Safety Culture Excellence®

Greetings, recording this week in Marysville, Kansas. Just a quick note about some upcoming public events: On the 15th and 16th of September Terry Mathis will be in Seattle, Washington leading two one-day public sessions that are part of the Safety Culture Excellence Series. On the 15th he will be leading a seminar titled Advanced Tactics for Behavior-Based Safety: Lean Principles & Results Orientation. The following day will be covering Leadership Safety Coaching: Teach Your Supervisors to be Safety Coaches.

Then on the 28th and 29th of September I will be conducting two one day workshops for the Saskatchewan Section of American Society of Quality. Each One-Day Workshop is titled: Lean Behaviour-Based Safety & Safety Culture Excellence. If you would like more information about these workshops or other upcoming events, please visit www.ProActSafety.com and click on the events category at the top.

So on to this week’s topic. “Most people view perceptions as something to be measured; not managed. But I have found that if perceptions are not managed, they will have variance that can cause lack of correct focus in safety efforts. Workers who do not accurately perceive their greatest risks often waste their limited safety efforts on ineffective strategies. Correcting perceptions can direct safety efforts for maximum effectiveness.” – Terry Mathis.

In the June 2009 edition of EHS Today, Terry Mathis, the Founder and CEO of our firm ProAct Safety, published an article that has created quite a buzz among safety professionals and executive leaders. For this week, I’d like to share a recording of that article and challenge you to consider if the message applies to your company. If you would like to see the actual article, please visit EHS Today’s website at www.EHSToday.com or you can find it along with a lot of other free content to improve your safety focus on our website at www.proactsafety.com. So without further delay, let’s get to the article…

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

Greetings from Canton, Ohio. Whenever we are called in to audit an existing observation or behavioral safety (Behavior-Based) approach, we always ask a lot of questions but we often start with three simple ones.

1. What are you focusing on?
2. Do people know what the focus is?
3. How does that impact your accident rates?

Key thought here, if you have a focus in safety like items on a checklist, if people haven’t internalized the items or the focus, you will always be relying on observations and reminders. That shouldn’t be the goal in a Behavior-Based Safety process or any other awareness or focus initiative. I believe the goal should be to give people a few key things that they can do to minimize their exposure to risk and help them internalize them and remove the obstacles or barriers that make it difficult or impossible to take those precautions. So for this week’s podcast Terry and will talk about what we call Knowledge of Precautions in Behavior-Based Safety.

Have a great week!

Shawn Galloway ProAct Safety

Greetings from The Woodlands, Texas. This week I would like to share a recording of another article by Terry Mathis, recently published in EHS Today in their April 2009 issue. The article can either be found on the EHS Today website – www.ehstoday.com or on the ProAct Safety website – www.ProActSafety.com

Have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

Greetings from Toronto, Canada and show number 84! This week I’d like to talk about what we call a Personal Safety Focus. The idea is: Do you have things that go beyond rules, policies and procedures that you can focus your people on that minimizes or prevents their exposure to risk? Now obviously if you do not have the basics in place, those three things should receive priority attention. I’m of the belief that safety has been truly successful when it can be taken with people, when it is portable. When we only think about safety as on the job, we miss out on helping our people where they are more likely today to get injured. Is most countries, it is not at work. When safety is successful that means that it was interesting and helpful enough and caused people to share the strategies with their families. If you are truly effective in safety, the people you’ll help the most are people you might not ever meet, their family members, and their neighbors. Do your people relay your safety messages? I hope you enjoy this topic, here we go!

Have a great week!

Shawn Galloway ProAct Safety

Greetings, recording and editing this week from The Woodlands, Texas. The topic this week comes from a subscriber who sent us the following message: “Our company is rolling out a campaign that says, There Are No Accidents! This is creating some disconnect between the union and management with a lot guys thinking that management is out of touch with safety issues. What are your thoughts on this? Do you believe this is true, that there are no accidents?”

This week Terry and I will respond to this question but let me first say that I believe that this message usually is well intended. There are some videos available on the internet that leverages this slogan. Typically the message is positioned to get people to see that all accidents have a prevention opportunity somewhere along the chain of events. The thought is that if you can focus everyone on seeing these prevention points we can often stop the chain of events from resulting in an unplanned outcome. It is often easy to utilize a saying to spread a message as it gives people something to associate their thoughts with. The danger is when posters are hung and slogans are haphazardly used without thoroughly and effectively communicating the message. On another note, please do not forget to visit www.proactsafety.com and click on events to find where we will be speaking at or the dates for one of our public workshops.

