Safety Culture Excellence®

Today at work, employees and leaders alike will work hard to control risk exposure on the job. Hazard identification training will take place, new risks will be identified and barriers to safety excellence removed. The vast majority of these same individuals will leave at the end of their day to return home to go trick-or-treating with family members, or stay home to hand out candy. We are increasing our ability to identify hazards and control risks on the job, how well are we doing with Halloween?

My earliest memories of the joys of Halloween are also coupled with the horror stories of apples with needles in them, pixie sticks with PCP (Phencyclidine) or cyanide, child predators, and blades in lollipops. Many of these were myths, but there were truths as well. In 1964, a woman in Long Island, New York, frustrated with the increasing age of trick-or treaters, handed out items containing steel wool, dog biscuits and ant buttons. Thankfully she was prosecuted. In Detroit the same year, lye-filled gum made the news, along with rat-poison as treats in Philadelphia.

Today these stories persist and a new risk has emerged as the top danger of Halloween, distracted driving. According to the article, “Halloween is ‘Deadliest Day’ Of The Year For Pedestrian Fatalities” (http://www.bestplaces.net/docs/studies/halloween_deadliest_day.aspx) some concerning details were revealed based on an analysis of more than four million records in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) from 1990 – 2010 for children 0-18 years of age on October 31.

• “Halloween Was Deadliest Day of the Year for Child Pedestrian Accidents
• Nearly one-fourth of accidents occurred from 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. Over 60% of the accidents occurred in the 4-hour period from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m.”
• Over 70% of the accidents occurred away from an intersection or crosswalk.
• Most of the fatalities occurred with children ages 12-15 (32% of all child fatalities), followed by children ages 5-8 (23%).
• Young drivers ages 15-25 accounted for nearly one-third of all fatal accidents involving child pedestrians on Halloween.”

1. If wearing a mask, make sure it doesn’t limit vision
2. Wear bright enough clothing or reflective items and carry a flashlight – and turn it on!
3. Make sure clothing or costume accessories do not limit mobility
4. Cross at crosswalks and intersections, not in the middle of the street
5. Trick-or-Treat in larger groups to increase visibility
6. If you need to drive, take a cab if consuming alcoholic beverages or are tired
7. Do not operate a phone while driving (Teen age drivers more prone to distracted driving)

I heard a good analogy recently about the difference between hazards and risks. “Hazards are the sharks you spot in ocean while standing on the shore. They become Risks when you get in the water.” How well do you help those you lead, understand, identify, and respond to the differences?

With good intentions, many organizations prompt activities to purposefully and proactively identify potential hazards in the workplace. While this is admirable, it becomes a complex issue when there isn’t a shared understanding of what a hazard is and isn’t, and how some turn into risk. But, not all risk will turn into incidents and injuries. Further, if there is a shared belief that “safe means zero risk and safety first”, or “safety is our number one priority”; might there be mixed signals sent?

Consider how this might be interpreted, “They say our goal is zero injuries and zero risks and that ‘safety first’ means we are controlling all the risks, yet we have brought several to management’s attention with no action!” This isn’t just hyperbole, this misunderstanding was the result of a conversation with a key union official within a client organization.   

Let’s provide some further context on hazards and risk. Wikipedia provides a good definition of hazard. “A hazard is a situation that poses a level of threat to life, health, property, or environment. Most hazards are dormant or potential, with only a theoretical risk of harm; however, once a hazard becomes "active", it can create an emergency situation. A hazardous situation that has come to pass is called an incident. Hazard and possibility interact together to create risk.” Note the key points in this, “most hazards are… only a theoretical risk of harm; however, once a hazard becomes ‘active’…”

A further search in Wikipedia provides another good explanation of risk. “Risk is the potential of loss (an undesirable outcome, however not necessarily so) resulting from a given action, activity and/or inaction. The notion implies that a choice having an influence on the outcome sometimes exists (or existed). Potential losses themselves may also be called "risks". Any human endeavor carries some risk, but some are much riskier than others.” Again, some key points to tease out: “Risk is the potential of loss… resulting from a given action”. Moreover, it points out “Any human endeavor carries some risk…”

Some safety advocates propose there is little point in debating terminology. I strongly disagree. How common language is used influences beliefs and behaviors within the culture. The English language has many different meanings for the same word. Have you ever used a word or phrase that was interpreted incorrectly? Of course you have. You know how important it is to use the correct words when communicating with your family. Why should our dialogue within safety be less important? After all, isn’t it our number one priority? Or wait, is it a core value?

- Shawn M. Galloway

Here is a short video on this topic: http://youtu.be/_BrpiL4rxgk

Shawn M. Galloway is the President of ProAct Safety and the coauthor of two books, his latest published Feb 2013 by Wiley is STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence. As an internationally recognized safety excellence expert, he has helped hundreds of organizations within every major industry to achieve and sustain excellence in performance and culture.  He has been listed in this year’s National Safety Council Top 40 Rising Stars, EHS Today Magazine’s 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS and ISHN Magazine’s POWER 101 – Leaders of the EHS World and again in the recent, elite list of Up and Coming Thought Leaders. In addition to the books, Shawn has authored over 300 podcasts, 100 articles and 80 videos on the subject of safety excellence in culture and performance.

