An Exercise on the Various Myths About Safety Programs

Why do you believe what you do about Safety? Do you question accepted norms without evidence based on your own safety culture?  Do you use critical thinking to help you in your quest to help your employees to work safely?

Following are five topics or accepted “truths” within the safety world that seem to be proven facts and are rarely questioned.  They are dogma to most, but are they really? Whether you agree or disagree with them, the real positive in this exercise is to take an honest appraisal of what you think of them with regard to your own safety culture. 

1) Safety is #1

Is it really?  You see it all the time in website copy, on company brochures, on the backs of work shirts, on vehicles, posters, on just about anything.  You see various iterations of it. It is often adopted by the company as the ultimate statement of commitment to creating safety on the job.  But the truth is that companies are not created to be safe, they are created to make a profit for the owners and/or shareholders. Corporate decisions are made every day.  Is safety considered 100% of the time before making those decisions?  If not, Safety is Not #1.

2) Counting Injuries is the best Measurement of Safety

Reducing the number of accidents and injuries is almost always the number one goad of any safety incentive program we’ve analyzed, but is it the right goal?  Wouldn’t reducing unsafe behaviors be a better one? Safe/unsafe and injury/uninjured are not linked to safety.  Workers do unsafe things all the time and avoid injuries.  No injury was the outcome, but how it was achieved was not by being safe.

3) Zero Accidents/Injuries should be a Commitment

No injuries can and does in many cases mean you were lucky. These types of goals can also motivate some very wrong behaviors like hiding injuries through reclassification and accommodation.

4) Passing a Safety Audit Means You’ll Be Safe

Standards and audit systems are ubiquitous in the safety industry. Many have impressive names and have been created with “world-wide” input making them sound even more impressive. In reality, these are almost all “opinion based” with little or no scientific evidence to support them. Passing an audit doesn’t guarantee anything, just that you “passed the audit.”  You may want to read the results of your audit with a view toward what it may not be telling you. 

5) All Incidents Are Preventable

The use of the word “all” makes this statement wrong.  To make it right means you would have absolute power over all things and absolute power doesn’t exist in humans.  A better way of looking at prevention is to consider that all unsafe behaviors can be changed.  And when you change unsafe behaviors reducing accidents follows. 

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Why Relationships Matter in Safety

Following is a synopsis of an interesting blog post written by Judy Agnew Ph.D., senior vice president of Aubrey Daniels International, who works closely with clients to strengthen sustainable safety cultures.  She maintains that a solid safety culture starts with good relationships between employees and management. 

From a behaviorist’s perspective, safety is fundamentally a behavioral issue.  And as such, the only way to change or improve behavior is to use a process grounded in the science of behavior.   That process has to start with a positive and trusting working relationship between employee and management.  To go beyond the basics compliance requirements of a safety process, it boils down to the discretionary effort of the employees.  Exceptional safety happens when employees are in lock step with management.  Unfortunately you won’t get this kind of discretionary effort when employees dislike, distrust or worse, fear the boss.

According to Agnew:

Discretionary effort is created through the use of positive reinforcement. Research shows that when people are recognized for what they do well around safety and when reporting problems and concerns is met with reinforcing consequences (such as joint problem solving and problem resolution), employees will be more engaged in safety.

Within the post you can see a list of behaviors that contribute to positive workplace relationship.  They can be exhibited by any worker type and will lead to improved work in general.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Good Strategies to Renew a Safety Culture

While strategies to address safety and health have shifted over time, it’s always useful to take an inventory of what you’ve done, are currently doing and other ideas to focus on what might be useful in the future.

Has your commitment to safety truly been and continues to be a corporate value? And have your executives merely providing lip service to it?  Has it become just a slogan on the corporate website?  Here are some ideas you might want to use to refresh your safety culture:

• Do a complete analysis of all the important safety initiatives you used over the last couple of years, tie the results to a real ROI for each initiative and make a presentation to executive management.
• Have executives renew their commitment to  your workforce by meeting with them in small groups and recognizing them for their performance
• Renew or initiate a communications channel to the workforce including information about performance.
• Focus on housekeeping, working on reducing messy or disorganized work areas.
• Have field management work with your crews after work assignments are made to walk the site to see if there are existing hazards that need to be addresse
• Check to make sure you have been keeping things simple: don’t complicate the process. Your focus should be on safety, not the steps.
• Engage your workers: ask them for ideas to renew and refresh your approach to safety.
• If you’re using any form of behavior based safety remind your managers that it is an application of the real science of behavior change to real world problems.  It should focus on what people do, analyze why they do it, apply a research-supported intervention strategy to improve what they do, and then recognize and reward the improved performance. 

 For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Who Are Your Safety Leaders?

It’s hard to read anything about the safety industry without coming upon the term “safety culture.”  But what does that really mean?  Simply put, a safety culture is nothing more than the attitude, beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to safety in the workplace.  In other words to coin a well-used phrase “it’s the way we do things around here."

Every company has one, some are great, some are good, some just so so and frankly some are pretty poor.  Let’s assume we all want one that is great.  So how do you develop it?

There have been hundreds of books written on the subject with a ton of advice on how to create one but not many that we’ve seen that discuss using your own safety leaders to help build your own.  It’s not a new approach, “it’s called transformational leadership” and it aims to instill your team with a compelling new vision where employees work toward a unified purpose…namely safe work performance.

This approach uses something call “idealized influence” which is nothing more than finding the leaders in your company who behave in ways that result in their being role models for the safe performance in your workplace.  Every company has them; you can list them on your fingertips. They are the ones who are admired, respected and trusted by their fellow workers.