Have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

I received a great post on my Facebook profile that I’d like to respond to on here by sharing my thoughts and inviting others to do the same. Here’s how it went:

“I'm familiar with safety consultants. Some of my best friends are Safety Directors or Regional Safety Managers. I guess since I had a good buddy fall to his death on a project and witnessed three fatalities on another project I have developed some passion for doing the work right which also means safely. I'm always a little entertained by safety ignorance especially at the program level where you report the stupid things that produce metrics, but lets you fly under the wire so the managers don't get all riled up. I've witnessed a safety professional ask a crane operator to wear his safety glasses while operating with a 80--foot long shaft cage being lowered into place not 4-feet from an operating emergency room. The whole time I'm striving for operational excellence I frequently witness some safety knuckle head locking horns with an hourly meathead over PPE or something that’s pretty insignificant. Please explain that culture if you can. I'm all ears." - Todd

Great comment Todd and thank you! This is a common headache and I agree unfortunately many workers feel that safety is out of touch with the reality of the risks of the job. Some could argue it is because some safety professionals aren’t always familiar with the industry or the way that work is performed. Others unfortunately view safety professionals as the safety police rather than a resource to the job site superintendents or foremen to ensure the work can occur as safe as possible.

I often find there is good intention; the biggest issue I find is there is just not enough attention placed on really talking with the people who perform the work and truly understanding the inherent risks. Moreover many times the accident investigation following an event becomes a form filling process rather than truly understanding all the contributing factors and influencers. So with the best of intentions the engineering hierarchy of controls is used and thus Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) becomes a perceived easy fix. Realistically there are still some managers will only support easy to fix issues, or the easiest mitigation opportunity. Sometimes the easiest is not the most risk reducing.

Now consider that all risks cannot be removed in an organization. It is impossible to engineer all danger out so too often PPE becomes a focal point; moreover it is easiest to spot. Plus in some people’s minds it is an easy way to demonstrate that safety is important because it is being enforced. Rather than coaching for safety performance it is easier to manage for compliance. If we are truthful with ourselves we are all susceptible to that. We are hardwired in the brain to look for exception and manage that exception. Too often I’ve found an example of that is when someone asks why the requirement is necessary, the response is “because it is a rule”. Rather than explaining the rationale and allowing the workers to discovery learn how this minimizes exposure to risk if there is validity to the rule or discretional request. I’ve also seen examples where the individual enforcing the mandatory behavior, themselves doesn’t understand. When this happens safety becomes a joke. Management and supervision becomes aligned with the workers and the jokes on the safety person.

I work very hard to ensure safety isn’t driven by extrinsic motivators; it has to be intrinsic at all levels to reach excellence. When it is extrinsic, (pushed by someone to do something for safety that doesn’t make sense) safety becomes “because I have to” rather than “because I want to.” Additionally too often PPE policies are blanket responses to a single event or one person’s undesirable behavior. This often occurs because the ability or comfort level to coach for performance and give helpful feedback is nonexistent. After working at countless locations throughout the world, I’ve found it isn’t only some safety professionals who are guilty of this. It is often many other leaders that fall into this trap.

Regarding metrics, unfortunately we measure often because we have to rather than to gather insight. Thus we fall prey to measurement dysfunction. I agree that PPE is far, far too often the predominant focus of safety improvement rather than understanding the job, the risks and the experience of the people doing the work. WE need to involve them to help us understand collectively how to collaboratively improve safety at the job site and everywhere the people are. In other words, the tools in safety should not be solely requirement-based or reside in a gang box (construction site toolbox)at the jobsite. We have to be passionate about improving; otherwise the strong safety foundation we create will crumble under the pressure of other hypercompetitive operational priorities. I believe Individual passion at all levels is the only thing that will truly sustain the foundation we work hard to create. Passion for safety cannot be forced upon an individual.

To get to the level of excellence, those of us trying to help improve safety can’t be only focusing on the easy to see opportunities like PPE; we have to go deeper in the organizational culture to understand the influencers and hidden risks that we miss, even with our own common sense and experience. We have to go to the people who know the jobs and risks best, the people doing the work. Even if we are passionate about improving safety and have had success in the past, we can’t be naïve and only leverage only our viewpoint of risk. Sadly in the way we measure, assess and “manage” safety we often can’t see the hidden things.

It is analogous to telling someone there is fish in the lake you used to fish in as a kid. Standing on the pier a disbelieving individual looks out across the surface and replies, “no there isn’t. They then dip an empty bucket below the surface, retrieve it and stare at the bucket now full of lake water and reply, “see.”

Shawn M. Galloway

President and Chief Operating Officer

ProAct Safety, Inc.

