even when they aren’t.

This may sound like yet another attack on BBS;  it isn’t. While there is certainly a time and a place for Behaviour-Based Safety (I am accused of being so virulently anti BBS that I can’t see the value in it, this is a false charge, but one I suffer relatively cheerfully.) it is the height and breadth of  arrogance to assume, without investigation, that worker behaviour is the primary cause of injuries.  But then again, it’s just as arrogant to assume that the process is to blame.

For years I sold a process that I invented as a work for hire. SafetyIMPACT! was a fairly prescriptive methodology that yielded terrific results.  But what made it tough to sell was the “not invented here” push back.  I spent 6 years working on safety improvements in the automotive industry, but the first time I tried to sell SafetyIMPACT outside the auto industry companies responded with “this isn’t the auto industry” and then “this is aerospace” and then “this is healthcare” and then “this is mining” and then…well you get the picture.  I always sort of rolled my eyes and thought these narrow-minded goofs just don’t get it; that they just didn’t understand that they weren’t that special, not that unique.

So I modified my style.  I turned the system I developed into a structure diagnostic tool that in one year would assess the situation, use the methodologies most appropriate to the situation, and build an infrastructure that would work for the organization.  After 15 engagements without a single failure I began to think that I had all the answers, that I had developed the magic bullet.

Last week I realized I was wrong.  I realized I didn’t have all the answers, in fact I didn’t have many answers at all.  I realized that all those people who refused to buy my snake oil were right; I don’t know who they are and I don’t know their specific challenges.  But if that was the case why was I so wildly successful? Because the key to success lies not in knowing what the organization needs, but in knowing that you don’t know what an organization needs and that you will have to research the situation.  You need to invent it here.

Filed under: Loss Prevention, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, 88% of injuries caused by unsafe behavior, Behavior Based Safety, Heinrich Risk Pyramid, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Process safety, unsafe behavior

More Deming on Safety: Adopt the New Philosophy

Deming’s second point is “Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.” In writing this point Deming could well be describing safety.  For years Japanese companies have viewed the worker as a resource, as the best source of ideas for improvement, but also long-term partners in business; certainly a wise organization would do everything in its power to preserve and nurture something so vital to its success.

Adopting the new philosophy in safety manifests itself in several important ways.

