Safety Culture Excellence

Greetings recording this podcast in Atlanta, Georgia. I’d like to share with you some information about an upcoming event. We are holding a public workshop titled “Safety Culture Excellence Seminar”. These are events that we have been holding privately for organizations for many years. After the request of many, we have decided to take these events on the road and open them for the public. This will be a three day series held at locations around the world, however you do not need to participate in all three days, you can pick and choose from the three different topics if you would like. 

Day 1 will be Advanced Tactics for Behavior-Based Safety: Applying Lean Principles and Ensuring Results.  This session will enable participants to create a customized plan, using the latest Lean Behavior-Based Safety (Lean BBS®) Technologies for spearheading safety process improvement. Lean Behavior-Based Safety is based on the philosophy of achieving faster accident reductions with the minimum internal resources and external cost requirements, ultimately achieving a more sustainable internalized continuous improvement process. Borrowing proven techniques from Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and experiences from over 1,000 successful implementations; Lean Behavior-Based Safety has proven to be the most efficient and practical approach to an already effective theoretical process. Utilizing the best of your existing Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) process, your site or committee leaders will explore the options and learn the lean techniques that will successfully breathe new life and efficiency into the existing structure.

Day 2 will be Leadership Safety Coaching: Teaching Your Supervisors to be Safety Coaches. This seminar will give managers and supervisors the background and tools to become effective safety coaches. They will learn how to focus workers on the most effective accident-prevention strategies, discover and manage influences on workplace behaviors, measure the progress of cultural changes, and coach and counsel effectively to address safety-related behavioral issues with workers. The use of these skills will greatly improve safety, but more importantly will, make managers and supervisors more effective in all dealings with workers and each other.

Day 3 will be Assessing and Developing Your Safety Culture:  This session will enable participants to create a customized plan to assess and improve site and/or organizational safety culture. Common myths about safety culture will be dispelled and a good working definition will be developed to empower understanding and customization. Assessment methodologies will be discussed and compared and each participant will see how to best determine the cultural strengths and improvement opportunities. Based on the assessment findings, plans will be formulated to find the most practical and effective strategies to build on cultural strengths and address weaknesses. Opportunities will be investigated to utilize other site improvement initiatives to aid in the cultural improvement plans. All plans will conclude with measurement strategies to ensure long-term change viability and early identification of problems. 

If you are interested in participating in one of these events please visit www.ProActSafety.com and click on events for the schedule.  I’d like to close with this, if you only have time to do one thing in safety today, what would it be and how will it contribute to making this a safer world for us all? Thanks for tuning in…

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings, this podcast recorded in Avon Lake, OH. “Most safety culture improvement initiatives either start at the top or the bottom of the organizational structure: executive coaching for senior managers or workforce teambuilding for the rank and file. Some experts believe that safety begins with leadership, others stress that worker behavior has the most impact on safety.   Both approaches can achieve improvement. However, there are organizations with good reasons to delay these approaches and start safety improvement in the middle.” – Terry L. Mathis.

In the August 2009 edition of EHS Today, Terry Mathis, the Founder and CEO of our firm ProAct Safety, published an article that I would like to share with you today. If you would like to see the actual article, please visit EHS Today’s website at www.EHSToday.com or you can find it on our website at www.ProActSafety.com along with a lot of other free content to improve your safety focus.

Thanks and have a great week!

Shawn Galloway

ProAct Safety

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Greetings from Omaha, NE. I received a great post on my Facebook page a couple of weeks back. I responded to it in text format only on this podcast’s blog site. Subsequently, I’ve had a few requests to turn it into a recording. So, always happy to oblige that is what I’ll be doing for this week’s topic which I’m calling: Is Your Safety Focus Out Of Touch With Reality? As you listen to this recording, please reflect on what you are focusing on in safety and how it either helps or hurts your efforts to reach and sustain a level of excellence and create the ownership necessary for people to be safe, regardless of where they are in world. 

Here is what I received on my Facebook page…

“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 collectively understand 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 successes 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.

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Do your supervisors police or coach safety? Both can have their place, yet what is the predominant style most often used? This seminar will give managers and supervisors the background and tools to become effective safety coaches.  They will learn how to focus workers on the most effective accident-prevention strategies, discover and manage influences on workplace behaviors, measure the progress of cultural changes, and coach and counsel effectively to address safety-related behavioral issues with workers.  The use of these skills will greatly improve safety, but more importantly, make managers and supervisors more effective in all dealings with workers and with each other.

Attendees will be able to:

·         Better understand and appreciate worker actions through behavioral analysis

·         Identify the factors that influence workplace decisions and learn how to change them

·         Differentiate between policing and coaching opportunities in safety

·         Clearly distinguish work behaviors with low probability risks

·         Focus employees on behavioral precautions that are highly effective and within their power to control

·         Choose the best form of feedback to shape behaviors

·         Motivate employees to encourage superior performance through positive feedback

·         Coach employees effectively to change unsafe behaviors

·         Align leadership coaching with progressive discipline when needed

·         Synergize leadership coaching with employee-driven processes without conflict or redundancy

For more information including the dates, cost and locations please visit

www.ProActSafety.com 

I hope to see you there!

Shawn M. Galloway

ProAct Safety, Inc.

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