Can health and safety metrics be converted into business metrics?
Can health and safety metrics be converted into business metrics? If so, are companies leaving significant value on the table by merely achieving a “good” safety culture and meeting the minimum OSHA requirements? What does it take to go above and beyond basic safety requirements and programs and become a world-class safety organization?
No coach can punish a team into winning the Super Bowl of safety. To get your team in the end zone, you might need to rethink your management approach.
Many people have been taught that zero injuries is the end of their safety journey. But in fact, zero injuries is only the beginning of the journey. It’s a journey that will never end, as you and your leadership team relentlessly pursue perfection, which I define as zero at-risk behaviors.
Building a Team
Now, if you’re like most people, you’re probably wondering how you build a team that pursues perfection and approaches zero at-risk behaviors. How do you inspire your team to win the Super Bowl of safety? Even harder, how do you get people doing the right thing for safety, in the moment of choice when you’re not there watching?
The answer is that you need employee engagement at its highest form: commitment.
Three Types of Workers
When it comes to workers, every company has just three kinds: non-compliant, compliant and committed:
Non-compliant – “I will not follow your safety and quality rules, because I am convinced the only way to get high production is to take risks and shortcuts.”
Compliant – “I will follow your safety and quality procedures, as long as someone (a manager, a supervisor or a peer observer) is watching me. But when that person leaves, I’ll take more risks and shortcuts.”
Committed – “I will follow the safety and quality procedures in the moment of choice, when nobody is watching. This is who I am.”
Where do you want your culture to be? But before you answer this question.....
toss this around and lets see how you answer.
OSHA’s recent rule to modernize injury data collection is a great step towards helping businesses become more proactive in reducing workplace illness and injury. It opens up the data to public scrutiny, and will push some organizations into doing better because of it.
But it’s not enough. We all know the best way to improve safety is to have a knowledgeable workforce who can operate equipment safely, work with hazardous materials properly and knows what to do if something happens on the job. Most companies just record incidents and carry out safety training, but don’t really know why safety incidents happen, or how to decrease the numbers. What’s missing is the link between whether employees really know what they should do, and whether they can translate their knowledge into job actions that improve safety.
What if, instead of analyzing an injury after it happened, you could see a trend towards imminent injury or illness and prevent it? What if you could:
Define what employees need to know, and what employees need to do to create a much safer workplace.
Continuously evaluate what employees know and observe and document what actions they take on the job (their “behaviors”), which influence their performance.
Constantly compare current knowledge and behaviors against targets at an individual, group, or regional level, to uncover trends that point towards imminent issues.
Understand which employees need to improve their behaviors to achieve safety targets, and whether they also need more knowledge to accomplish that.
Quickly and easily modify training programs to ensure employees get the right information for safety.
If you had this kind of information at your fingertips, you could become proactive at preventing workplace injury and illness, instead of simply reporting it after the fact.
Now answer this question... "Where do you want your culture to be?"
The answer is obvious. We want every employee to be committed to safety, not merely compliant.
Realistically, with turnover, downsizing and the stressful demands of doing more with less, we always are going to have employees who are not committed to safety. The message they’ve gotten from the leadership team is that production is more important than safety.
The million-dollar question is this: How do you get your non-compliant and compliant employees to be committed to safety, in that moment of choice when nobody is watching?
Change Comes from the Leaders
The way to transform workers’ attitudes toward safety might be to rethink your management style and system.
The management system of choice for 99 percent of companies today use, and I’ll bet it’s the one your company uses. I call it “leave alone/zap!” I’ve used it, you’ve used it and so has everyone else in a leadership position. It’s easy to fall into this trap.
Here’s how it happens: Have you ever walked past a group of employees doing everything safely and said nothing to them, and then immediately said something to the first employee doing something wrong? If you answered yes, then you’ve engaged in leave alone/zap.
Does leave alone/zap change behavior? You bet it does. And that’s why it’s the favorite weapon of choice for most folks.
Think about it today as you drive home, when you might be driving about 10 mph over the speed limit, along with me and everyone else in the pack of cars. At this point, we all are non-compliant, until we see the police officer pointing his radar gun at us.
What do you (and everyone else) do to avoid being “zapped” with a speeding ticket? You hit the brakes. You (and the entire pack of cars) have just graduated to being compliant with the rules that the police want you to follow, at least for a while.
How long does this shift in behavior last? About 30 seconds, and then you breathe a sigh of relief as the police officer disappears from your rearview mirror. Whew! He almost got you!
Now, what’s your next behavior? For most of us, we hit the gas pedal and speed back up, and once again, we become non-compliant.
From this short example, it is clear that punishment, negative reinforcement and “leave alone/zap” management systems fail to produce commitment, and they fail to change worker behavior in the moment of choice, when nobody is watching.
The key is to get employees committed to safety, to do the right thing in that moment of choice. Is the key increasing the number of safety cops and having more frequent zaps? Many managers think so, but they are misguided. More punishment and negative reinforcement will get you more compliance, but it won’t get you commitment.
No coach can punish a team into winning the Super Bowl. To truly get commitment requires something that’s rarely delivered by today’s managers and leaders: workforce engagement and positive reinforcement.
Three strategies for achieving employee engagement.
These strategies are especially applicable to safety.
For some organizations, the best place to start engaging employees is in safety. Safety answers the "what's in it for me" question better than almost any other organizational endeavor. Once employees get engaged in safety, their efforts also can be directed toward other organizational goals.
