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

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, Behavior Based Safety, culture change, Attitudes toward safety, Criticisms of BBS, focus on prevention, contingencies for safety, accident prevention

You Say You Want a Revolution

“If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you aint gonna make it with anyone anyhow”—John Lennon

There are a lot of people in the safety world that are calling for change.  Typically this call for change is articulated in fairly gentle and vague terms. “We need leadership commitment” or “communication is key” leads the parade of platitudes.  This is harmless but it doesn’t accomplish much beyond making the safety professional feel and, to a lesser extent, sound engaged.  All these calls are likely to change precisely squat.

Changing from a culture where safety is for wimps, safety is too expensive and disruptive, or that safety is in any other way undesirable can not be an iterative process; in short this kind of change takes revolution, not evolution. When Deming first promoted his 14 points for Quality, he was far from universally accepted

Revolutions sound scary—the word conjures up images of guillotines and firing squads. But the business world has seen the quality revolution, the Lean Revolution, and the information revolution all brought exciting possibilities with them.  But even these weren’t bloodless coups.  As a new philosophy takes hold the business axioms they replace fight like wounded badgers for survival.

“All Change Comes From the Barrel of A Gun”—Mao Tse Tung

While the Utopian view of safety that many safety thought-leaders espouse sounds nice, few in the workforce see a compelling reason to change how they conduct themselves relative safety and without a compelling reason there can be no lasting change. As a former colleague used to put it, change comes when the pain of not changing exceeds the pain of changing. Or as noted culture expert, Edgar Shein, put it in his first fundamental law of change, “Principle 1: survival anxiety or guilt must be greater than learning anxiety” So in other words, nothing is going to change as long as people are either satisfied with the way things are or are too scared of what the future holds. A few worried safety professionals hunched over computers arguing over the finer points doesn’t foment the necessary discontent with the status quo to change a $10 bill let alone a culture.

Shein’s formula for organization can be loosely stated as:

D+V+N>R

where D=discontent, V=Vision for the Ideal State, and N=next steps and R=Resistance

Fomenting Discontent

Fomenting discontent in the organization means walking a line between being an agent for change and being a discontented and uncooperative turd who is unable to play well with others.  Additionally, organizations like organisms tend to have built in systems for defending themselves.  Changing a culture requires fortitude; it doesn’t take many missteps for the organization to turn on the fomenter of discontent.

Cast the Vision

Fomenting discontent without articulating a clear and compelling vision of how things could be, but are not. Casting a vision of a future state requires leadership, creativity and courage.  Unless one can question one’s most cherished beliefs, one’s most deeply held values, one can never hope to change a culture.  One has to look into the very eyes of God and call him fraud before one can honestly craft a vision of any real validity.  Casting the vision takes guts, in questioning the status quo one risks making blood enemies, because it’s one thing to question one’s own beliefs and values, but quite another to question someone else’s.

Articulate the Next Steps

A vision for what must happen and a healthy level of discontent alone can not lead the population to the Promised Land.  A leader must communicate a clear and reasonable roadmap for moving from the current state to the desired state.  Unless a leader can do so, the population will judge the change too risky and decide against adopting it.

Changing a culture is relatively easy to the far more daunting task of building an infrastructure for sustaining it. The safety snake oils are often able to fob off a climate change with a culture change.  Unlike a culture change, which the population typically defend a climate change will only last as long as the antecedent remains present. (Think of a climate change as exemplified by the speed trap.  Traffic slows because drivers know a policeman is laying in wait, but once the policeman is no longer present, the drivers resume speeding.) Culture change consultants love climate change because if the parasitic relationship between consultant ends so too does the change; it’s as if the consultant is able to repossess the services rendered.

The ability to sustain a culture change—without adding a complicated and expensive infrastructure or dramatically adding headcount—is what separates a good culture change initiative from a sham, climate change, smoke and mirrors.  Millions are spent on shoddy, junk science solutions that merely mask the problems in an organization and create climate change.

