Safety Culture Excellence®

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.

In safety there are issues that require a lot of thought and decision making.  There are others that only require simple action.  These simple actions should be trained as habits and programmed into the auto pilot of workers.  It is a total waste of time to muse over whether or not to buckle a seatbelt.  Just make buckling an automatic response that is done every time without though or debate. However, don’t allow the engineering crew to refuel the nuclear reactor by habit.  Even if the process has steps that are repeated regularly, plan and carry them out very consciously.  Analyze the issues and keep everyone on their guard mentally as the process is completed.  Check and recheck each step and make sure everyone involved feels free to offer suggestions and voice concerns.  Hold a wrap-up meeting to review and ensure that everything is complete and secure before ending the project. Organizations with excellent safety performance recognize this dichotomy.  It is critical to differentiate the precautions that require mindless action and those that require careful planning and execution.  Confusing one for the other can spell disaster. -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.

Maslow pointed out that we focus on immediate needs until they are met and then move on to higher goals.  Is your safety program still focused on where the next meal is coming from or looking for enlightenment?  There is no ideal answer to this question; only an honest one.  If you are still struggling to get your workers into basic compliance (i.e.  Knowing and following the rules and procedures), you are trying to survive.  If you are well past that stage and looking for the next step change beyond your already good results, you are trying to thrive.  There is no fault in either case.  You probably inherited the current state and are challenged to take it to the next level.  What is important is that you recognize your current state and respond accordingly. If you are in survival mode, it is imperative that your supervisors are respected and viewed by workers as friends and not foes.  Position and authority don’t matter as much to workers trying to survive as the distinction between friend and foe.  Friends are trying to help you survive; foes are trying to make you fail.  Workers will follow their friends and not their foes.  It is also critically important that you communicate accident data as stories from which you can learn lessons.  Survivalists view risk taking as necessary to survival and don’t generalize well.  Tell them the story of the accident and let them determine lessons learned from the story. In thrive mode, you need to focus on the passion and purpose of safety excellence.  To be excellent, it is not enough to convince workers; you must convert them.  Directives will get hands and feet moving.  It takes passion to move hearts and minds.  It is critically important to recognize the difference and to address it intelligently.  Many safety professionals think that more of the same will get them to the next level.  Unfortunately, that is seldom the case.  The tools of excellence are different from the tools of pretty good.  You can be the voice of reason and get the organization from bad to good.  You have to be an inspirational leader to get from good to great. -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.

I would like to suggest an update to some basic safety terminology.  As ideas evolve the language used to describe them should also. The first term is provocation.  The word has several meanings including to “incite to action.”  It also means to irritate, enrage, anger, or exasperate.  The negative side of this word tends to outweigh the positive and there are many other words that work better with fewer bad side effects (depending, of course, on your intent).  If your intent is to further the pursuit of safety excellence, it seems that words such as advance, motivate, progress, and innovate would provide a call to action without burning bridges behind it. Underlying this term is the assumption that beating and kicking the locked back door of the mind will somehow open the front door to new ideas and opportunities.  In my experience, attacking ideas almost always results in a defensive rather than a progressive response.  If your goal is to stir things up without any real progress, the old word works just fine. The second term is confrontation.  I can no longer count the number of times I have heard it espoused that workers must be trained in how to confront each other about safety issues or how supervisors must not be afraid to confront workers.  Confrontation also has several meanings, but it overwhelmingly connotes attacking and creating enmity. Attacking creates defensiveness which tends to minimize openness to change.  It also tends to damage relationships and cultures.  I think the term coaching is a far superior term and concept.  Coaching is helping another person to perform better.  It does not require attacking or demeaning.  It does not require the destruction of old ideas to form new ones.  It tends to promote progress via evolution vs. revolution. It is what friends do for each other and what parents do for their children.  It is what experts do for aspiring athletes, dancers, singers, and others desiring to develop excellent performance.  Why not call this what we do for each other as we aspire to create excellent safety performance? They are just words; but words create meaning and meaning can direct actions.  If we want the best actions, why not choose the best words? -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.

I thinned some trees in a thick, forested area on my lot hoping the remaining trees would grow more wide limbs and spread their canopies.  It didn’t happen.  I asked my tree expert why not and he explained that new limbs on a mature tree were only growing out of the bark and not the core of the tree trunk.  They were weak and seldom reached large size without breaking off in the first strong wind. Many safety programs likewise are add-ons and have no real connection to the core values and strategies of the organization.  We hope they will provide extra coverage and fill the gaps, but they seldom survive for very long.  The strong limbs of our safety programs are connected to a solid strategy and designed to provide specific coverage.  They are not afterthoughts, but the result of solid planning. It is crucial for organizational leaders to think of the tree and the limbs as one unit.  If safety is a core value of the organization, there are no safety goals; only business goals related to safety.  The strategy of the organization includes safety-related strategies that connect to the core.  Leaders might fertilize the soil and stimulate the roots, but they don’t try to artificially graft on limbs that aren’t firmly connected. Many safety programs and processes are attempts to compensate for a lack of core strategy and seldom survive the winds of change. -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.

