Safety Culture Excellence®

When safety practice ignores the facts it’s no wonder why things don’t work well.  Research has shown and re-affirmed several facts that have escaped attention or reaction from common safety practices.  The following is only a short list of examples:

Fact:  People react emotionally before they react rationally.
Practice:  We try to convince people first with logic and then get them involved and bought in.

Fact:  People remember concrete facts better than abstract concepts.
Practice:  We generalize about safety and then (maybe) back up our generalization with specific examples.

Fact:  The messenger is often as important the message.
Practice:  We send out safety messages via email or ask whoever is available to deliver the message.

Fact:  Discovery learning is best.
Practice:  We tell everything rather than letting people extract lessons from stories.

As long as safety practices ignore the facts we can expect them to produce less than stellar results. What other facts do you see safety practices ignore?

-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 just heard another organizational leader claim that he had good safety programs and a good safety culture and couldn’t figure out why he still had accidents.  The two greatest problems with such leaders is already stated:  they don’t know why they have accidents and they are satisfied that something is good even when it does not produce results. 

These leaders are not entirely to blame.  They have been told by the “experts” that good safety programs and a good safety culture have certain characteristics.  If their programs and safety culture have these characteristics, they must be good ones.  The true measure of a safety program or culture is not what it is “like” but “what it can do and does.”  If you have too many accidents, your programs and culture are not doing what they should do.  If you don’t know why, you can’t lead your organization to better results.

This problem is simply an application of the age-old tendency to mistake activity for results.  This is why we have both process metrics and results metrics:  so we can see if we are working our plan and also see if our plan is working.   A culture that wants to prevent accidents is not automatically a culture that knows how to prevent accidents.  Work on your culture’s capabilities and not just its characteristics.

-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.