One must be prepared to topple the regime to effect change, but regime change isn’t the same as culture change. And a failed coup usually ends in the termination of those who attempted it.  Safety professionals who attempt to change the culture (even if they are successful) seldom survive the change.  Who needs revolutionaries after the revolution has succeeded?  While people will eventually accept change, they seldom forgive the person responsible for it.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, culture change, organizational development, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, Rockford Greene Interational, Safety Culture, Worker Safety

Mind Your Own Business: The Far From the Last Word On Building A “Safety Culture”

photo of the Diego Rivera Mall at the Detroit Institute of Arts taken by Phil La Duke

There is a nearly ubiquitous conversation ragging in the safety forums: how can one create a “safety culture” within my organization. This debate is troubling from a couple of perspectives.  First, there really isn’t any such thing as a “safety culture” the fact that people blather on about this topic shows a very deep ignorance of organizational culture.  Every organization of more than five people has a culture. In simplest terms, a culture is the codified collection of the norms, shared values, and rules of an organization. Cultures evolve to protect the organization’s interests and to determine what is acceptable behavior. In so doing, corporate culture makes it possible to govern the organization.

In some organization’s the corporate culture is so strong that changing from within is almost impossible, in fact, it is far more likely that a new hire will adopt the corporate culture rather than change it, no matter how strong the desire or ardently the new employee works for change.

I’ve studied corporate cultures and worked in OD for years.  I won’t bore you with a lot of pedantic excrement filled with a lot of jargon and theory, but if you want that, believe me there are plenty of people out there to fill your head with it.

Cultures are made up of shared values—kind of shared opinions of how important something is relative to the other elements of an organization.  Organizations tend to have a value of safety, that is, the organization places some value on safety relative to the other activities on which it can expend its resources.  Some cultures view safety as unimportant while others view it as of paramount importance, but all cultures place some priority on worker safety, and therefore, all organizations have a “safety culture” albeit some have a strong safety culture while others have a weak safety culture.

Even if a safety culture could be achieved (at some point it becomes a purely semantic argument) such a culture would neither be advisable or desirable.  A safety culture would mean that safety would be prioritized above all other business elements. Customer satisfaction, productivity, profitability, quality, and profitability all would take a secondary role over worker safety.  It sounds great, but in practical terms,  it doesn’t exist, nor should it.  No company exists primarily to ensure the safety of its workers.  In fact, most companies exist to make money.  This isn’t a bad thing; the safest companies in the world are the ones who went out of business because they didn’t make any money. Pursuit of a safety culture is a mish mash of Polly Anna idealism, cheap sales talk, and excuse making. (“I’ve done all I can; the culture is broken”).

As for the larger issue of a culture change, that may be necessary but that isn’t the job of the safety professional.  There are people with degrees in Organizational Behavior, Industrial Psychology, Organizational Development (OD), or other advanced degrees that qualify them to create culture change interventions. These people have years of Organizational Development experience before they are able to lead such a change; they aren’t safety professionals who have read a couple of books or attended a couple of speeches at a safety conference.   It’s been suggested that the skills of the safety professional and the organizational psychology field aren’t mutually exclusive; perhaps not. But just because someone read a couple of books about airplanes and has a flight simulator on his PC doesn’t make him a pilot. And frankly I would prefer a cardiac surgeon perform my coronary by-pass surgeon to a butcher, but effectively they share as many skills as a self-important puffed up safety huckster who believes—however earnestly—that he has the same skills as a professional skilled and experienced in OD.

So let’s shut up about creating a safety culture; it makes us seem even more out of touch than we already do.  We should however, foster an environment where safety is valued, but that isn’t a culture change, it’s a change in values.

Changing the values of an organization doesn’t take a whole lot of special skills.  A tenacious and conscientious safety professional can immediately start creating a heightened sense of value for safety within his or her organization.

Engage Leadership

I have written and spoken extensively on ways to engage leadership so I will just quickly summarize the key points here. In organizations that place a low value on safety professionals tend to have little or know credibility with the senior leadership in an organization.  Building credibility begins by speaking the same language and relating safety to the things that senior leadership find most compelling.  If the organization values sales above everything else, the safety professional should express the cost of injuries in terms of the amount of additional revenue it will take to replace the money spent on worker injuries.

Run the Safety Function Like a Business

Every safety function that is run like a business (i.e. the primary purpose of the function is to provide some service that is of quantifiable value) is much more likely to survive and thrive than those that are manage like overhead.  When the safety function sees itself as a for hire service provider it is far more likely to instill the kind of confidence required to build demand for safety.