1. Injuries are waste and need to be managed as such.  Far too many safety pundits are still preaching that “safety is the right thing to do”, they continue to preach about moral imperatives for companies to protect worker at all costs.  Whether or not companies have any compunction to protect workers is between them and the workers.  That having been said, organizations need to protect their competitiveness, their profits, and their efficiency and all this begins with a relentless pursuit of waste reductions.
2. Stop worrying about changing the culture and start worrying about changing your processes.  Too often safety professionals stick with what they know and don’t venture too far beyond it. Unfortunately, safety professionals typically don’t know all that much about organizational development, transformational change, or organizational psychology.  Even so, that doesn’t seem to be sufficient to stop safety vendors from shilling half-baked culture change solutions to organizations. Nor does it stop internal safety professionals from championing initiatives of which their sole qualifications are limited to reading an article in the odd safety magazine or attending a session at a safety conference.
   That some organizational cultures inappropriately undervalue safety is indisputable, but making the leap that the Safety function is capable of changing that on some grand, enterprise-wide scale is laughable. On the other hand few safety professionals understand process mapping, value stream analysis, and the other tools and methods necessary for process improvement.
3. Integrate the Safety Into Other Business Functions. The days where Safety is a separate business function are rapidly coming to a close.  Maintaining a safety infrastructure with Safety professionals must end.  Just as the Quality function evolved into a vehicle for process improvement so too must safety.  As long as Safety professionals see themselves as discrete from the overall operations and somehow able to operate in isolation from production it will always be at risk of being dropped from the corporate team.
4. Leadership Must Advocate for Change. Leaders are often maligned by safety professionals. Too many times safety professionals blame their own failures on a lack of leadership commitment. In this case Safety professionals are right:  Leaders SHOULD be visible and outspoken advocates for safety and organizational change that supports it.  That’s not to say that safety professionals shouldn’t play a role in this initiative.  Safety professionals should provide expertise and guidance to leaders, many of whom, don’t know how to begin to advocate change.
   If safety professionals are going to be trusted counselors to the leaders there is much work they need to do:
1. Quit pretending to know more than they do. Safety is an area of expertise that requires practitioners to have a deep understanding of a diverse range of disciplines, but there are limits to even the most learned safety professionals’ curricula verities.  There is a natural tendency (bordering on compulsion) for safety professionals to advise far beyond their knowledge base and once labeled a vacuous windbag it’s hard to been seen as having any opinion of value to offer.
2. Research and Analysis. Perhaps the most useful service a safety professional can offer is comprehensive research coupled with razor-sharp analysis on the best way to leverage the things uncovered by the research.
3. Offer Guidance, Not Advice or Opinions. One of the most important thing that I recently learned is that offering guidance is tough. Frequently, what we see as guidance is opinion or just plain butting in. Guidance is marked more by listening than by advising someone as to what they had ought to do.  Guidance is invited; advice or opinions are not.  Safety professionals need to transition to trusted counselors than pouting eunuchs that huff and sigh when they don’t get their ways.  But offering guidance requires trust, and trust takes time to build.
5. Recognize the Realities and Challenges Endemic to the New Global Economy.  Deming developed his 14 points over 50 years ago, yet even then he was able to recognize that even then we were in a new economic reality.  Even as safety comes under increasing government scrutiny the scarcity of resources available for workplace safety continues to plague safety professionals.  The stark reality is that while the number of demands placed on safety increase, the resources are shrinking or trending flat.    
6.  Improve the quality of safety training and ensure its efficacy. My background is in organizational development and training and I will say unequivocally that the most safety training is wholly inadequate for anything except for checking the compliance box.  The biggest opportunity to transform the safety of the workplace lies in the improvements that can be made in training.  The better a worker is prepared in the tasks associated with his or her job the safer that worker will be.  I wrote an article on how safety training could be improved, What’s Wrong With Safety Training and How to Fix It so I won’t revisit it here.

Deming’s work remains the quintessential guide to quality, but the lessons one can glean and apply to safety are timeless and substantial. In studying Deming’s thoughts on quality we can transform safety and in so doing our industries.

Footnote: Phil La Duke will be speaking at 1:30 p.m at the National Safety Council on October 31, 2011

About Phil La Duke.  Phil La Duke is a contributing editor and safety columnist for Fabricating and Metal Working magazine, an editorial advisor and contributor to  Facility Safety Management magazine, and a contributor to ISHN magazine.  La Duke is a highly sought after international speaker and author whose brash style and often controversial take on emerging issue is a favorite of the international safety community.

Filed under: Loss Prevention, Near Miss Reporting, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Adopt the New Philosophy, Aerospace, Aerospace safety, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, culture change, Deminjg on Safety, Freightliner, Heavy Truck Manufacturing, increasing efficiency, Just Cause, Just culture, Leadership, Mexico, Mine safety, National Safety Council, oil and gas, Peru, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, Process failure, Process Failure Modes Effects Analysis, Process safety, rockford greene, Rockford Greene International, Safety, Safety Culture, Safety Leadership, Williams International, Worker Safety

People Don’t Respect You Because You Act Like An Idiot

Somewhere, right now, in a LinkedIn discussion group someone is posting the 245^th  opinion on “Should a Company considering itself world class have the right to fire employees for their private unsafe behaviors? For example, if employees are seen during lunchtime jaywalking, or riding a motorcycle without a helmet (where legal), using stairs without handrail, etc. How about during the weekend at a non-mandatory Company picnic? Do you think a “world class” company should be protected from lawsuits when letting go these employees? Or, is the Company going too far?” As simple-minded as this topic is, it has generated a mob-mentality thread where people seem to shout out opinions without reading the other posts.

At the risk of offending my esteemed colleagues this thread is what is wrong with safety these days.  As governments chip away at safety regulations in the name of saving jobs, as businesses actively order shortcuts that undermine workplace safety, and as 50 years of progress in worker safety is threatened to be rolled back, THIS is how safety professionals choose to spend their time. THIS is the problem that they decide to commit time and energy.  I’m stunned. For the first time in history, safety professionals from all over the world can virtually gather and discuss the most compelling issues in worker safety.  We can share ideas and debate the best methods for solving lingering problems.  Manufacturing can talk to Oil and Gas, Energy and Utilities can share the wealth of experience with Logistics and Aerospace and yet time after time we see threads like this.

