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

A Just Culture Starts With Just Leadership

Just Culture, a concept James Reason proffered decades ago is growing in popularity.  At its essential core Just Culture is pretty simple: people make mistakes and punishing people for making honest mistakes is a basic form of injustice.  Reason, and his successors, argue that organizations must foster blame-free environments where workers are encouraged to report mistakes and near miss if they hope to ever address the root causes of workplace injuries.

But implementing a just culture is far more difficult than merely deciding not to punish people for screwing up.  Far too many business leaders are unable to see past their petty biases and the traditional legal department party line that a blame-free culture needlessly and recklessly exposes organizations from malpractice lawsuits or other liabilities.  This is unfortunate.  So many business leaders are afraid to do what is right in favor of what is safe.

For a just culture to take hold and blossom organizations need a different sort of leader. A Just culture  needs to be led by what I describe as just leaders, and these executives are a rarity.

Traits of a Just Leader

Just leaders share characteristics that set them apart from the pack. These leaders see themselves as leaders first and foremost and they live there lives by a code of conduct that is set not be some artificial external criteria but by their personal values.

Courage

It takes a lot of moral fortitude to stand up to corporate attorneys who advise you on a course of action that pits you against your core values.  If the corporate attorney insists that you hang someone out to dry, it’s tempting to throw someone under the bus and blame the oily skinned legal department (or corporate communication or IT).  It takes real courage to stand up to the corporate pitch fork and torch toting mob screaming for the blood of some hapless bureaucrat who mad a bad decision in good faith, but that’s what a just leader does.  A just leader recognizes that courage lies not fearlessness, but in recognizing one’s fear and forging forward despite them.

A just leader is able to clearly articulate his or her values and institutionalize  those values into a work culture that is fair and just.

Vision

It’s scary what passes for vision these days. Corruption is rampant, which one could argue was always the case, but even when Chief Tammany bore witness through his lifeless wooden eyes, people recognized corruption, incompetence and dare I say it, corporate sin. Just leaders need vision and that vision must take them beyond what’s good for themselves and their stockholders.  Just leaders know that they cast long shadows and that to create an organization that will endure it takes more than their own skills and includes the skills of most everyone in the organization.

Recent years have seen the growth of a sickening cottage industry—executives who take companies into bankruptcy.  This is pointedly obvious in the auto industry.  There are a handful of executives whose only value seems to be screwing people out of money to which they are legally entitled via bankruptcy. These slim-witted weasels are hired to bankrupt a company not as a last resort reset of the company’s debts but as a corporate strategy.

A just leader looks beyond the goals by which his or her compensation is based  and instead focuses on how organizations can serve the needs of their stock holders, their environments, their employees, and their customers.  A good leader knows the importance of being a good corporate citizen.

Consistency

Rudyard Kipling once wrote “if you can trust yourself while all men doubt you while still allowing for the doubting too.” Just leaders do this by consistently holding the line as others in their industry are melting down in panic.  Because these leaders have a clear cut vision you can always predict what they will do in a crisis,  you can set your watch by them and trust they will do what is required even if it is painful

Consistency isn’t easy, especially when an industry is melting down.  But no one will ever admit mistakes without knowing exactly what consequences are likely to befall them. So unless a leader can consistently react to unexpected circumstances a just culture can never emerge.

Honesty

A just leader cannot expect others to be forth coming about their mistakes unless he or she clearly acknowledges his or her own mistakes.  Everyone makes mistakes and for a leader to gloss over his or her business faux pas is the height of arrogance and hubris.  Just leaders aren’t afraid to acknowledge their mistakes and the best of them learn from their mistakes and teach others the lessons they learned.

Honesty transcends being straight-forward with board members, the media, the workers, the unions, and the stockholders and reaches the depths of the just leader’s subconscious and lays bare the soul, in short the just leader is MOST honest with him- or herself.

Integrity

Just leaders don’t just know the difference between right and wrong, they also know the difference between right and legal. In this day and age it’s easy to hide behind the law and commit corporate atrocities.  For most leaders doing something heinous is softened a bit if you can get your corporate lobbyist to get it legalized first.  Just leaders worry about what is right, not what is legal.  And when they act with integrity and transparency they need not worry about investigations or accusations.

Just leaders hold themselves to a higher standard than the one to which they hold all others and the one against which society measures them. And when it comes to creating a just cultures having the right leaders is more important than having the right consultants, the right tag lines, or even the right policies.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Near Miss Reporting, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, corporate atrocities, Courage, don't hurt yourself, efficiency, Honesty, Integrity, Just Cause, Just culture, Just Leaders, Mine safety, rockford greene, Safety Culture, Stop trying to prevent every possible accident

The Most Important Laws Governing Safety Don’t Come from Government Regs

We all know Murphy’s Law— anything that can go wrong will go wrong[1] but far fewer know Pascals Gambit, Occams Razor, or Parkinson’s Law.  And this week I thought I would explore how these laws govern safety and how we can use these laws to change the way we think about Safety.