Position Safety As a Partner In Improvements

For far too long, the safety profession has seen itself as serving a greater good that the rest of the organization, while the other departments busied themselves making money or improving quality, or making materials flow more efficiently, Safety saved lives. And while that is beyond important, it positioned safety as a parent and a policeman, but never a partner.  Safety became the smug outsider in the organization and then wondered why nobody trusted it.

But it doesn’t have to be like that, the Safety function plays an important role in bolstering operating efficiency (worker injuries interrupt production and make the operation less efficient), increasing profitability (worker injuries cost money), and creating a lean workplace (injuries are  waste).

Lead

Day after day I interact with safety professionals who deride leadership of their organization as indifferent or even hostile to safety.  These sad sacks talk in “us versus them” distinctions that make me wonder why they have jobs at all.  If safety professionals want to effect real change in how much value and priorities they have to be credible leaders not whiny crybabies who feel powerless to effect change.

People listen to those who have something to say, they learn from those who have something to teach them, and they follow people who are going to take them someplace better.  If you can’t these things for others there’s probably still important role you can play in worker safety, but shut up about culture; you don’t know what you are talking about.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Performance Improvement, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Corporate Culture, Culture, culture change, organizational development, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, rockford greene, Rockford Greene International, Safety Culture

Do We Have A Duty To Save A Life?

As I wrote this weeks post for the Rockford Greene International blog, “Everyone is an idiot but me” www.rockfordgreeneinternational.wordpress.com I got to wondering about the duty of a safety professional to intervene when he or she sees a threat to safety.  The idea of duty is a cornerstone of Just Culture and of the legal code of most industrialized nations.  “Everyone is an idiot…” centers on the hypocrisy of safety professionals who say they want to create a safety culture but then do things that impede the development of a safety culture.

I thought I would devote this space to an exploration of duty; specifically, what duty does a safety professional have when he or she is “off-the-clock”? Does a safety professional have a responsibility to intervene when he or she sees a life-threatening situation? If so, why? and if not, why not?

The laws of most nations are pretty clear: while people have may have a legal responsibility to avoid deliberately causing harm, injuring another, or even accidentally injuring someone because of negligence.  There are even Good Samaritan clauses in the laws of many nations that protect those who act in good faith to help an injured person from lawsuits. But is there a deeper responsibility by virtue of our profession? Do we, because we call ourselves a safety professional, have a professional responsibility to get involved in situations where we believe harm is impending?

I got thinking about this quandary as I selected whacky photos of unsafe acts that safety professionals find so precious.  I guess I wanted to rub the self-righteous noses of the safety belligerents who send me hate mail (“You don’t offer any positive suggestions, you just criticize our practices”) in another one of their cherished traditions. (Yes, I am a petty, petty man.) As I sifted through the photos it suddenly hit me. Someone callously took these photos; someone who could have gotten involved but chose instead to snap a couple of quick photos.  In an instant a person chose to photograph the situation instead of acting to save a life.  If these same photographers were to take pictures of people dying in these circumstances we might judge them differently. It’s on the same continuum but somehow the consequences shape our view of the responsibility.

I don’t think anyone would condemn a person for not getting involved in hazardous circumstances if in so doing the person subjects him/herself (or others) to danger.  No one can judge the safety professional for not sacrificing him/herself to save another.  Doing so might make the safety professional a hero, but nobody has a duty to be heroic.  In fact, doing something out of duty obviates heroism.  Unlike some professionals, safety professionals don’t take an oath to save the lives of others.

Essential to this dilemma is the question is “safety professional” a job, a calling, or who we are? If safety professional is a job then clearly there is no responsibility for us to do our job in situations where we won’t be compensated.  While we may have a moral responsibility to protect a stranger there is no enforceable law that says we must take action.

If safety professional is our calling or who we are as our quintessential selves than we must take action.  Ignoring a situation that places a stranger in impending danger puts at odds with our nature.  Call it sin, bad karma, powerful ju-ju, or whatever, but we are drawn at a very basic level to act.

So where does that leave us? Indifferent slob or safety crusader? Are these are only choices? And if we are bound to intervene to what extent and in what circumstances? It’s a cipher—do we spend our days with a mop and bucket mopping up spills?

