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

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.

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

An Inspection by Any Other Name

I’m often asked by people both inside and outside the safety discipline the difference between an audit and a safety inspection. An audit is typically annual (or semi-annual) activity conducted by safety professionals to ensure compliance with safety regulations and internal policies. An auditor typically has a check list of items that need to be verified or assessed, and audits are usually done by either an internal safety professional or an external governmental agency. Audits are reactive. Audits are a “gotcha” that ostensibly is performed so that the safety professional—whether an internal department or OSHA, the Minister of Labour, or some other governmental agency—can coach the organization.  In fact most audits result in negative consequences and for the most part they are feared and detested, and in the majority of the those cases rightfully so.

Safety inspections are regular, proactive activities that are designed to identify workplace hazards and contain/correct them before an individual gets hurt. Safety inspections are conducted by first line supervisors and/or representation (in Union environments) and use a problem-solving, failure-mode (anticipating what could go wrong) approach. Inspections are proactive. The problem with safety inspections is no matter what you call them (and there are myriad names for essentially the same activity) people associate safety inspections with some negative outcome like those associated with audits.  The result is a well-intentioned buy largely simple minded attempt to rebrand the safety inspection to take away the sting associated with it.

In healthcare, Safety Rounding is growing in popularity.  Safety Rounds are safety inspections that are adapted for use in matrix organizations. Like Safety Inspections, Safety Rounds are regular, proactive walk-thrus, but instead of first-line supervision conducting the rounds, volunteers take on the responsibility in addition to their normal jobs. The goal of a Safety Round is the same as that of a Safety Inspection, but Safety Rounds focus parallel the “Environment of Care” requirements of the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) audits. Unfortunately, the volunteer brigades tend to attract gung-ho staffers who don’t have much to do or who are shirking their core responsibilities in favor of the new assignment.  But even the best intentioned volunteers lack the authority to hold the people responsible for getting hazards corrected and in a short time the volunteers lose interest, become frustrated, or otherwise become ineffective.  I’ve seen the same thing happen in lean implementations where 5S teams were staffed by volunteers; without the power to force the first line supervisor to correct issues the same items are identified week after week, month after month.

But Safety Rounds aren’t without value.  In fact, in places where the manager that owns the area is held accountable, Safety Rounds can be extremely effective.  Safety Rounds tend to be more holistic than Safety Inspections and often those conducting Safety Rounds will ask hospital staff questions to determine the effectiveness of required safety training.  Safety Rounds may well be tied to Patient Safety, and when it is, the effectiveness tends to increase expontentially.

In Lean Manufacturing environments (which believe it or not aren’t restricted to manufacturing these days) Safety Inspections can be embedded into Layered Process Audits.  from 2008 to 2009 I spent one week a month for 15 months working with a manufacturer in Mexico to completely integrate safety into their manufacturing operating system.  One of the major breakthroughs that we made was the integration of the safety inspection into a layered process audit.  This had a profound impact on the effectiveness of the safety inspection because a) it met the requirement that a Layered Process Audit be conducted weekly and b) it documented all the process flaws into a database that made it easy for maintenance (or other departments) to correct the flaws.

Perhaps the most useless bastardization of a safety inspection is the safety observations.  Safety observations are based on the belief that if a supervisor watches someone working he or she can identify unsafe work practices and provide feedback to the worker on how to work more safely.  This practice overlooks many scientific principles that make it an expensive waste of time.  For starters safety observations assume that workers perform their tasks the same way every time they do their jobs and that the act of being observe will not alter the worker’s performance in any way.  Years ago I worked in an automobile factory assembling seats.  Once a year the engineers would do a time study where they would come and watch each operator work and count the steps involved in a given job.  Knowing that the engineers were likely to heap as much work as they possibly could on a job the operators would routinely add steps, slow their pace, and other wise queer the batter by providing the observer skewed data.  But even in cases where operators are not trying to confuse the results, the fact that their bosses are watching over their shoulders are likely to make the operators take more time to do their jobs and work more safely.  Unless an organization intends to pay someone to watch every operator every moment of every day, it’s not likely that the observations will bear much fruit and it’s highly likely that they will add costs and ignore variation in human behavior.

Some organizations have taken to calling the safety inspection a safety tour, and in so doing soften the stigma of an inspection.  I suppose that if renaming the activity makes it less threatening then we should by all means rename it.  My personal preference is to call it a Process Integrity Analysis, and I would not limit it to safety.  We have to do a better job integrating safety into the work processes, and stop calling safety out as a separate and discrete activity.  A Process Integrity Analysis should include analysis of process capability and reliability, quality, total productive maintenance, 5S, and Job Safety Analysis.  By examining a process holistically an organization can lower injuries, boost productivity, and increase quality.  If we position the “Safety Inspection” as just another element of process improvement Operations will stop viewing safety as an interruption of their jobs and start treating it as a critical discipline that drives productivity.