Earlier in this blog I used the term “simple-minded” to describe the thread.  That was unkind; true, but unkind none-the-less. Before any of you wet yourselves allow me to break it down and tell you exactly WHY this debate is so stupid.  Let’s start with the first bit, “Should a Company considering itself world class have the right to fire employees for their private unsafe behaviors?” I’m going to ignore the capricious capitalization of the word “Company” (it is not a proper noun so it should not be capitalized), the lack of a hyphen in the word “world-class”, not because I think it’s acceptable, but because I routinely butcher the English language not out of ignorance, but from sheer laziness, arrogance, and indifference. Let’s focus on the fact that the asker doesn’t tell us for what the company considers itself “world-class”.  If the company in question considers itself an overly controlling corporate douche bag, then I would have to agree. But if it considers itself a world-class safety organization, I would have to say that they are perhaps a bit misguided. Without knowing exactly what context in which the company is considering itself world-class, no one can proffer an intelligent response (which by the way, didn’t stop me from posting not once but multiple times).  And what precisely, does considering oneself world-class at anything have to do with whether or not one should be protected from lawsuits?

The next part of the question is an attempt to clarify the asker’s point: “For example, if employees are seen during lunchtime jaywalking, or riding a motorcycle without a helmet (where legal), using stairs without handrail, etc.” The asker really doesn’t get into substantive examples here.  What company would ever consider firing someone solely for lunchtime jaywalking? Sure they may use this as an excuse but show me a company who fires workers for something this petty and I will show you a company about to unionize.  As for riding a motor cycle without a helmet? Well I guess if I was the Human Resource director and some half-baked safety manager came to me with this, I would be questioning the competency of the safety manager, not the motorcycle rider.  And not using the handrail? Please. I used to work in construction and I was told by people who design and build structures that hand rails are not in place so people can hold on to them every time they walk up or down stairs, they serve to protect people by giving them something they can grab to break their fall.  To even suggest that someone would fire an employee for not using a handrail, and while on their own time and off company premises is beyond stupid.  When I read this topic heading I was embarrassed to ever to have been called a safety professional.

The author goes on to ask “How about during the weekend at a non-mandatory Company picnic?” the more he asks the dumber the question becomes.  A non-mandatory company picnic? Okay, so apparently there are now companies out there somewhere who are mandating picnics—but then I digress.  Finally, the author asks,  “Do you think a “world class” company should be protected from lawsuits when letting go these employees? Or, is the Company going too far?”  On what legal basis would there be any expectation of protection from the company? How could any rational person believe that the company is doing anything but going too far?

What is more troubling than the simple-minded question is that it elicited nearly 250 responses so far and the count is still rising.  To paraphrase the Social Network they did this instead of doing what? The fact that so many safety professionals felt compelled to weigh in on this topic is bone chilling (made even more upsetting were the numerous safety professionals who thought the company had every right to behave this way.) When I asked, on several occasions, exactly what company had the resources to engage in off-work  surveillance of its workers, I was ignored; why let logic torpedo a good conversation? I also asked how many of the respondents knew of any company that had the safety of its workplace so completely under control that it thought the only way to improve was to meddle in the personal lives of its workers.  Again, the silence was deafening.

But the issue here isn’t about worker privacy rights.  The larger and more disconcerting issue is that hundreds of safety workers think that this is something that is worth discussing (some of which I think we can safely assume were doing so during work hours).  I hear safety professionals bemoan their lack of stature in their organizations, that Operations leadership doesn’t take them seriously, and that in general, no one listens to them.  Well if this is the kind of dreck that you find worthy of your time and the kind of dreck that you want to talk to leadership about, well… no wonder people think you are a fool; you most probably are a fool.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Worker Safety, ASSE, Attitude, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, contingency planning, culture change, don't hurt yourself, driver safety, Driving while distracted, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, Loss Prevention, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, privacy, Safety Culture, simple-minded safety, Stop trying to prevent every possible accident, variability in human behavior, Worker Safety

Are Safety Professionals Endangered Species?

