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

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

Who Needs A Safety Guy?

Last Week I Covered the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) and as is always the case I ran into more than a couple of earnest looking safety professionals who, with a straight face, claimed that they were trying hard to work themselves out of a job.  It’s a lovely sentiment but it’s also hogwash.  Safety professionals love to propagate this steaming pile of propaganda; it’s the kind of gooey, sappy sentimentalism that we use to promote our sacred mission of saving lives. No offense to those among us who legitimately feel that our jobs our more a calling than a career, but I think for many of us, it’s just something we say.  It doesn’t require a lot of thought and it doesn’t carry a lot of weight.

I’ve been giving this statement a lot of thought in the last week or so and it occurs to me that maybe safety shouldn’t be its own discipline.  Maybe instead of merely giving “working ourselves out of a job” lip service we should take steps to make things happen.  Can we as safety professionals be brave enough to envision a world without us? What would happen if we eliminated the position of safety professional? If that idea scares you, you’re not alone.

The initial response I get when I ask a safety professional to picture a world without safety professionals is shock: how could I even suggest such a thing.  But given that so many safety professionals collect paychecks without really changing things year after year I fail to see how industry would suffer any great tragedy if the profession ceased to exist.

The next response is to argue that if there were no safety professionals that Operations leaders would run amuck, violating rules and breaking laws.  My response to this argument is based on the belief that safety professionals are supposed to be the safety cops and without them people would be victimized.  If this is the case, the safety professionals have failed to make a compelling argument for safety as efficiency and have failed miserably.  Industry is well rid of these professionals.

Some argue that safety professionals are integral to ensuring governmental compliance and maintaining records.  To these professionals I say that they can be replaced by an administrative assistant of average ability.

But what if the safety, quality, lean and continuous improvement functions were combined, would that be so bad? One of the first things taught in Lean principles training is the first rule of process change is to make the process safer. And certainly since injuries cost money, any serious effort  to make the workplace safer would constitute a continuous improvement project,  Finally, the goals of Quality are parallel and overlaid  with each other—both look for the root causes of a process inefficiency that results in waste.

If we were truly interested in working ourselves out of a job we would be looking for ways to consolidate our departments with other departments and to leverage the work of others in the organization to save money and make the workplace not only a safer place to work, but a more efficient and profitable organization.

If you enjoyed this blog, check out the Rockford Greene International blog http://www.rockfordgreeneinternational.wordpress.com

 

Filed under: Uncategorized, Safety, Behavior Based Safety, Safety Culture, Phil La Duke, Loss Prevention, Regulations, Worker Safety, Safety Culture, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, Mine safety, Safety recognition programs, QOS, culture change, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, oil and gas, rockford greene, Just Cause, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, don't hurt yourself, Stop trying to prevent every possible accident, injury prevention, predicting injuries, efficiency, increasing efficiency, process variability, Rockford Greene International

Don’t Read This Blog…Navigating Through the Sea Of Liars and Idiots

93% of information posted on the internet is wrong.  Does that figure surprise you? Does it seem high? I made that up.  In a couple of hours I will be at the American Society of Safety Engineers in Chicago on press pass covering the show for Facility Safety Management magazine.  ASSE and the National Safety Council together drive more press coverage of worker safety than nearly everything else—not counting industrial disasters—combined.

Given that I am covering the show, I thought I would devote both this week’s blogs (this one and www.rockfordgreeneinternational.wordpress.com) to an exploration of how we as safety professionals get our information and the efficacy of those sources.

Blogs

A web log (or “Blog” as some apparently dyslexic mouth breather contracted it) is an uncontrolled outlet for the incoherent blathering of someone motivated enough to write on a topic but often not talented enough to be published.  Blogs vary greatly from the pre-teen who rants about her English teacher to respected experts and authors who use blogging to round out their literary or journalistic retinue and everywhere in between.  Because blogs are typically free, easy to create, and unrestricted the information is often rough and frequently dubious. Because this information is typically the work of one person and does not pass through a gate-keeper who vets work, editing the pieces that make the cut and rejecting those that don’t. This process is referred to as a peer review.  Blogs are not considered peer-reviewed and therefore researchers and other authors can’t cite the work as a source of truth.

This discipline doesn’t doesn’t extend to us bloggers…we can create, promote, and perpetuate ignorance on an unprecedented scale.  The misinformation many bloggers spew ranges from insipid (and usually incorrect) trivia to the truly dangerous lies and fear mongering.  At their best blogs, are the highest and purest form of the freedom of speech but at their worst blogs are irresponsible propagation of specious arguments and urban legends.