Murphy’s Laws and Its Bastards

Murphy’s first law Laws is probably the most quoted of all the law’s that are supposed to govern business (if not life itself.)  Murphy’s Law is interesting not only in its simplicity but because it is the bastard child of another, older law: Sod’s Law.

Sod’s Law

“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”

The widely known law proffered by a little known author and attributed to another better-known one holds that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.  An admittedly bleak perspective and one that is easy enough to invalidate (after all Sod had the huevos to speak in absolutes where many, myself included, use weasel words like “many” or “likely”—using these words I need only produce one example to make my statement true whereas I need only produce a single exception to ?’s law to discredit it, but then I digress.) In terms of safety we would be wise to incorporate ?’s law into our mindset.  Shit happens.  And sometimes the shit that happens comes back to bite us in lethal or fatal way.  I used to get derided by safety professionals when ever I would say this.  A roar would go up not heard since Jesus before the Sanhedrin.  “Heresy!! Blasphemer!! Or worse yet the dripping condescension of a smirking jerk in the audience at a conference. I guess I was in good company.  But the fact remains that while there is always a chance that we can get blindsided by some unanticipated factor, most (yes I said, “most”) injuries happen from multiple variables working in concert with a catalyst.  So we can reduce the probability that the things that can go wrong won’t go wrong, but it’s a whole lot of work, and let’s face it, we have our fair share of lazy working in our field.

Murphy’s Law

If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong

At first blush, Murphy’s first law seems indistinguishable from Sod’s Law, but the importance while subtle is important for safety professionals.  Murphy’s Law is a little less fatalistic than Sod’s Law, Murphy allows that there may be some possibility than things won’t go wrong, at least not immediately.  This may be a semantic difference but it’s my blog and I’ll pick nits if I want to.  In either case, both Sod and Murphy agree that we need to spend our efforts and energies determining what can go wrong and how we can reduce the probability that it won’t.  This thinking is at the heart of all safety processes and while it sounds rational, it ignores both Murphy’s and Sod’s Laws—that if there is a possibility that something can go wrong we need to expect that it will.  So trying to prevent something from going wrong is impossible since the probability of catastrophe is never reduced to zero percent.

Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives

Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment

Another interesting law at play in the workplace is Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives which states that Anything that can go wrong will—at the worst possible moment. This expectation should help safety professionals to understand the danger of collaborative hazards—that is, those conditions, whether behavioral, mechanical, or environmental that act in concert with one another to either create a catalyst for disaster or causing the hazard outright.  This mindset should forewarn the safety professional against seeing a hazard condition in a vacuum or without context, which sadly many behavior based safety programs actively encourage.

Parkinson’s Law

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Perhaps the most destructive force operating in the workplace, and safety, is Parkinson’s Law.  Parkinson’s Law holds that any task will expand to the time allotted to perform it.  Wasting time eats at productivity like a cancer, and yet Safety professionals gleefully choke the organization’s calendar with some sort of safety dog and pony show.  One and half hour weekly safety meetings, safety BINGOs, safety talks, Job Hazard Analyses, and…well the list goes on and on. Safety professionals need to be mindful of Parkinson’s Law and reduce both the number of tasks and the length allotted to that time.  Time is money and every task performed in the name of safety had better see a threefold return on the time it consumes.

Occam’s Razor

“We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”

Occam’s Razor has been bastardized and reconstituted to the point where many people believe it to be “the simplest explanation is usually correct”. Safety professionals need to heed the advice as originally written and shun the adulterated version.  Basically safety professionals need to draw no conclusions and stay focused on researching the root cause of injuries and suspend any preconceived notions about the situations;.

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[1] Actually this is NOT Murphy’s Law (Murphy had numerous laws and “ everything that can go wrong will go wrong” is in fact a direct quote of the older and lesser known Sod’s Law but most people wrongly attribute it to Murphy so this gives me the opportunity to pander to the great unwashed while still being a pedantic know-it-all jerk.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Regulations, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, efficiency, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives, Just Cause, Mine safety, Murphy's law, Occam's Razor, Parkinson's Law, rockford greene, Rockford Greene International, 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

Four Flaws of Behavior-Based Safety

By Phil LaDuke

There is a growing body of evidence that BBS does more harm than good (the current head of the OSHA recently expressed his concerns that incentives and BBS were creating a climate where not reporting injuries is more important than preventing injuries. That is not to say that there are not studies on the wonderful effectiveness of BBS (although a fair amount funded by companies that make tens of millions of dollars selling it). So how can studies show diametrically opposed points of view?

For starters there is no international standard that differentiates BBS from well… BS. Anyone can describe there particular flavor of snake oil as Behavior Based Safety. Read the admittedly less than universally respected reference Wikipedia article on BBS and it reads like a brochure written by the closed head injured. It is far from impartial, and anyone who dares question the value of BBS is soundly shouted down. The vagueness with which people talk about BBS is astonishing (and no, I don’t include everyone in this condemnation, but let’s face it there are a lot of quacks out there selling some quasi-psycho babble as BBS and it has hurt anyone who labels there approach to worker safety as BBS.