The safety professional has been falling in status of late. I suppose one could blame the economy after all, troubled companies just don’t have the money that they might have ordinarily spent on new fangled safety processes. One could also blame the politicians—some the vacuous gas bags that pass as politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have characterized safety as costing jobs, being overly protective of workers, and in general needlessly wasting business’s valuable time. But I prefer to place the blame squarely on the safety professionals themselves. Safety, in its present form, really hasn’t been around that long. Sure there have been attempts to protect workers—most notably the efforts of organized labour to improve working conditions and the safety of the work environment—but safety as a mega industry is a relatively new phenomenon. The rise of safety has seen the function move from the position companies stuck good-natured and well-meaning dim-wits to the rise of snake oil salesmen who fancy themselves Machiavellian grand master puppeteers capable of manipulating the behavior of the workers with a bell and some pizza. And as funds get tighter and resources increasingly scarce there isn’t a whole lot of adaptation happening in the safety community. Too many safety professionals still try to compel that which they cannot inspire. After 15 odd years of trying to change things Safety remains a police force, although now some try to do police the populace with complex schemes dressed as culture change. When the environment changes only the most adaptable are able to survive and thrive. And while changes to the business landscape have been profound the reaction from the safety community have been all but imperceptible. To find one of the best examples of the “let them eat cake” mentality one need not look very far. The American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) is sponsoring a people-to-people safety delegation to Brazil. The cost per individual is substantial, and it’s fair to say that most of the participates won’t be doing so on their own dimes. I am not trying to denigrate the program, although personally I can’t find a sound business justification for sending a safety professional to Brazil to attend meetings with their South American peers. But forget the specifics of this program and focus, if you will, on how out of touch a safety professional has to be to even suggest that his or her employer. Even with my relationships with several safety magazines I wouldn’t dream of suggesting they fund this boondoggle. The problems facing the safety profession go deeper than expecting companies to make expenditures on questionable trips. Safety still hasn’t found its Deming, when Deming developed his revolutionary approach to quality, an approach that would ultimately form the foundation for Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma, he didn’t immediately go door-to-door like Moze Pray hawking Dixie Bibles. Safety professionals, conversely, show very little decorum in their haste to commercialize every half-baked scheme that flashes across their minds. And if the theory has holes in it, no problem, just sponsor a research study that supports your junk science. A good safety process should be malleable and evolve over time. Once an organization has mastered compliance it needs to concentrate on lowering injuries through hazard management. Solid hazard management works very well in injury reduction, but too often safety professionals lose steam after the low-hanging fruit has been picked. From there Safety professional need to be prepared to tackle the tough problems of serious injuries occurring seemingly randomly. To face those challenges safety professionals need to have a significantly deeper understanding of probability and statistics. Throughout this evolution safety professionals need to do a better job at linking their activities to strategic initiatives of the overall organization. If Safety is going to survive it needs act quickly and decisively. First, safety professionals have to demonstrate the value they provide to the organization and to advertise the contributions that they make to the overall operating efficiency. If your overly complex safety initiatives are costing the company more than it can ever hope to recoup you need to simplify your process and connect it to the continuous improvement of business systems. If Safety can’t directly impact the bottom line, it can indirectly impact the cost of injuries by reducing its expenditures, or at very least it can stop pissing away profits on non-essential safety activities. The economy will eventually rebound and recover, but unless Safety begins to see itself as a partner in making the workplace more efficient it may not survive in any meaningful way. Those safety professionals who ignore the changes in the business landscape will go the way of the Moa, the dodo, and the Tasmanian Tiger, but hell, they got a free trip to Brazil out of it.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, ASSE, ASSE People to People, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, Brazil, Can Safety Survive this downturn, contingency planning, culture change, don't hurt yourself, Driving while distracted, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, increasing efficiency, Just Cause, Michigan Safety Conference, National Safety Council, oil and gas, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, rockford greene, Rockford Greene International, Safety Incentives, Worker Safety