Forums

Forums are on-line discussions moderated (hopefully) by a small group of devoted volunteers who enforce civility, discussion topics, and generally keep the group in line.  Except for Penthouse Forum, forums are not considered peer reviewed works and therefore cannot be cited as a source for academic works or research.  Why? because forums are essentially just opinions that people support or refute.  No third party does any fact-checking and the bulk of the discussion may not be supported by facts.

Newsletters

Newsletters are regular publications put out by non journalistic organizations.  Newsletters (despite being positioned otherwise) are marketing tools.  A newsletters is at its heart a tool for marketing something. (Some of you may be ready to scream because you edit a “newsletter” for your professional organization or Not For Profit and your not selling anything.  I would challenge you that you are indeed selling something—like, for example, your organization’s reputation.  Because of the promotional nature of newsletters (and just because a publication is called a newsletter on the masthead doesn’t make it a newsletter any more than The Wall Street Journal is an academic or scientific journal) they typically are not considered peer-reviewed publications even if they follow the same general vetting and editing process.

Magazines

Magazines are peer reviewed publications.  Most have a highly competitive publishing criteria, a vetting process, a strong system of editing and fact checking.  Essentially this processes produces a written piece that—while credited to a single author—is the work of a team of publishing professionals.  This fairly intricate system of checks and balances, magazines are considered credible sources of truth and can be cited as sources in other works.

Journals and Periodicals

Journals and periodicals typically are compendiums of research findings from individual authors or writing teams.  In many cases these papers are presented at professional conferences and symposiums.  The competition and acceptance criteria for these works are often fierce and rigorous, with authors submitting abstracts to a team that rejects most of the proposed abstracts.  Those few that are accepted must produce a paper that is supported by research and cited sources.  The paper is then again reviewed by the selection committee, which will often reject the initial draft and will continuing recommending edits until it is satisfied with the final result.  At this point the authors are typically invited to present the paper to an audience of his or her colleagues.  This process can be exceedingly long and onerous. I wrote the paper Creating Safety In Off-Shore Operations for  Loss Prevention 2010 and was invited to present my paper in Brugges, Belgium.  The review and vetting process took almost 3 years. Sadly I was unable to accept the invitation to speak owing to other commitments (it’s tough to plan the disruption associated with an international symposium three years in advance on a maybe.)

In Europe and in U.S. academic circles it is not uncommon to expect the speakers to pay to attend the conference at which they are presenting.  In short very few proposed journal articles ever make it to publication in a journal and those that do represent the crème du la crème and are the closest thing we are likely to see as a source of truth on a given topic.

So if blogs are so bad why do I write, not one, but two?  I like to fine-tune my writing and flesh out ideas that I generally get arguing with idiots in forums.  Those of you who regularly read my blogs, share groups with me on LinkedIn and read my published work may have noticed a progression in my work.  Typically I get an idea by participating in a LinkedIn discussion or answering a question in the LinkedIn section devoted to that.  From there I generally get enough of an idea (typically a response to someone who only wants to shout me down) to flesh out into blog post.  My blog posts tend to be longer than the publications for which I write will publish so I have to pare them down to a more manageable size—typically 1,000 words or less.  From there I submit the article to an editor who cleans up the piece, renames it, puts art next to it, and stream lines it.  I’d like to think that I work well in all these media but that is ultimately for you, the reader to judge.

Filed under: Loss Prevention, Safety, Worker Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, culture change, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, don't hurt yourself, Stop trying to prevent every possible accident, increasing efficiency, variability in human behavior, facility safety management magazine

You’re Only As Safe As You Feel

Abraham Maslow theorized that a one could only reach one’s full potential if one’s needs were met.  Maslow arranged these needs into his seminal work, the Hierarchy Of Needs.  The needs in the Hierarchy of Needs are arranged in a pyramid with the most basic human needs at the bottom and the more intellectual and social needs at the top.  According to Maslow, a person cannot achieve the higher needs until the more basic needs have been met.   At the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy lie creativity, problem solving, and autonomy—the very things we typically look for in workers we would describe as “empowered” or “engaged”.

While Maslow identified the most primal needs as the need for food, shelter, sex, and sleep,  he identified the need for safety and security as needs just above these in importance.  And unless these needs are met it is impossible to pursue higher needs.  This is interesting in the context of worker safety because many safety professionals are either unaware of Maslow’s research, ignore it outright, or fail to recognize how this research applies to the workplace.