If we agree (and I doubt we do) that safety professionals have an intrinsic responsibility to intervene where is the line? Should I be yanking away driver’s licenses of the mouth-breathing brutes that weave through traffic on the expressway? Should I bat away the cell phones of those who text while driving? Hazards are everywhere; at what point does the duty to intervene kick in? To answer that question we have to look at probability and severity.  If the probability that a situation will end in injury is highly likely AND the severity is likely to be high (death or dismemberment) then it is clearly appropriate to intercede.  But if the chances of catastrophe are small (improbable with low severity) any action would likely be seen as meddling and an unwelcome intrusion.

Ultimately the answer is situational, we’ve sworn no oath to save lives but our career choices have led us to a profession that most people would see as requiring, or at very least encouraging, us to bring our skills to bear on hazards that endanger society.  We walk a ill-defined line between our duty to intervene and our duty to butt the hell out and mind our business. It’s a no-win proposition, intervene and be seen as an insufferable worrier and do-gooder or walk away and be branded a coward or sociopath.

For a related post go to http://www.rockfordgreeneinternational.wordpress.com

Filed under: Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, culture change, don't hurt yourself, duty to save, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, rockford greene, Worker Safety

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

Safety Expert Dies in Fall

About two months ago while retrieving an item from the loft in my garage I fell approximately 8 feet onto concrete. I miraculously escaped any serious injuries.  For the last couple of days I’ve been engaged in a spirited debate on a LinkedIn safety forum about the extent to which an employer can discipline a worker for legal, albeit unsafe behavior.  It got me wondering about a couple of things one of them I’ll address here and the other that I will address in www.rockfordgreeneinternational.wordpress.com

(shameless plug for both my consulting company and the other blog that I write weekly.)

Given that safety is essentially an expression of the probability of emerging uninjured from a given circumstances or activity and that virtually any activity carries with it some assumption of risk on the part of the person so engaged, at what point does the risk become so great that it rises to the level that it should be construed as the much touted “unsafe behavior” bugaboo.

This is more than mere intellectual pursuit.  Blaming worker injuries on unsafe behaviors has a long and storied tradition in safety.  From it’s earliest roots accident investigations have found that most accidents are rooted in the carelessness or recklessness of workers.  I won’t beat the dead horse that is my seemingly limitless condemnation of Behavior Based Safety and the slow-witted brutes that continue to swindle industry with bold promises of behavior modification (the equivalent of using phrenology as pre-offer hiring screening).  I will, rest assured, return to my epic diatribe in due time, but for now, I wanted to leave that alone and assume for a moment that the half-baked premise is correct and explore exactly where the line between normal, acceptable behavior lies.  Unless we know where the line is with out needing to cross it then BBS is little more than a “no shit” observation. A “thanks captain obvious” factoid that does little more than to make the expert feel even more superior than usual as he nods knowingly and  patronizing in baleful, clucking shame.

So here’s where we sit.  Unless we can trace the precise moment where safe behavior becomes unsafe we can’t really do anything to move the proverbial needle towards a safer workplace.  The extremes are easy to spot. At one end the continuum we have sitting doing nothing—not moving or interacting at any level with anyone else or anything in our environment. At the other extreme are those clearly dangerous activities like driving drunk or juggling cats or a howler monkey opening paint cans with a chainsaw.

Engineers are the first to try to determine where the line lies, and they are frequently mocked for it.  In our zeal to reduce “frivolous lawsuits” special interest groups have tarred most product warnings as ridiculous outgrowths of a litigious society.  There is even one self-important fellow at a Michigan University who runs a “wacky warnings” website where he gleefully makes fun of those dedicated engineers who try to foresee every potential way a product can hurt us. I heard him on All Things Considered  on National Public Radio. I am particularly interested in who funds this ivory tower half-wit and why NPR would give him a national soap box on from which to spew his smug condescension. But engineers do try to define the line between safe and unsafe and arguable made great progress.  Products have gotten safer and fewer people are injured doing stupid things.