 

Filed under: Performance Improvement, Safety, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, efficiency, increasing efficiency, increasing productivity, injury prevention, Mine safety, Mining safety, Near miss, Operating efficiency, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, predicting injuries, process variability, variability in human behavior, Worker Safety

Don’t Hurt Yourself

Don’t hurt yourself.  We’ve heard it perhaps hundreds of times throughout our lives and probably said it almost as often.  Let’s take a moment to reflect on what that statement says about our view of safety and the nature of injuries.  Clearly we believe that the injury is within the control of injured party otherwise we wouldn’t say it as a declarative statement.  In saying don’t hurt yourself we are directing the about-to-be-injured party to stop what they are doing and avoid injuring his or her self.  We are implying that we are smarter and most likely immune to getting hurt.

Telling someone not to hurt him/herself also implies that the person has control over whether or not they will be injured.  This sounds innocuous enough, but (while harmless) it’s seldom accurate.  Injuries can come from hundreds if not thousands of causes many of which are far upstream from the injury itself.  Equipment wears out, structures collapse, strangers act in careless or negligent way, and we can control very few of these causes.  But the believe persists that we somehow are at some basic level responsible when we get hurt.

“Don’t hurt yourself” also implies that injuries are the result of cognitive behaviors and conscious decisions and again that is seldom the case.  Think about the times you were injured; how many of those times were you hurt simply because you weren’t thinking.  There is a growing body of research that holds that mistakes are a basic function of the brain.  Most of our mistakes are subconscious and some believe that our subconscious minds make these ways to test the environment and the safety of adapting to a new environment.  In this way, we are able to both resist and invite change simultaneously.  As backward and contradictory as that sounds in so doing we can innovate, discover better ways of doing a task, and expose ourselves to all the wonderful serendipity that life has to offer us.  Unfortunately, sometimes these mistakes lead to lethal or even deadly consequences.  But if mistakes are an inevitable function of our brains merely telling people not to err is pointless and in my opinion fairly irritating.  It’s like telling someone to be taller.

Assuming we aren’t dealing with someone who is mentally ill, injuries that do happen as a result of a  cognitive decision were not a deliberate attempt to hurt ourselves.  Saying “don’t hurt yourself” implies that we WOULD hurt ourselves if we weren’t told not to.  It’s a saying rooted in arrogance and ignorance.  After all, many injuries occur either because something we thought was true wasn’t or vice versa.  In other cases, we made assumptions relative to the situation or environment that were equally false.  So telling us not to hurt ourselves, or even to “be careful” is really an attempt to express concern, not an earnest attempt to prevent an injury.  It’s a nice sentiment and people who tell us not to hurt ourselves mean well, but the statement is indicative of an attitude about the nature of injuries that is flawed and potentially dangerous.

The saying “don’t hurt yourself” is not in itself dangerous but often safety professionals institutionalize this flawed philosophy into a equally flawed, and exponentially more dangerous, safety system.  At the heart of many Behavior Based Safety systems there is the belief that if we can just get people to be more careful and watch what they are doing the workplace will get safer.  But this emphasis on holding people accountable for their own injuries creates an atmosphere where individuals fear the organizational consequences of an injury far more than the physical consequences.  At one end of the spectrum you have people terrified that if they report and injury they will be fired, and at the other end of the spectrum you have people who won’t report injuries because it will mean spoiling the safety record and costing their coworkers a reward of some kind.  One can, of course, modify the things for which the organization provides incentives, but unless the organization abandons the underlying mindset endemic in “don’t hurt yourself” the system will ultimately result in skewed data and a false sense of security.  In these environments injuries seem to fall and the organizations infer that the workplace is safer.  But as I have said on numerous occasions, the absence of injuries does not denote the presence of safety.  Risk that might have been easy to mitigate had near misses and minor injuries been reported, contained, investigated and corrected are never detected and, as these hazards interact with other unknown risk conditions, ultimately raise the risk threshold to the point where a fatality is all but certain.

“Don’t hurt yourself” safety systems are less an expression of concern or an attempt to keep workers safe and more a way of putting the onus for being safe on the worker.  These systems are more a warning about culpability for the injury; it’s a way of saying, “if you get hurt you will have no one to blame but yourself”; it’s not all that nice a sentiment, but even more so, in most cases it’s simply not true.  No organization can excuse itself for worker injuries by saying, “well I told them to be careful; it’s his own darned fault.