According to Maslow, a worker who doesn’t feel safe (irrespective of the accuracy of that opinion) cannot possibly focus on process improvements, creative problem solving, or any of the other empowered activities we expect of today’s workers.

So what does that mean for safety? Plenty.  First, it calls into question the basic premise that safety incentives aimed at lowering injury rates.  If people don’t feel safe (which is a sane response to working in an environment where people are frequently injured) they are incapable of contributing any worthwhile ideas for process improvement.  We are not providing an incentive to work more safely we are providing a random reward that will confuse the workers and basic reward good luck and punish bad luck.  If we are rewarding outcomes at all; far more frequently we are rewarding people for concealing their injuries which in turn makes people feel less safe and more insecure.  Before anybody gets all indignant about my questioning the value of safety incentives, I will grant that incentives have their places—primarily in workplaces that have already made great strides and are less concerned about fixing a broken safety system and more concerned with sustaining hard fought gains. But in most cases, organizations provide incentives too early in the evolution and maturity cycle of their safety systems.

Beyond merely providing incentives, Maslow’s work have a profound influence on the type of incentives that should be provided.  Many organizations provide one of the most basic motivators available: money.  The trickiest part of motivation is that once a need has been satisfied, it ceases to motivate.  Money is a basic need and provided the worker makes a living wage, money will be less and less a motivator (unless the amount is continually increased.)

Some incentives are focused on meeting social needs—recognition, social appreciation, or contribution to a team.  Again this approach assumes that the workers feel safe, and secure or the incentive will fail.  But nonetheless incentives at this level can be effective if they are appropriately awarded.  Awarding a team for the accomplishments of single member may be less effective than singling out an individual.

Underlying all these factors is a basic question: does the person receiving the incentive find it valuable and worth winning.  I once had a worker describe safety incentive as “they buy us a pizza once a month if we don’t kill anyone”.  The worker went on to explain how condescending he found the incentive program.  Clearly the organization was not attuned to the needs of the worker.

Another thing organizations need to consider when analyzing their incentive programs in the context of Maslow is the concept of security.  Workplaces where workers believe their jobs are in jeopardy are far more dangerous than more stable environment.  Workers who believe they are eminent danger of unemployment are incapable of responding to higher level stimuli.  In other words, safety BINGO will not provide incentive to work safe to workers more worried about keeping their jobs; injury rates will likely fall, not because workers don’t want to miss out on the chance of winning a baseball cap, but because injured workers fear that they will be the first to be laid off.  It is true that in some environment injury fraud increases in the face of layoffs, but it is equally true that genuine injury claims are more likely to be concealed for fear of retribution.

So in very real terms, safety is not just about an absence of injuries, or even, as I have so often thundered, a presence of risk.  Safety is more than either of these.  Safety is about feeling safe and working in a place with so little risk of injury that your subconscious doesn’t trigger stress reflexes.

Filed under: Safety, Worker Safety, Safety Culture, Phil La Duke, Loss Prevention, Near Miss Reporting, Loss Prevention, Worker Safety, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, Safety Incentives, culture change, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, Process safety, oil and gas, Just Cause, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, don't hurt yourself, efficiency, increasing efficiency, Maslow

What Will The Rising Tide Against Organized Labor Mean For Workplace Safety?

Organized labor world-wide is losing the battle for public opinion.  Governors in Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin have openly stated their intentions to change the law to weaken the rights of workers toward collective bargaining. Many safety professionals take great pleasure in the seeming waning influence of organized labor; those that do are wrong.

Organized labor stood at the forefront for the fight for worker safety.  At the risk of sounding melodramatic, many protections for workplace safety were forged in the blood and misery of early organizing efforts.  But what does one have to do with the other? It’s not like organized labor is the reason  that workplace safety regulations exist, or is it?

As recently as six months ago a national politician in the UK openly asked publicly if the laws in his country that held managers and business owners liable for workplace injuries weren’t too over reaching, and many governments are reconsidering safety laws and wondering if these laws don’t, in fact, make it too hard to do business.

Somewhere in this mix seems to be the idea that because it is so expensive to injure workers that government’s had, in these tough times, roll back some of these protections in favor of lower fines, and less severe penalties for work place safety violations.

I want to be clear, my intent is neither to support nor oppose organized labor, rather, I hope to raise awareness among safety professionals that these attacks on workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain, if successful, will have a profound detriment on worker safety world-wide.