W. Edwards Deming explained a basic concept of manufacturing quality by elaborating on the cause of defects.  He explained that some defects had special cause (i.e., some unusual event caused the defect to happen).  Other defects happened due to causes that are built into the manufacturing processes itself.  He called these common causes. There is a debate among safety professionals these days about whether accidents are caused more by system issues or simply by human error.  The simple fact is that it could be either and that neither is mutually exclusive.  Your organization could be having accidents caused by either or both.  Finding out the cause is critical during accident investigations and making the distinction between common and special causes can be very useful. This dichotomy is less useful for fixing blame than it is for fixing problems.  Special causes alert us to outside forces to guard against in the future.  We can often extend our caution beyond the specific issue to other similar risks or situations.  When a foreign object gets into a product, we can protect against that object but also explore what other objects could find their way into our processes and how they could do so.  When a special outside issue impacts safety, we can use similar reasoning to increase our awareness and precautions against such risks. Common causes can be more difficult to recognize because they hide within our systems and influence other actions and decisions that can directly lead to defects and/or accidents.  However, it is critical to identify them because they will continue to influence risks until we see and address them.  Even what looks like simple human error can be influenced by systems issues.  This is one reason for always asking “why?” to find what may lie beyond worker decisions and actions. Deming left us with a warning about finding out and classifying causes.  He said that blame causes fear and that fear causes the hiding and skewing of information critical to understanding causation.  We should seek first to understand and then take intelligent action based on that understanding. -Terry L. Mathis

Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in ‘The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS’ in 2010, 2011 and 2012-2013. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence, 2013, WILEY.

Three has been a lot of dialogue lately about high-severity accidents.  Some have questioned the basic assumptions of people like Herbert William Heinrich that tended to think that all levels of severity come from the same risk pools.  Several research projects have focused on severe accidents and sought to determine their root causes and find strategies to prevent them.  The real danger in focusing on topics like this is that we tend to lose the balance of our safety efforts.  We tend to focus either on the highest frequency accidents or the highest severity accidents and not on both. While the majority of severe injuries result from process issues that are usually covered by rules and procedures, and the most frequent accident tend to be more personal and involve worker behaviors;  there are exceptions to both.  It is crucial that we achieve compliance with regulations and our own rules and procedures while encouraging and empowering workers to go “above and beyond.”  If we take our focus off one kind of risk while we work on another, we do so at our workers’ peril.  Even mundane risks can sometimes result in unusually severe injuries.  A behavioral approach should not take effort away from compliance efforts.  While we strive to better understand both our severe and our frequent accidents, we should balance our efforts to prevent both types. -Terry L. Mathis Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in ‘The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS’ in both 2010 and 2011. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence, 2013, WILEY.

Greetings all! Probability is a factor that masks risks from many workers. This video explains how low-probability risks look ok when they are really not. It does so without criticizing workers for not seeing these hard-to-understand risks and the importance of avoiding them. ProAct Safety provides more strategies in the area of safety culture and safety excellence in the public domain than any other firm, organization or association. For access to increased, advanced value in the form of videos, podcasts, public workshops and seminars, please visit www.ProActSafety.com/Store

You can either watch the video here at www.SafetyCultureExcellence.com or you can watch it below from YouTube.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfcKrcRJix0]

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

I hope to see you there!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

Between the recent articles in safety publications and the capsizing of the Costa Concordia, there is a renewed dialogue among safety professionals and others about accident causation. In the first third of the last century Heinrich proposed, from his observations of accident reports, that 88% of all accidents were the result of unsafe acts, 10% from unsafe conditions, and 2% from undetermined causes. One author recently refuted this, mainly citing the tendency to blame employees for accidents when much of the “cause” was due to systems issues controlled by managers.

While there is validity in looking beyond human behavior, there is great danger in overlooking it and its critical role in accidents. We should always look at the “why”, but we can’t forget the “what.” It looks like we have opened the door to a whole new set of terminology around what has been traditionally labeled “immediate cause,” “underlying cause,” “root cause,” and “contributing factor.” If changing terminology or consolidating terminology helps prevent accidents, I am all for it.

From the discussions on line, there may be a need for better developing the talking points around accident causation. It is hard to synergize solutions when it takes 1200 comments in a LinkedIn group just to get everyone agreeing on terms.

The main point that must not get lost in this discussion is the fact that behaviors , regardless of what causes, prompts, or influences them are critical to risk control and, thus critical to accident prevention. We have assumed a lot over the years about what causes human behavior and how to change it. However we approach it in the future, we must not forget it. If a driver swerves into the other lane, the probability of an accident just dramatically increased. THAT is human behavior.

Now, how do we keep drivers in their own lanes? That is the next level. We err when we think that changing the influences on behavior will automatically and completely and immediately change behavior. If we don’t change behavior, we have missed the mark or are shooting at the wrong targets. It is not about blame, it is about prevention.

If we forget this basic premise as we strive to better understand its causes and influences, we are taking a step forward and falling hopelessly backwards. We need to understand the next level of causation or influence or systems issues or whatever we decide to call it so we can use it to shape behavior, not forget it.

Terry L. Mathis

CEO and Founder

ProAct Safety, Inc.

www.ProActSafety.com