Some of you may be reading this and thinking, well I am certainly not guilty of telling people not to hurt themselves.  To you I say, take a hard look at your workplace.  Do you have safety posters and slogans plastered all around? Are you preaching safety in vague esoteric terms? Tug on the heart strings by putting up posters made by the employees children? All these things are just different ways of telling people not to hurt themselves.  Reminding me not to do something I didn’t intend to do is Catch 22 thinking; it makes us feel better even though it does more harm than good.  That’s not to say that there aren’t good and important warnings to provide to the workers.  “Remember we are running 35 non-standard products today, and anytime we introduce variation into our system we increase our risk of failure modes so double check your work and the work of others.”  Reminding me of risk conditions (“It snowed last night so watch for water on the floor”) are helpful because instead of merely telling me to be careful you are also  telling me of conditions that are nonstandard and therefore more inclined to hurt me.  This proactive thinking is the foundation of a good safety system.

So think long and hard about telling someone not to hurt themselves, and remember, don’t hurt yourself.

 

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Safety, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, culture change, don't hurt yourself, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, Just Cause, Mine safety, oil and gas, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip LaDuke, Process safety, rockford greene, Safety Incentives, Safety recognition programs, Worker Safety

The Biggest Threat To The Safety Of Your Workers May Be You

As efforts to improve worker safety become more sophisticated so too have the dangers that workers face.  Much has been written about the role of the individual worker’s behavior in workplace safety, and much has been written about the role that a lack of leadership commitment plays in worker injuries.  But for a moment I would like you to consider perhaps the most serious threat to worker safety: the attitudes of the safety professionals themselves.

These attitudes range from the “defenders of the faith” to the “backslappers” and each poses a significant threat to the safety with which we work.  I would like to take a brief look at these attitudes and ask you to take a hard look at yourself and your peers and ask how closely that attitude aligns with your personal beliefs.

Before I get into the individual attitudes that put us at risk, I think that it’s appropriate to discuss change, and why we are programmed to resist it. In  biological terms, change is bad.  If you are a white crested tern, and you live in an environment that affords you a bountiful supply of food, good mating prospects, temperate weather, and few predators then all change can bring is ruin.  The human animal has evolved keen defenses against change and resists it at an almost molecular level.  Yet, on some level nature also knows that an inability to change results in the inability to adapt and an inability to adapt leads to extinction.  It puts us in a pretty tight bind.  If we change we die, but if we can’t change we also die.  It’s a tough row to hoe.  And the safety profession is the organizational personification of this dichotomy.  But before you look to lay blame for the inadequacies of your safety system on some unsuspecting victim, take a look at these attitudes of safety professionals that are doing more harm than good and ask yourself “am I my own worst enemy?”

Defenders of the Faith

I’ve seen a lot since I started working with safety almost 10 years ago.  Let’s be clear, I’ve worked “in safety” for a lot longer than 10 years, but for the last 10 years I have been working diligently to effect change in safety and that has not been easy.  Bringing change—sometimes radical change—to people who by their nature are extremely cautious individuals is tough. Add to that, the fact that many of these same individuals report to Human Resources departments that view themselves as keepers of the status quo, defenders of the faith, and you will perhaps get some sense of what those years have been like.  Defenders of the Faith are the safety professionals who ostensibly espouse a desire for radical change in the way we approach worker safety, but, in fact, most of these professional don’t want change at all.  The Defenders of the Faith will outwardly admit that change needs to happen but then chip away and passively resist change.  These individuals never tire of the blame game and have umpteen excuses for why they aren’t successful, but meanwhile people continue to get hurt. The primary motivation of the Defenders of the Faith is to ensure continued employment and deflect any negative attention from themselves.

Heggs

Luther Heggs was the character played by Don Knotts in the film The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Heggs was a cautious to the point of being afraid of his own shadow, and there are a lot of Luther Heggs working in safety today.  I am not trying to be ironic when I say that safety professionals are a cautious lot.  The profession attracts more than its fair share of individuals who enjoy regulation, rules, and formulas.  As a rule, these individuals don’t like change and actively (or passively) seek to subvert it.  Whether they realize it our not, these individuals would rather continue a course of action that consistently fails than to adopt a new (and in their minds risky) course of action.  These individuals will only embrace corrective actions that have been time tested and proven effective beyond a shadow of a doubt.  They will make all sorts of excuses as to why these process changes are inappropriate to their situation.  Heggs don’t understand process, and haven’t a clue at the deeper implications and underlying organizational flaws that injuries represent.  In their minds the job of the safety professional is to count bodies as they bear witness to the carnage.  It’s not their fault that people are getting hurt, nor their jobs to fix it. If you find yourself reluctant to accept a new idea until there has been years of research on its effectiveness before you consider it you might be a Hegg.  Unfortunately and ironically, the caution shown by the Heggs actually increases the risk of injury.