I completely understand the argument that worker injuries are expensive, inefficient, and undesirable, but easing these restrictions and lessening the penalties for non-compliance is not the answer.  In light of the mining disasters, oil and gas deaths (and unprecedented environmental fallout) and even the response to the Japanese nuclear plant one would think that worker safety would become more of a priority not less so.  But in a climate where soaring unemployment and sluggish recover have people looking at their neighbors and asking if they don’t perhaps make too much money, it’s easy to equate workplace safety with job losses and generate public support for safety rollbacks.

Safety professionals and unions have long had a love-hate relationship.  Many safety professionals resent what they categorize as unwarranted defense of unsafe behaviors by organized labor while many safety representatives dismiss their management counterparts as puppets  for the company.  In many cases, neither side can get past their differences and the safety committee meetings degrade into gripe sessions.

And we need to face facts, in many workplaces the cost of sustaining safety incentive programs, safety observations, and dozens of safety meetings a month have made the cost of prevention disproportionate with the risk of worker injuries.  And yet, if businesses suggest abandoning safety bonuses or exploring low cost alternatives to existing safety programs they are accused of not caring about worker safety or (shudder) caring more about profits than they do about human life.

The reality is this problem is big, and promises to get bigger.  The 1990s and millennial decade saw unprecedented growth in safety prevention as a business.  As businesses realized they had to reduce the cost of injuries a cottage industry of safety providers sprang up seemingly overnight.  In flush times, safety professionals were able to implement safety prevention programs that added heads, and made more and more demands on the resources of the organization.

The danger goes deeper than companies feeling the financial pinch and unions fighting on other fronts.  Cut backs in the enforcement arms of regulatory agencies make it less likely that companies that openly defy the law are far less likely to be found out and almost certain to avoid any meaningful punishment.

So what’s the answer?

For starters, safety professionals, both union and management, need to look for ways to do less with more.  Incentive programs that offer cash and prizes for workers not getting hurt (or more likely reporting injuries) need to be scrapped.  As one manufacturing vice president once said to me, “I refuse to pay extra for something everyone should do intuitively” and as one union bargaining chair put it, “they think we’re stupid and careless.  For them to pay a bonus for not injuring workers is insulting to us.”  But discontinuing a financial incentive when so many people are struggling  for every nickle is likely to be met with fierce resistance.

Next, take down the safety posters.  A cutsie safety poster has never saved a life, and while children’s poster-contests may be popular and tug at the heart strings, it’s not likely that someone who disregards safety rules will suddenly be shocked into responsibility because of a crayon drawing.

And finally, we need to recognize the costs associated with watching workers complete tasks and telling them to work more safely.  Programs that require supervisors to spend significant time observing workers are inefficient.

That’s not to say that we should concede the fight and give up trying to protect workers, but we need to be pragmatic and sensible.  Safety professionals of all stripes need to take a hard look at the efficacy, cost, and value of the way they are doing business and look for ways that not only protect workers, but lower operating costs (like reducing downtime, employee turnover, or defects) and increase overall workplace efficiency.

There are a lot of people counting on us.  Yes, hurting workers is expensive, so we need to stop doing it.  But the answer can never be discount the penalties for skirting the laws or openly flouting worker protections.  If safety professionals don’t step up to this fight, who will?

Filed under: Safety, Safety Culture, Loss Prevention, Regulations, Worker Safety, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Safety Culture, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, Driving while distracted, driver safety, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, culture change, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, Process safety, rockford greene, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, don't hurt yourself, efficiency, increasing productivity, increasing efficiency, Attacks On Organized Labor, Unions and Safety

Are Government Regulations Getting In The Way of Safety?

As experts chide safety professionals to be more proactive and to think of safety in terms of the potential to harm instead of the incidence of harm, governments around the globe still measure safety using reactive, lagging indicators.

Is this bad? Isn’t governmental oversight of the workplace a good thing? Do we really want to consider rolling back government regulations and risk horrible tragedies? Well…yes, yes, and no.

Despite over a century of laws and enforcement aimed at protecting workers and a wealth of improvements in worker safety, there are still high profile safety, environmental, and public health disasters that renew the cry for greater action from the government.  It’s unfair to suggest that government regulations aren’t effective.  But using an ever increasing threat of fines or even criminal prosecution isn’t the answer to making the workplace safer.  Sure some business owners and managers will begrudgingly make the bear minimum investment to meet governmental requirements but do we really want business to make the workplace safer out of fear?