A different approach is to take the other extreme and analyze the situation one element at a time.  In the case of a howler monkey opening paint cans with a chainsaw, we can apply the hierarchy of controls to work on the howler monkey, the procedure for opening paint cans, or the tool with which the cans are opened. So in this scenario we can probably agree that a person using a chainsaw to open a paint can is safer than a howler monkey, or a spider monkey, or well… chose your monkey.  Similarly, a person opening a paint can with a screw driver is, all other things being equal, behaving more safely than one opening a paint can with a chainsaw, We can move along the safety continuum even further by providing the person with a paint can opener and training in the correct procedure for doing so. But at this point we can’t pronounce the behavior as completely free of all risk of injury.  There are just too many variables, too many things that can go wrong, and too many possibilities for different outcomes.

Deviation from the Norm

The degree to which a person behaves safely is essentially the extent to which that person adheres to the defined process AND the extent to which the defined process is being performed in the anticipated circumstances.  That may sound more complicated than it needs to be.  Essentially the safest conditions are those where things are going as planned, but unfortunately things seldom do.

The Handrail Conundrum

Recently, in three separate conversations, I’ve had three people cite the use of handrails while walking down stairs as an example of people not following a basic safety procedure.  We’ve all walked down stairs and I for one seldom if ever touch the handrail.  Why? not because I am reckless, stupid, or derive pleasure from the adrenaline rush of not using a handrail.  I don’t use a handrail because I have never seen a janitorial crew washing down or disinfecting a handrail and I judge NOT touching the handrail as the healthier, if not safer, thing to do.  Additionally, I have always viewed the handrail not as something I should be hanging on to prevent a fail, rather as something I could take hold of and break my fail and mitigate injury.  Of course I have never been trained in walking stairs or in handrails.  And yet everyone seems to assume that the purpose of a handrail is not to break a fall and mitigate injury but to prevent injury. As a contingent safety device handrails make sense, but as a preventive measure they are a piss poor safety device.

If we extrapolate the handrail conundrum to other situations, safety devices, and household/day-to-day experiences we will find that we have received scarce little training in what is the safest way to do things or in how the misuse of these things can cause us harm.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Attitude, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, culture change, driver safety, Driving while distracted, efficiency, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, increasing efficiency, increasing productivity, Process Improvement, rockford greene, Rockford Greene International, Safety, safety at home, Safety Incentives, Stop trying to prevent every possible accident, variability in human behavior, Worker Safety

What ‘s Wrong With You People?

In my haste I had a typo or two and even an incomplete thought.  I did a quick edit just now, but I would hazard a guess that it’s  far from perfect…Phil

This week I joined two or three new groups on LinkedIn. That’s my fault. For whatever reason I seek out the company of people who post largely inane opinions and spend their time arguing with strangers. That’s not to diminish LinkedIn; I’ve met many really great people through the site, unfortunately I’ve also met some honest to dogs imbeciles. Recently I weighed in on whether or not a company should consider itself world-class (the author didn’t think it germane to the discussion to hint at precisely in “what” company should claim such an honor) if it fires its employees for things they do on their own time (as in while off work). The topic generated some minor buzz, largely centered around Chrysler workers caught by a local Fox news show should be fired for drinking on their lunch hour (nobody questioned how three autoworkers drinking on their lunch hour in a city with a population smaller than Columbus, Ohio with a murder rate of 40.1 per 100,000 residents rose to anything approaching news worthiness). I couldn’t bring myself to continue the argument—nobody seemed to much care about the pseudo topic—but it got me thinking: is any company so free of risk and so flush with resources that it can even consider doing this?

As far as the absurdity of trying to govern worker’s off-the-clock behavior, Henry Ford tried something similar when he hired private detectives to follow his workers to see if they were smoking, drinking, or otherwise doing something decidedly unFord-like. In the case of Ford, the effort hastened union organization and generally collapsed under the weight of its own complexity. Even given today’s sophisticated technology the cost of snooping on your workers far exceeds the financial benefits.  Add to that the fallout from workers when they find out they are working for a voyeuristic creep, and you end up in a no-win situation.  The argument was pointless and while safety professionals continue engage in pointless debate about which latest fade is way cool, people are dying.