Bandwagon Jumpers

Opposites of the Heggs are the Bandwagon Jumpers, and they are every bit as dangerous.  Bandwagon Jumpers have never met a dumb idea that they didn’t love, especially an idea that absolves them of culpability of a failed initiative.  You can find Bandwagon Jumpers at every conference eagerly jotting down notes in the professional development sessions or loading up on the newest fad literature in the bookstore.  This attitude is dangerous because even when the Bandwagon Jumper happens into a good idea he or she seldom gives the idea time to work before scurrying off to the next hair-brained scheme.  You can spot a Bandwagon Jumper by his or her love of jargon; they jabber on for hours spewing meaningless crap that they really don’t understand themselves. Operations leadership seldom respect the Bandwagon Jumpers because the leadership expects and values results, and for all the sound and fury generated by Bandwagon Jumpers very little gets done; it’s all activity and no meaningful consequences.

Snake-Oil Salesmen

I’m fond of the old adage, “when you sell hammers, all the world is a nail”, and never was this more true with the Snake-Oil Salesmen.  These safety professionals glommed onto a scientifically dubious safety process years ago and like a terrier with a rat in its mouth they just refuse to drop it.  Some of these people learned a methodology that worked for them in a very narrow scope and continue using it even though it creates an infrastructure that is too costly to sustain.  Others paid to get certified in a given methodology and admitting that it is of questionable effectiveness erodes their Curricula Vitae; these people understand that allowing the possibility that their methodology is bunk is, by inference, calling their qualifications into question as well.  You can’t blame one for preserving one’s professional values but it becomes problematic when one places more value on one’s own credentials than they do on the safety of the workplace.  It’s easy to be a Snake-Oil Salesman without meaning to—after all, every conference hosts seemingly inexhaustible populations of people who make their living selling processes, methodologies, and ideas that don’t work.  You can find the Snake-Oil Salesmen shouting down each other in LinkedIn chat rooms and on-line safety forums.  Snake-Oil Salesmen are adroit at using a statistically insignificant sample size to refute the evidence that their malarkey is junk science.  They will seldom support their arguments with any research done in the last 50 years, in fact, most will just keep repeating their own opinions until the opposition dismisses them as idiots and walks away.

Backslappers

Without a doubt, Backslappers are the most dangerous attitudes in safety today.  Backslappers are content with what they’ve already done and brag about how safe their workplaces are.  By using industry averages, dubious rates and trends, and antiquated views of safety (as the absence of injury instead of the reduction of risk) Backslappers congratulate themselves for a job well done, at least until there is a serious injury or a fatality.  Backslappers feel that they’ve conquered worker injuries and they don’t have to worry anymore, their jobs are done.  Safety professionals who are Backslappers can’t wait to show the new boss what a terrific job they’re doing, and will waste vendor’s time by inviting them in the guise of learning more about the vendor’s offerings when in fact, they only want to brag about what a swell job they are doing.  Backslappers are the most dangerous of these attitudes because it belies the misconception that we can ever relax or let our guards down when it comes to workplace safety.  When complacency becomes the safety strategy the risk of serious injury grows unchallenged and unchecked until a the probability of a fatality rises to virtual certainty.

So What Can We Do?

I’d like to think that these posts do more than deride a particular fault I find in something and that I also offer something constructive that one can use to correct the undesired state. In that spirit, here goes…

1.     Ask operations if, in their eyes, you fit any of these attitudinal types.

2.     Investigate the trends your safety against national trends; you really need to discount improvements that are part of a national or industry trends.  You also don’t need to congratulate yourself too much for being “better than average”.

3.     Actively seek to improve the safety of your workplace by getting engaged and partnering with Operations.

It takes a lot of courage and moral fortitude to be an effective safety professional, but then this is the career we chose.  If we can’t challenge our own belief-sets, if we can’t call our own attitudes into question, how then can we effect real, lasting, sustainable change?

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, culture change, Just Cause, Loss Prevention, Mine safety, Mining safety, oil and gas, Phil La Duke, Philip La Duke, rockford greene, Worker Safety