When a business only improves the safety of the worker because it fears fines because of a governmental inspection it believes its compliance justifies it’s inaction beyond the bare minimum.  Smart Operations managers will improve safety not because it’s the “right thing to do”—there are a host of things in business that are the right things to do—but because it’s the smart thing to do.  As long as the government keeps its standards based on lagging indicators (incident rates, first aid cases, days away or restricted, etc.) it perpetuates the idea that any work place that hasn’t killed anyone lately can be pronouced “safe”.

We need to be practical.  Nobody ever died because a fire extinguisher wasn’t hanging at the proper distance from the floor, and simply having Material Safety Data  Sheets locked in a drawer may meet safety regulations, but it hasn’t  saved any lives either.

In defense of government regulators, we have to start somewhere.  In many parts of the world, industry has shown that it cannot be trusted to safeguard its workers or its communities.  So safety regulations are necessary.  And safety regulations aren’t broken, the philosophy behind them is.  Safety regulations start with the idea that safety is quantifiable, that is, it believes that one can pronounce a workplace either “safe” or “unsafe”. While it would be nice if this were true, the fact is that no workplace can be pronounced completely safe.  And perpetuating an audit system that pretends that it’s possible to certify a workplace as devoid of risk is wrong-headed.

Certainly, audits are important and valuable, but they are problematic as well.  Auditors inspect a facility and ostensibly find and record all violations.  After the audit, the organization resumes business as usual under the reasonable assumption that everything else it is doing is not only safe, but endorsed as safe by the government.  The organization believes that it doesn’t need to lift a finger to do anything to further protect workers, after all, it has just received the government’s seal of approval.  Unfortunately, safety doesn’t work that way.  Why?

Auditors Miss Things

Even the best, most diligent auditor will occasionally miss some violations.  Some of these violations are big, some are small; some are harmless nuisances and some are lethal.  But because the facility passed the audit, it believes that it has done all it has to guarantee worker safety.  Internal safety officers and labor reps can talk until they are blue in the face but their arguments will likely fall on deaf ears because the government has already told them that they are doing all that is required.

Regulations Target The Wrong Things

Most governments require fire extinguishers be on hand, annually inspected, hung at a proper height, identified through signage, etc., but far fewer require that anyone be trained in when and how to appropriately use the fire extinguisher.  Using the wrong fire extinguisher can make the situation far worse, but we still do a half-baked job of regulating them.

Safety Is Relative

Safety is not a binary condition.  Life is not as simple as a facility being “safe” or “unsafe”.  Regulations should be updated to reflect that safety is relative. A facility can be seen as safer than another facility that is similar to it.  Or a facility can judged as safer than it was when it’s baseline was established. Or a host of other comparisons that would be meaningful and would encourage businesses to do more  than the bare minimum.

Some regulators have tried to do this kind of comparative analysis.  In Ontario, Canada, the provincial government provides businesses with a Workplace Wellness Score.  Companies with high injuries and low workplace wellness scores face higher taxes than similar companies with lower injury rates and better scores.  Even so, Ontario’s system needs significant redesign to be most effective.  For example, injury rates and employee complaints are given far too much weight to make the program effective. Workers can shut down production by asserting that the work is unsafe to be performed.  Work stops until a Minister of Labour representative can investigate and pronounce the work safe. While in many cases this regulation is used in good faith there is widespread abuse of this law has turned safety into a negotiating tactic.  People are playing dangerous games with the law.

Audits Are Static Workplaces are Dynamic

Recently I was asked to begin reviewing the covers of a safety magazine.  The job seemed simple enough: I was to look at a proposed magazine cover and determine whether there was anything unsafe portrayed (no publisher of a safety magazine wants a cover that shows an unsafe condition on the cover).  Before agreeing to take the job, I made a point of making the disclaimer that a) nothing can ever be pronounced completely safe, and b) I was looking at a static photo without context so I couldn’t really say that the workers in the photo were working safely, but conversely no one looking at the same photo could say definitively that the worker was behaving unsafely.

The exercise got me thinking,  Safety is a dynamic characteristic that is highly dependent on context and yet audits are snapshots of a moment within the highly fluid and dynamic world of business.  However valuable that snapshot is, however much is uncovered in the audit, it’s just a snapshot.  The highly volatile and ever present variability in human behavior will always create problematic situations.  In short, no matter how thorough the audit, significant threats to worker well being can materialize literally as the auditor drives away.