Many organizations have adopted Computer-Based Training (CBT), especially for the OSHA-required annual training.  It has some advantages but also has some very serious disadvantages. Advantages:  CBTs provide exactly uniform information to each worker.  The learning is self-paced so each worker can complete it at their own learning and comprehension speed.  It allows workers to take training a few at a time to minimize interruption to normal work flow.  It does not require a classroom or meeting room; only a computer work station.  If a worker can demonstrate competence through a test, they don’t have to take the training again.  It allows for easy record keeping to track who has taken the training and who has not. Disadvantages:  It tends to foster cheating.  Workers can keep their answers and skip the training all together.  In some cases workers pass the answers to newer workers who never take the training.  It can become extremely repetitive, monotonous and boring.  However, the most serious disadvantage of CBT lies in the fact that it isolates workers for training and denies the interaction common in traditional classroom training. It completely eliminates discussion of topics and collaboration among employees.  Best practices cannot be shared during training and real questions about application to the workplace cannot be adequately answered.  Training becomes a lonely process and the opportunities to build culture around learning and application are lost. Organizations can compensate for CBT with other culture-building activities, but training becomes an anti-culture activity.  The acquiring and renewing of key workplace skills becomes a siloed and isolated individual process.  The opportunities to build a “can-do” culture are largely lost.  Smart managers will consider these advantages and disadvantages and decide if CBT is a good decision for their organization or not. -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.

I recently heard a supervisor say to a manager, “Do you want me to knock out this job or do you want to play the safety game?”  Is that really the choice that leaders have to make in the workplace?  Is safety something that gets in the way of productivity?  I believe that people who think safety and productivity are the two opposite sides of a coin, don’t really understand safety. Safety isn’t simply doing a job more slowly and it is not other things you do besides the job; safety is the way you do the job. It is not just the safe way to do the job; it is the RIGHT way to do the job.  Almost anything that increases the chance of an injury also increases the chance of a defective job.  Failure to plan, short cutting steps, rushing and all the things that make a job unsafe, also make it a poor quality job.  We don’t design processes to produce defects or accidental injuries.  When they do, our processes have failed and need to be modified.  When we think about safety correctly, it almost disappears into the real issue; how to do our work right. -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.

There are two strategies in safety that don’t work; one is doing nothing and the other is trying to maintain the status quo.  The sad truth is that safety is constantly either getting better or getting worse.  It would seem logical that keeping a constant level of effort toward accident reduction would result in a relatively constant result.  While this can be true in the short term, it seldom continues for multiple years.  Many organizations get a wake-up call when, after a few years of relatively low accident rates, they have a rash of accidents they didn’t expect. Much of this thinking is the result of relying too heavily on lagging indicators to evaluate safety performance.  Periods without accidents can appear to be the result of safety efforts when in fact they are simply luck.  Low-probability risks do not cause accidents with every incidence, and it can take time to play out the results of such risks.  Lagging indicators will accurately reflect the risk level over time, but usually too late to respond effectively. The two ways to overcome this problem involve developing leading indicators and implementing continuous improvement.  Leading indicators help to evaluate the amount of effort and change that is happening in safety activities.  Continuous improvement simply means that the organization must maintain a healthy sense of vulnerability and constantly target new safety improvements.  The journey to safety excellence is long, but can be effectively taken a step at a time. -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.

Certainly the average person desires to be both liked and respected. While a gross oversimplification of behavioral sciences, we behave in a way consistent with seeking out what we desire and avoiding what we don’t. Leaders of all kinds are often put in positions to make decisions that impact the lives of others. If our primary goal is to be liked, we act, or decide in accordance. The same is true if our goal is to obtain or preserve respect. Earlier this month the world lost Margaret Thatcher, the previous Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. She was once quoted as saying, “If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.” I’m sure we have all worked for people that we personally liked, but didn’t respect the professional position, with the opposite also being true. With leaders seeking out both hearts and minds and hands and feet, what should the primary focus be? Ultimately, we need to look at what the role of a leader should be (e.g., thought leader, challenger of status quo thinking, advancer of performance and culture)? Stephen Hawking, a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author once wrote, “Among physicists, I'm respected I hope.” During a recent dinner conversation on this topic with very well liked and publicly respected CEO, he commented, “Being liked is more about an individual’s self-esteem.” I tend to agree. Being respected comes from accomplishing what needs to be done and through creating the desire among others to do so without question, due to regard for the person and position. I’m very happy if those I work with and lead like me. More important, do they respect what I do and what I’m trying to influence them to do without my direction or oversight? What are your thoughts? Shawn M. Galloway is the coauthor of two books: STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence and The Hazardous Materials Management Desk Reference (3rd Edition). He is also the President of ProAct Safety.  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.  In 2012, ISHN Magazine listed him in the POWER 101 – Leaders of the EHS World. He has authored over 250 podcasts, 100 articles and 30 videos on the subject of safety excellence. Shawn is the host of the highly acclaimed weekly podcast series, Safety Culture Excellence and a columnist for several magazines.

When my children turned three years old, their heads were exactly the height of much of the furniture in our home.  Bruises and bumps abounded and we feared a call from Child Protective Services!  We were tempted to tape bumper pads on the key head-knockers to reduce the suffering when we read a book that asked the question, “Are you preparing the path for the child or the child for the path?”  We realized that even if we padded our home our children would visit other homes.  How could we keep them safe in any environment?  We discovered a behavioral precaution called “eyes on path” and our lives got better. In safety, we often face the dilemma of working on conditions or behaviors.  The best safety solutions don’t ignore conditions or behaviors.  The engineering hierarchy of controls defines how to start with conditional fixes and migrate to behavioral fixes for risks that cannot be eliminated or controlled adequately with conditional fixes.  This approach can result in both a safer workplace and safer workers.  Safe workplaces are stationary but workers are not.  While we continuously improve workplace conditions, addressing safety behaviors can enhance workplace efforts and also take a road trip with the workers as they go to even more dangerous places, like home and highway.  Make sure at least some of your safety efforts are portable. -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.