Greetings from The Woodlands, Texas. During a recent webinar we received a lot of great questions. By the way the previous webinars we have held can currently be viewed on demand at no cost. They can either be found on the Safety Culture Excellence website or at www.proactsafety.com. We followed up with the individual questions after the events and many asked that we turned them into podcasts as they thought others could benefit from the response. So thank you for that! For this week we will answer the following question: “What do you do if your company is sporadic with its commitment to the safety program and what suggestions do you have for a safety culture where mgmt is not consistent with enforcing its policies?” We will try to offer some guidance on this and also how to understand what might be influencing this for as we all know there are a lot of hypercompetitive priorities in business today, I hope our thoughts help!

Have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

Greetings from Sheffield England. This week we will conclude the second part of the series by  listening in to Terry’s Seven Steps that an organization can go through, taking what they have accomplished at work and transfer it off the job. We hope you can take some of these ideas and start sharing them with your employees.

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

Greetings from Saint Simons Island, GA. Often we hear of leaders who have stated that there will be a "zero tolerance for accidents". Sometimes the positive intention of that phrase is well understood and thus no problem. Many times regardless of best intentions, a perception gets created about the meaning and potential negative outcome of the new philosophy. The purpose of this podcast is to provide a little background and offer some insight about how to communicate the intention correctly.

If you are listening to this file through streaming media and would like to download it for later use. All files and other ideas to help you bring positive improvement in your safety culture can be found at www.safetycultureexcellence.com or you can visit our consulting firm’s website at www.proactsafety.com

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

Greetings from Barnsley, England located in South Yorkshire. Last week I received a comment and two thought provoking questions from a subscriber. They were as follows:

“What are your thoughts on fixing targets on near miss reporting / investigation, as a part of measuring safety performance?

Other question, How deep should the near miss incident investigation go?. Should it be as much as a first aid incident investigation. Thanks”

Thank you for this and the positive feedback! Here are my quick thoughts. I encourage others to “weigh in” as they see fit. To respond to your questions, I would like to first provide some background information.

I’m a believer that history tends to repeat itself and if you aren’t learning from the past, you are as often said “doomed to repeat it”. – Moreover I believe that safety can seem like a numbers game when you look at the severity ratio aspect of accidents/incidents. I am of the school of thought (like Dean Gano) that most accidents have both behavioral/precautionary and conditional prevention opportunities. There are low probability risks that occur daily in the normal work that people do. If a task has a 1 in 1000 chance of resulting in an incident/accident and if several people perform the task 3 times a day for a few years, eventually someone’s luck will run out.

For all of the risks that take place, a percentage of them become near-misses/close-calls/near-hits a smaller percentage turn into first aids and even fewer turn into recordable/reportable types. If you haven’t, I encourage you to listen to the previously recorded podcast titled: The Cliff Analogy.

Consider that some people who are working at the edge will come close to falling and catch themselves (near-miss) some fall off but just receive a bump or minor scratch at the bottom (first aid) and fewer will fall and receive a more serious injury (recordable). Now not everyone who walks out to the edge of a cliff will fall off. However everyone who falls off walked out to the edge. This is what is referred to as a risk pool. Near-miss reporting offers an opportunity to identify the risk pools prior to someone getting seriously hurt. (“Wow someone was working at the edge and almost fell off? Well what can we do to ensure this doesn’t happen again or prevent someone from actually falling off?)

It is important to report this type of information because one can not predict severity in accidents. I have been at sites where a person had fallen off two steps and it resulted in a fatality. I have been at another site where someone fell two stories and only broke a bone. I knew a man that slipped on a magazine that was on his carpet at home and he hit his head. Unfortunately he lost his life. I’m sure there are several of you (admittedly like myself) that have also slipped on something at home and got away injury free. As I’m writing this, one of our associates came in my office to tell me about an accident she saw on the way to the office. She said “had I been 150 feet further up the road I would have been hit by the driver” Sometimes the difference between a near-miss and a serious incident is 150 feet; many times it is just inches.

I do believe that there will always be an element of risk in many things people will do. While I believe zero accidents is a possibility (as I’ve seen it first hand in some very dangerous environments), zero risk isn’t possible. It is impossible to completely engineer out all of the risks so we must continue to work to identify those hidden risks and develop other ways to minimize the exposure. This is why we have to change the definition of “Safe” from no accidents to meaning “not at risk”. The better we can identify those areas without someone getting hurt to tell us, the better off we are. This also creates the necessity to help people understand the precautions they can take when exposed to the different risks in their environment.