How Can We Fix This?

Fixing the problem is going to be difficult.  In the U.K. politicians are openly asking if the laws designed to protect workers are too restrictive.  In the U.S. congressmen repeatedly claim that safety regulations are too strict and place an undue onus on businesses. And what’s worse is 40 years of BBS snake oil has safety professionals themselves reinforcing the believe that workers are largely to blame for their injuries.

We need to evangelize that safety is about reducing the risk of injury, and the severity of those injuries that we failed to prevent.  Safety needs to be a criteria for success not an after thought.  Safety regulations need to change from quantitative measurements to qualitative measurements.  And finally we need to make people understand that improving safety is not about cost, its about cost reduction and cost savings.

 

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Regulations, Safety, Worker Safety, Phil La Duke, Loss Prevention, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, Mine safety, Safety Incentives, Philip La Duke, oil and gas, rockford greene, Just Cause, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, don't hurt yourself, injury prevention, predicting injuries, increasing productivity, increasing efficiency, variability in human behavior

The Disturbing World of Fallacious Conclusions and Specious Arguments

Almost a month ago I was engaged in a spirited and contentious debate, again about the supposed merits of Behavior Based Safety.  Once again I was shouted down on line for having the unmitigated audacity to question the long-term impact of Behavior Based Safety.  It started when I made the admittedly blunt assertion that the contention that “people either choose to work safe or unsafe” is an unsupportable position. I thought the statement was clear, concise, and accurate. I certainly wasn’t trying to cultivate controversy.

Almost immediately the forum filled with people who questioned my experience, knowledge of safety and credibility.  After all, who was I to call the emperor naked? Millions have been made on systems that seek to make the workplace safer using basic, Skinner-based behaviorism.  How dare I question all of that?

Behavior-Based Safety proponents point to a study conducted by the National Safety Council that found that 90% of all worker injuries were caused by unsafe behaviors.  Most safety professionals hold this study sacred; it makes sense.  We’ve all seen instances where worker injuries and even tragedies could have been easily prevented had workers just acted with more care, professionalism, or plain common sense.  Even though this study is over 30 years old and to my knowledge never been independently confirmed in the safety community to question it is to commit the worst kind of blasphemy (Some of the more staunch allies will point to Heidrich’s Injury pyramid that also found (over 70 years ago) that a high percentage of injuries are caused by unsafe acts).  But I don’t question these findings.  I believe that 100% of all injuries have some behavioral causation, in so much as if no one is doing something than no one is likely to get injured.

My point is who cares? I don’t want to quibble with statistics, my point is, okay, so now what? BBS providers seem to have had this “aha” moment that holds that since behavior played a role we now have the magic bullet to prevent all injuries because all we need to do is remind people to be more careful or motivate them to be more safe, or use basic behavior modification to “fix” people. Many BBS theorists never asked “why” the people behaved the way they did. And without Root Cause Analysis to understand not only why they behaved the way they did, but also why they believed what they were doing was safe.

The crux of my view of safety is this: nobody wants to get hurt and you system wasn’t supposed to hurt them se we had ought to fix the problem not the blame. Recent, well-documented repeatable studies on how the brain works indicate that human error is an inevitable (and in an evolutionary sense desirable) human characteristic. So we can only train people to work safely to an extent, and we MUST be more proactive, which allows us to apply controls that are higher and more effective on the Hierarchy of Controls.

In most cases, I believe that too much emphasis is placed on individual behaviors and not enough on organizational behaviors, in other words too many people worry about modifying individual behaviors (while ignoring human error research, Maslow’s work, Fredrick Taylor’s work, Edward Deming’s work, the entire fields of organizational psychology, neurology, anthropology, and more) at the expense of modifying systemic issues that cause people to make bad decisions that ultimately get them hurt.

Safety is a qualitative measurement that most companies treat as a quantitative measurement. If company A has less injuries than company B it does not necessarily follow that company A is a safer place to work because as you point out there is an element of luck. Certainly there is a correlation between risk and injuries, but safety is a relative term used to describe risk. And as long as we view safety as a body-count things will continue to erode.