This topic hits pretty close to me. My father died from mesothelioma. I watched him devolve from an energetic and active retiree to a shell who could barely move, much less breath. My father never blamed his employer, who he believed took every reasonable precaution to protect him. But he was incensed to learn that the asbestos manufacturers who provided materials to his employer knew and failed to disclose that information. I have a brother-in-law with days to live. He has lung cancer likely caused by working as a millwright at what was once reputedly listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the dirtiest square mile on Earth. One doctor initially thought it was caused by silica exposure, another by some other industrial exposure. I’m not privy to his exact medical records so I doubt I’ll ever know the truth.

I have a brother, who years ago was overcome by fumes and fell from a pallet that was raised using a forklift as a makeshift platform used to paint the ceiling. A task that not only was he instructed to do by his supervisor, but one that the mouth-breathing thick-witted brute of a supervisor stood by as it happened. The fall left him close-head injured with short and long-term memory loss that only through God’s grace did not cause him any long-term disability. I’ve lost friends to a horrific array of industrial accidents—two co-workers to electrocution, another who fell in an open vat of acid, I could go on, but at some point it becomes macabre. None of these people took frivolous risks, drank on their lunch breaks, or thumbed their noses at safety regulations. They were just guys looking to make a fair day’s wage and go home the same way they came to work.

Thank God the safety professionals around the world have the time and intellectual energy to argue about what sorts of unsafe behaviors workers engage in off the job. After all, doesn’t safe behavior off the jobs safe lives too? Isn’t that important too? Well…no. If I chose to mow the lawn barefoot and drunk as a monkey I am making my own choice. I assume the risks and face the consequences. (Let me state for the record that mowing the lawn barefoot while drunk (as a monkey or otherwise))  is foolhardy and should be discouraged but despite the recklessness of such actions I am in an environment controlled by me.  It is an inalienable human right to make a wage without the unmanaged risk of injury.  When we enter into an employer-employee relationship the employer has a more, financial, civic and legal obligation to do everything in their power to protect us.  And THAT is the issue of the allegedly drunken Chrysler workers (trusting Rupert Murdock to provide you the truth is like trusting Charles Manson to house sit). It’s not that tax payers bailed out Chrysler and now we somehow own not only the company but the workers as well, it’s that drinking during lunch and returning to work endangers multiple other workers who are working safely and minding their own businesses.  That Fox film crew could have raised the alarm, but instead chose to get the ratings; it’s practically depraved indifference.

Let me get to the crux of my issues.  When safety professionals sit around arguing about this pointless crap, people are dying. While people in ivory towers debate whether safety is the fault of unsafe behaviors or failed processes people are horribly maimed and deprived of their livelihoods. And while safety professionals sit around congratulating themselves for lower recordable injuries or for the neat new incentive program because injury reporting is driven underground or because “effective case management” has taken a recordable off the books, things don’t get any safer.

Through all of this there is an opportunity cost. For starters, we are losing the war in the court of public opinion. People around the world who are actively trying to convince the public that worker injuries are largely the fault of bad luck; careless, drunk, or stupid workers. Even then-President of the United States decried the people who exercised their legal rights to hold companies responsible for knowingly putting people in harms way as filing “frivolous lawsuits”.

As the economy worsens more and more people are prepared to trade job safety for jobs. In a world where there are 27 million slaves (more than ever before in the history of mankind) worker safety rights need to be protected. Despite the rapidly deteriorating opinion as to the importance of worker safety there is little attention paid to the problem at professional conferences. Peruse the abstracts offered at the majority of the expos and conferences and you will see plenty of talks on culture, on incentives pro and con, and a fair amount on regulation. But scare few speakers take on the most serious threat to worker safety faced today: the belief that safety as a profession is irrelevant. We safety professionals have to be more than theorists. We have to be more than money-grubbing snake-oil salesmen. We have to worry less about pointless minutia of or trade and work to raise awareness of the importance of safety professionals who know how to do their jobs, do them well, and make meaningful advances in the trade.

It’s time to wake up.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, Chrysler, culture change, does safety cost jobs?, don't hurt yourself, Drinking alcohol while on lunch break, frivolous lawsuits, Jefferson North Assembly plant, Just Cause, mesothelioma, Mine safety, oil and gas, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, rockford greene, Rockford Greene International, Safety, Safety Culture, Safety recognition programs, UAW, Worker Safety, worker safety rights