As a site gets better and better in safety before the accidents go completely away and you sustain zero accidents the incident data does a nasty thing to you, it loses it statistical significance. It no longer provides trends to respond to, only random data points. This of course is why many sites hit a plateau and experience slight ups and downs over a few years. Moreover this is what has lead to the global popularity of Behavior-Based Safety (BBS). Rather than just relying on “reporting” to understand safety challenges, this process (if done correctly) looks at common practice to better see the hidden dangers and possibility of taking very specific precautions to minimize the exposure to the inevitable risks.

Prior to creating performance targets for reporting near-misses and deeply trying to investigate the almost events; I would first encourage an organization to, as Covey would say, ”Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” It is important to understand what perceptions exist in the organization. Perception surveys can provide you part of this answer. So can simply talking with the population during your normal conversations.

First understand how people define a Near-miss. I have asked this same question to thousands of employees and have received many different incorrect responses. If you expect a person to report something that falls into a certain category, ensure the expectations are clear. Don’t let incorrect perceptions determine your success.

Second, I encourage you to understand how population views the context of measurement. Far too often measurement is looked at as a fault finding/blame placing tool, rather than to help understand and improve. A great book for this is called “Transforming Performance Measurement”. A link can be found at:

http://www.safetycultureexcellence.com/recommended-reading/

Third I encourage you to look at how people view the current effectiveness of first aid and recordable reporting. If people report something and nothing happens or there is no follow up or communication back… If the system is viewed as a black hole safety system, it will be difficult to get people to report additional things. Unfortunately ineffective employee suggestion systems will have an impact on incident reporting as well. Resulting in both being lumped into the commonly heard perception “why keep telling them about the issues, when nothing is happening to fix them.”

Fourth, look at what might demotivate people first and work to remove those demotivators before adding the motivators. The belief is that the motivation is already there, just remove the barriers! Rather than finding ways to motivate reporting, first understand what the barriers to reporting are. As I learned from the teachings of Ferdinand Fournies, people are intrinsically motivated to do the right thing, however barriers exist that end up demotivating the performance. Try to identify what might demovitate someone to report and neutralize those aspects within the culture. Consider that there are three elements of motivation: Reducing de-motivators, adding motivators and rewarding. In looking for the general demotivators, look for: Constant change, withholding information, hypocrisy, dishonesty, unfairness, unproductive activities, internal competition, lack of follow-up, over-control, ignoring input. Conversely for motivators continue providing input, a sense of ownership in safety (programs, processes), involvement, teamwork, a scorekeeping mentality (achieving success not avoiding failure – TRIR), improvement, winning, variety and of course recognition. Lastly, if you want the near-miss reporting to continue, create a positive consequence for the activity.

Fifth, work to continuously communicate the reason for reporting Near-misses and build in real life examples from both at work and home. Consider how powerful it can be when people understand that they can report an almost event and there would be new insight and a positive outcome. If there are trust issues, consider an anonymous system to build the trust and most importantly demonstrate how the tool will be used. Recognize you might be sacrificing the ability to perform a deep analysis when it is anonymous; sometimes this is worth it in the beginning to build trust in the tool. As a side effect consider that this will help strength the safety culture. Consider communicating examples of how a hidden issue was found and solved, without someone having to get hurt, or in trouble.

I believe having a goal for near-miss reporting can be a great idea, because an organization should measure more than just “did we have fewer accidents this year than last?” We have helped many organizations develop their own custom Balanced Scorecards for Safety (Leading & Lagging, Impacting & Interactive Safety Metrics) and near-miss reporting is a common indicator.

The danger lies in focusing too much on the requested number and not enough emphasis on the rationale and necessity; thus creating a fiction writing contest. Deming once said “the numbers are critical but relatively unimportant”. In other words, the numbers are critical but not the end goal.

Several organizations perform a full root cause analysis on a near-miss to identify the contributing factors and precautionary control points. I always encourage investigators to look beyond employee behavior/actions, if this is found as a “root cause” or contributing factor. Many people will stop there because they can not answer the next “Why Question”. If one person is or feels encouraged to take a risk, usually others are as well. It is important to always look at the cultural aspects during an investigation/analysis. I believe that when the culture supports the measurement and understands why we need to investigate near-misses, an in-depth analysis can be a very positive thing. Consider that if people are fearful of the method and outcomes of first aid or recordable investigations, near-misses reporting will be negatively impacted. If you do not address the perceptions and cultural aspects of performance measurement, you will have little data to analyze; making this post unfortunately, a moot point.

Thank you again for the topic idea, keep them coming!

Shawn Galloway