Safety is the probability of a worker doing his or her job without getting hurt. There needs to be a paradigm shift within the safety community.  At the foundation of this paradigm shift is the question of exactly how do we calculate risk. I’ve been working on an answer to that question for sometime and still don’t have a formula I’m happy with, but in broad strokes, I believe that the more hazards you have the more likely you are to injure workers. But there are other factors at play that raise the overall risk of injuries in the workplace.  Factors that directly influence the likelihood that people will make poor choices: ineffective communication practices, weak incident investigation, high amounts of nonstandard work, processes that aren’t in control, production bottlenecks, unstable work levels (layoffs/hiring), etc. The presence of these factors increase risk of injuries and safety can only be increased if we identify and manage these risk factors. Yes, behaviors play a key role in risk and should be managed, but not necessarily through behavior modification.

Millions are spent on Behavior Based Safety where the goal is to reward people for working safely, and yet most decisions made regarding safety are made in a reactive microsecond where there isn’t really time to make a conscious decision as to how the best and safest way to respond. Even in cases of mechanical failure, the true fault can often be traced back to a behavior: poor maintenance, poor inspection process, improper installation, etc.” I agree. But generally speaking, BBS has been bastardized to the point where organizations are only looking at behavior at the production level. They do a shoddy job of root cause analysis and if they do go far enough up the decision tree they far too often cop out without addressing the organizational system flaw that provides the “why” behind the behavior.

As I have said, all injuries are caused by behaviors if we look hard enough. But there is a huge leap to the conclusion that we can therefore use behavior modification to prevent all injuries. The debate between process solutions and behavior modification is pointless. We need to take a more holistic view of safety and focus both on improving processes, providing good training in how to correctly do a job (I’m talking core skills training not safety training—a welder who understands how to weld is infinitely less likely to injure himself or others than someone who has been given 40 hours of safety training but can’t weld.), reduce nonstandard work, and yes provide feedback on behavior.

Ergonomics, fork-truck accidents and lockout violations cost industry $100s of millions. And yes, there are significant behavioral elements to each of these but telling drivers to be more careful is like telling me to be taller. I’d like to be, but having my supervisor observe me won’t change anything for long. Do you ever speed? If you see a policeman do you slow down? do you resume speeding? This is because enforcement changes the climate of safety but does little to change the culture.

I was recently asked “why don’t we start to dissolve the artificial distinctions between protection and production in favor of effective total performance. (sic)” Why? because there are a LOT of people whose livelihoods depend on one methodology at the exclusion of all others. We can’t put all our proverbial eggs in one basket. We need to balance the need to protect workers against the need to produce at a competitive rate. But the first step in doing so is to recognize the quantitative “safety” does not exist, and that only by viewing safety as a comparative, qualitative measurement can we ever hope to recognize the apparent dichotomy between safe and productive. If we view both these terms as qualitative in nature we can begin to see them as supportive of one another, look at correlations between improved safety and improved productivity, quality, cost, and morale.

Behavior management has a place in any good safety program, but it needs to be counter-balanced by mistake proofing (which really isn’t about not making mistakes but in most cases its about ensuring that mistakes don’t kill anyone.

BBS alone will always fail because it ignores the fact that people don’t WANT to get hurt or always CONSCIOUSLY make bad decisions that lead to injuries. A fair amount of unsafe behavior is not a conscious decision so trying to modify it by rewarding a “good” decision is pointless.  Process based safety alone will always fail because…well you can’t bubble wrap the world.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Phil La Duke, Safety, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, contingency planning, culture change, don't hurt yourself, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, increasing efficiency, increasing productivity, Just Cause, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, rockford greene, Rockford Greene International, Safety Culture, Safety Incentives, Stop trying to prevent every possible accident, variability in human behavior

Opening a Dialog About Safety

The Editor of Fabricating and Metalworking suggested that in an effort to ensure that i don’t rehash topics that I’ve already covered in prior installments of The Safe Side my monthly column devoted to worker safety.  This is what I submitted as the introductory article.

From the outside, the world of safety looks pretty simple—either a workplace is safe or it’s not. And if a workplace is unsafe it’s reasonable to expect that people will agree what specifically is making it unsafe.  But for those of us who work within the safety profession nothing could be more complex or hotly contended than what constitutes a safe workplace and what is the biggest reason that workplace is unsafe.  In fact, it’s hard to get safety professionals to agree on the very definition of the word “safe”. So instead of a column this month, I’m beginning a series on safety.  In it I will explore different ideas about safety and what can be done to make the workplace safer.