For other organizations, safety engagement is the next logical step in safety-performance progression. Once the basics of safety compliance largely are accomplished, engagement becomes the next frontier. Safety excellence requires much more from workers than following rules and doing as they are told.
The three strategies for engagement are:
• Affinity (believing in the effort).
• Affiliation (participating in the effort).
• Autonomy (helping to create the effort).
We will discusses ways to use any or all of these strategies to create engagement. Below are additional ideas for how to apply these strategies to employee engagement in safety.
Affinity
The need to believe in something is basic human nature. Many workers don't believe that their organization is serious about achieving safety excellence. If safety is communicated as important until a customer needs an order in a hurry, workers realize that safety truly isn't a high priority, and they're demotivated.
If the emphasis in safety efforts is on mindless compliance, overkill rules or placing blame rather than on true excellence, then workers go through the motions but don't really buy in.
The sense that the organization needs better engagement usually comes from the realization that workers are less than enthusiastic about safety efforts. Enthusiasm comes from believing, not from being compelled.
Some workers simply don't believe that goals such as "zero accidents" are realistic or achievable. Their past experience may have taught them that even caring and careful workers can get injured. Exposing them to new methods to improve safety and showing them real-life examples of sites that actually have achieved their goals can begin to change the mindset that accidents are inevitable.
For workers to be truly engaged in safety, the goal of safety excellence must be believable. The idea of mission impossible makes for good theater, but not for effective engagement efforts.
One of the most effective ways to create affinity for safety programs is to humanize them. Many organizations have diminished their emphasis on the numbers and have placed the focus on the individuals. They put a face on accident reports and tell the stories of how accidents impact people and their families. They emphasize that increased effort or effectiveness is needed because of human need and not organizational greed.
In short, they put the caring back into safety.
Pursuing safety excellence for altruistic, humanistic reasons goes a long way toward converting the employees who have reluctant hearts and minds.
Affiliation
af·fil·i·a·tion
əˌfilēˈāSH(ə)n/
noun
the state or process of affiliating or being affiliated.
"he had no particular affiliation, no close associates"
synonyms:association with, connection with/to, alliance with/to, alignment with, link with/to,attachment to, tie with/to, relationship with/to, fellowship with, partnership with, coalition with, union with.
Safety is not just an activity to participate in; it's something to belong to.
Organizations that do not offer affiliation at work drive employees to find it elsewhere. Many workers would pour their energy into improvement efforts if allowed and facilitated to do so. Without the opportunity to participate, however, they channel their energies into church, community or charity.
The need for affiliation is strong, and people will find something to give them a sense of belonging. Improvement efforts can provide a sense of affiliation, but most don't.
Strategies to create affiliation need both the right structure and the right marketing. The structure needs to facilitate participation, and the marketing needs to create the belonging.
Safety committees, teams, problem-solving groups, observations, audits, etc., offer workers activities to get them involved in safety. However, if these groups or activities don't offer meaningful involvement, they often create disengagement.
Many teams or committees are led by management, and workers are involved only in a token sense. Many observation and auditing programs recruit caring people and then define their participation in terms of confronting rather than helping their fellow workers. It is not enough to offer participation; it must be meaningful participation.
Participation also must be facilitated. That could mean holding meetings during shifts rather than during off days or holdover times, or providing adequate meeting rooms, materials and other resources.
Even meaningful participation falls short if the marketing isn't right. The participation needs a team flare (name and logo, or something with uniform qualities such as caps, shirts, hardhat stickers, etc.). The activities need to be known to everyone, and the successes need to be recognized and celebrated. Membership should be special and valued.
Some organizations have successfully turned their entire population into a safety team with meaningful participation. Others have smaller teams with rotating involvement opportunities that affect the general population in meaningful ways. Where they differ in structure, they match in marketing.
Most organizations assume that everyone buys into safety and there is no need to really sell them on it. However, organizations that create true affiliation in specific safety programs almost all market heavily and effectively. Getting buy-in and belonging requires marketing, and many safety efforts neglect this basic need.
Autonomy
Autonomy is not complete freedom to do whatever you choose; it is defined decision rights.
Deming (W. Edwards Deming,
Engineer) said: "People support what they help create." Providing participation opportunities for workers gives them a feeling of belonging. Allowing them to help create those opportunities for participation gives them pride, ownership and a deep sense of fulfillment that motivates their creativity.
Sometimes this can be accomplished by simply letting a team or committee design itself. This can take place within the limits of a strategic framework and even can be reduced to a series of pre-defined choices. Making something from a kit can create a similar sense of ownership that building from scratch creates. It also can make a better finished product.
Successfully using an autonomy strategy for engagement is difficult for many organizations. It requires trust and well-planned structure. Many leaders are not willing to delegate meaningful decision rights, and workers sense that their own involvement is only symbolic.
A common strategy around this dilemma is to make joint decisions in which workers can offer creative suggestions and leaders can make the final decisions.
Another common approach is to direct workers' creative input to the already existing programs in which workers participate. These efforts have strategic direction, but many decisions are needed to discover how to best accomplish their goals. Making such decisions can engage the creative energy of workers in constructive and meaningful ways.
Getting workers engaged in safety efforts means getting them to believe, participate and/or creatively contribute. It requires leaders to go beyond a compliance mindset and workers to move from "do as you are told" to "help us create safety excellence."
Organizations with strong employee engagement outperform others – significantly – in almost all areas of performance. Focusing on safety engagement could be the beginning of better performance in other areas as well.