Here’s a thought. What if we stopped creating labels for our safety? would it kill us if we didn’t keep trotting out a new complex safety panacea? Behaviors cause injuries. I get it. But there is plenty more to consider (whether or not the behavior was the result of conscious, informed decision making, for starters) than behavior (like how individuals behave differently in a population, or the innate, uncontrollable variation in human behavior to name two.

Honestly there are so many people who are so quick to jump to defend BBS it really makes me suspicious of whether it is the methodology or their livelihoods that they are so adamant about protecting (again, Dominic, I am not throwing stones at you, but having just returned from a major safety conference where I heard dozens of specious arguments about why more people should invest in BBS that I could just pull my hair out.

And while we’re at it, how many of the new charlatans selling culture change solutions where schilling have baked BBS 5 years ago? Until I hear a BBS proponent that will even consider that there are other, perhaps better solutions out there, I will continue to be skeptical. Too many of these professionals are process zealots—the care far more about the methodology than the results, and that is dangerous. These people will always dismiss individual cases (whether it be an injury or a catastrophe) as statistical outliers or anomalies or in some way the fault of someone else.

If BBS is so clearly the best solution, why does it need defending? And why are their so many hotly contested variations of it.

I understand that several giants of BBS certify safety professionals in their methodologies.  It’s a great business model: safety professionals, buoyed by their new found sense of importance and portable credentials, become advocates for your methodology.  They will push and advocate your system and you will make money hand over fist.  If you can live with the fact that people will not be protected while you make huge profits I guess this is a pretty good life.

More and more companies are finding Behavior-Based Safety Programs just don’t deliver what they promise and are moving to a more balanced and practical approach to managing worker Health and Safety. Executives are drawn to Behavior-Based Safety Programs because they promise quick and painless results. Safety professionals are attracted to the idea that worker behavior is the cause of most workplace injuries. Unfortunately, experts are beginning to question whether or not Behavior-Based Safety is based on a foundation of flawed premises. Flaw 1: Behavior is a contributor in 93 percent of injuries. On the surface, this kind of statistic would certainly seem to argue strongly in favor of a Behavior-Based Safety Program, but it is a specious argument. 100 percent of injuries have a behavioral element. The formula for an injury is Hazard + Interaction + Catalyst = Injury. By definition, an interaction is behavioral in nature, so essentially the argument that unsafe behavior accounts for 93 percent of all injuries is akin to saying, “If workers didn’t DO anything, they wouldn’t get hurt.” Fair statement, but then who wants a workplace where no work is done? Flaw 2: Behavior modification is an effective tool in reducing workplace injuries. Most Behavior-Based Safety Programs rely on recognition and rewards to positively reinforce safe behaviors and discourage unsafe behaviors. So, basically, a worker is forced to choose between seeking treatment and receiving a safety incentive. “If you had told me when I was building seats for the General Motors Fleetwood Plant that I would get a $50 quarterly bonus if I didn’t get injured, you would not hear about any of my injuries unless I left the plant in an ambulance.” What tends to happen in these programs is that inflammation of the elbow turns into tendonitis which then turns into carpal tunnel syndrome and the resulting cost of treatment is astronomical. Research has shown that such systems are certainly effective at discouraging the reporting of injuries, but there is little evidence that behavior modification has any sustainable effect on the corporate culture. Flaw 3: Unsafe behavior is deliberate. Behavior-Based Safety starts with the premise that if workers were more careful, less of them would get hurt. This philosophy appeals to many executives who, frustrated by a lack of progress in reducing injuries, would like to put the burden for workplace safety back onto the worker. Two better premises are “nobody wants to get hurt” and “no system is designed to hurt workers.” If these premises are true, no amount of behavior modification will lower worker injuries. Flaw 4: People take unnecessary risks because they are careless. In the many incident investigations that I have conducted where behavior played a key causative role, the clear majority of the injured workers took the risk because a) they were trying to show initiative and save time, and b) they were unaware of the magnitude of the risk they were taking, and/or c) they didn’t believe the risk was credible. Very few of these injured workers believed they were putting themselves in serious jeopardy. So is Behavior-Based Safety so deeply flawed that there is no room for recognition programs in a world-class safety process? Absolutely not; here are some tips for integrating recognition programs into your safety process: Reward the Right Things. Instead of rewarding workers for not getting injured, reward them for identifying system flaws that cause injuries. A reward for a suggestion that makes the workplace safer is far more meaningful than one for “collective safety” where an entire department is rewarded for going without an injury. Understand and Correct the Root Causes of Unsafe Behaviors. It’s not enough to identify unsafe behaviors; to truly improve workplace safety, one has to take proactive steps to remove hazards (both process flaws AND unsafe behaviors) before people get hurt. Rewarding workers who identify and correct the root causes of injuries is a good use of recognition and reward programs. Don’t Jump to Conclusions About Behaviors. Use “repetitive whys” to understand the thought processes that lead to unsafe behaviors before reacting to them. More often than not, the process dictates the behavior.

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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

 

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

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