Measuring Safety

It’s a widely held belief among system thinkers, lean gurus, and Quality Operation System enthusiasts that you get what you measure and if you can’t measure something it may as well not exist. This gets dicey when you try to measure safety, because, like quality, safety isn’t seen as the presence of something rather than the absence of injuries.  And it is near impossible to proclaim the absolute absence of something.  So let’s begin our discussion with some context and some definitions of basic terms.  The absence of injury does not denote the presence of safety; rather “safety” is an expression of probability and a calculation of risk.  Because safety is a probability nothing can ever be pronounced completely “safe” instead, safety is relative.  We can accurately describe a situation or condition as “safer” than another, however.

But even so, the extremely high variation in working conditions and the even higher variation in human behavior make it tough to get an accurate read on the relative risk endemic to a given activity.  In short, for the most part all we can do is guess at the probability that a given activity will result in an injury, and even were we able to predict with statistical certainty that an injury will occur there is little we can do to predict the severity of the ensuing injury.  The difference between a fatality and a near miss (a “close call” where a worker could have been seriously injured but was spared) is little more than luck.

The Probability Gambit

One area of safety where there seems to be little disagreement is in the belief that the greater the number of hazards with which worker interact, and the greater the frequency of that interaction, the higher the probability of injury.  If a worker continues to behave unsafely or perform tasks that have been poorly designed from an ergonomics perspective eventually someone (not necessarily the worker him/herself) will get seriously injured or killed.  But because it’s impossible to say with certainty how much time or how the worker will be injured it is often dismissed as safety bugaboo.  As I used to say (when people would be overly concerned with remote possibilities) “maybe the moon will fall out of the sky.”  Warning of increased danger without being able to quantify probability is useless information—unless your sole intent is to say “I told you so”.

Man Versus Machine

Now that we have a common understanding of the definition of the term “safety” we can now explore the various, hotly contested theories of the best way to improve the safety of the workplace.  The first argument you will likely encounter is the philosophic question “what causes injuries?” One school of thought holds that because most injuries (studies have suggested that as many as 90%) have a behavioral element it follows that injuries are caused by unsafe behaviors and if unsafe behaviors are the most likely cause of injuries the most reasonable way to reduce injuries is to reduce unsafe behaviors.

Many safety methodologies focus on basic behavior modification techniques—carrots and sticks (that is, rewarding desired behaviors and punishing undesirable behaviors)—to increase safe behaviors while decreasing dangerous activities. Advocates hold that time tested research and hundreds of organizations support their techniques, many of which suggest observing workers while they work and offering feedback on the safety of their activities.  These systems encourage employers to offer financial or other incentives for low injury rates and improvements in key safety measurements.

 

No Life Was Ever Prolonged By Reminding A Person Not To Die

Critics of behavior-based safety systems contend that because nobody wants to get hurt and processes aren’t designed to injure workers the resources expended to improve worker safety would be better brought to bear against system problems. They deride safety observations as expensive and deeply flawed babysitting and incentive programs for encouraging under-reporting of injuries.  These people would have us believe that the road to a safer workplace is through mistake proofing our processes and that if people aren’t intentionally getting hurt no amount of behavior modification will change things.

Proponents of process-based safety believe that efforts to improve worker safety must be at the top of the Hierarchy of Controls (an engineering tool for determining the most effective way to eliminate the risk of process failures) Critics of process based safety counter that we can’t bubble-wrap the world and once a process is in place it is often too costly and impractical to idiot-proof the world.

To a layman the argument over behavior versus process seems pretty basic, maybe even pointless but these philosophies have staunch supporters and bitter critics and the actions you take to make the workplace safer are intrinsically linked to where you stand on this issue.

Individual Responsibility Versus System Responsibility

Maybe you’d prefer to argue the merits of holding the individual responsible over the system, or vice versa.  Some believe that strict policies and dire consequences for incompliance are the way to a safer workplace, while others argue that only an enterprise-wide solution can reduce injuries.  Both sides have their points; after all don’t we need to hold someone accountable for gross negligence and dereliction of duty?  On the other hand, volumes of research prove that populations act very differently from individuals and many experts believe that human behavior is strongly influenced by the systems in which people interact and that the pressure to conform to societal norms manifest in how people behave.

Safety Schools of Thought



Each of the activities in these quadrants represent some activity linked to worker safety in some way.  Some take a more holistic view of worker safety than others and some treat safety as a process outgrowth.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Worker Safety, Phil LaDuke, Safety Culture, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, driver safety, Safety recognition programs, Safety Incentives, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, culture change, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, Process safety, rockford greene, Just Cause, Attitudes toward safety, injury prevention, increasing efficiency, variability in human behavior