A study by the Center for Construction Research and Training suggests that the most important variable when aiming to increase safety outcomes is “idealized influence.” What this ultimately means is that rather than relying solely on incentive programs or traditional training methods, if you’re not encouraging workers to lead by example you’re missing out on a powerful opportunity.

You might want to consider using this research, and here are four ways to do it:  

1. Identify the leaders within your organization who are admired for their personal character, intelligence or skills.  Think out of the box; don’t just use the traditional leaders like managers, foremen, and supervisors. For example, who are the people on your team who consistently stand out for delivering exceptional work and who are well-liked by their coworkers?

2. Recruit the leaders to your cause and tell them they have the power to create positive change! Everyone loves to be told that they are a valuable team member with the ability to make a difference. You can use them in a mentoring program, as a “safety squad”, as training facilitators or in a variety of other initiatives or educational sessions

3. Visibly support your leaders commending the safe behavior that your leaders are role modeling, rewarding open communications about safety concerns and remembering the power of a simple, well-deserved and timely compliment. 

4. Involve them in your safety award efforts by letting them recommend and issue behavior safety awards and at times reward them as well for their performance in helping to grow your safety culture.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

One Word to Capture All Your Safety needs?

Note:The idea for the title and context in this blog come from the book “One Word that will Change Your Life,” written by John Gordon, Dan Britton and Jimmy Page.  

If you could think of one word that would encompass every aspect of your safety program (and culture) what would it be? If you’re looking for an answer here, you won’t find it.  But what may interest you is applying the process contained in the book mentioned above to the safety challenges you face today.  Here is the process

To begin, follow two simple steps: one unplug…find a place with no distractions so you can look inwardly as to what your One Word is going to be.  Two ask yourself the following three questions:

1. What does our safety program truly need?  Almost everyone in management wants fewer injuries, but this may not be what they need.  Focus on the safety needs as you see them today in your organization.

2. What is in your way?  Seek insights from your safety pro colleagues and your frontline workers to determine those things that stand in your way of a safety success. 

3. What needs to go?  If the same results are occurring using a number of historic activities, some may need to be replaced or discontinued all together to bring about the change that you need.

Oftentimes we get fixated on a numeric goal and never focus on what the people in the organization could potentially become. We tend to over-complicate and over-explain what employees must do to meet these goals. People do not remember paragraphs or sentences from one day to the next. Why not consider an approach that your safety sensitive employees might remember all year long and work to live by — adopt the “One Word” approach

The One Safety Word approach can work. You may experience a transformation in the safety potential of your organization, not just go through the motions of the same safety program you implemented several years ago.

And when you’ve used your word for a year, don’t carry it over to the next year.  Start the process again and bring in the New Year with a New Word. 

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

How to Make Safety Priority #1 With Executives

In the world of incentives, we often hear that safety professionals have to fight for budget dollars against other processes for production, sales and marketing, etc.  In other words on any given day at any given work-site safety is always Priority One…until it isn’t! If it was truly the utmost priority, safety managers wouldn’t have to fight for every new initiative beyond basic requirements.  If you want to take safety programs from just another line item and turn it into a stand alone strategy, there are three basic things you need to do: 

1.  Make a financial business case for safety to your executive group.  A study published by Accident Analysis and Prevention found that CFOs and other executives believe that for $1 spent improving workplace safety, more than $4 would be returned.  For too long safety professionals sold safety programs as a way to keep a company from losing money.  They do, but they also help to improve a company’s productivity, employee engagement and their ability to make money.
2. Provide motivation for safety among the workforce.  The buzzword for several years now within the human resource precincts has been employee engagement.  Almost everything is tied to it, and now there is more and more evidence that a direct outcome to a more engaged workforce is better company performance.  Behavior based safety applications offers both plant and quality managers an additional level of performance as well.  Well planned safety recognition will reward improved performances, turn them into habits and help to engage your workforce.  Budgets for non-safety employee recognition has been growing consistently for years because it works to improve engagement…it can be that simple!
3. Integrate it into the culture of your company.  Training shows employees how to avoid risk and actions that lead to accidents.  Those skills and habits can be incorporated into other environments to produce fewer performance errors as well.

Will doing the above really improve overall company performance?  In a study published this year titled “Tracking the Market Performance of Companies that Integrate a Culture of Health & Safety: An assessment of Corporate Health Achievement Award Applicants”, researchers showed that the stock market performance of 31 companies that were acknowledged to have exceedingly high safety standards throughout their organization exceeded the S&P average in all 17 measures under examination.  The integration of the above three points makes it clear that safety and and other corporate strategies are inextricably linked.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Safety Awards Should be the Icing on the Cake

How much time and money needs to be invested to develop an overall safety culture that  will be effective in reducing incidents of injuries and accidents that keep your workers safe?  That question is never answered.  Instead the reverse is discussed.  What is the cost of not being safe? 

In 2012, OSHA said that:

“In addition to their social costs, workplace injuries and illnesses have a major impact on an employer's bottom line. It has been estimated that employers pay almost $1 billion per week for direct workers' compensation costs alone.”

If you had to make an extensive list of all the pieces necessary to build the best possible safety program to eliminate accidents, how many items would be on it?  Would awards to effect behavior change be on that list? 

In context with the overall $1 Billion a week for compensation costs, when added to the multi-millions spent for all the items on your list, the diminimous awards used to positive safe behavior would seem to be a major bargain.

We had a client once tell us that he looks at his safety awards as ‘icing on the cake.’  He said it caps off all the hard work, time energy and budget necessary to make the cake the best that it could be.  It helps communicate his message with the frosting that positively reinforced every aspect of the safety culture he was trying to build.

We recently read an article by Norman Umberger, an EHS Professor at the University of Missouri that discussed safety award plans.  Mr. Umberger has an excellent understanding of the intricacies of safety awards from the perspective of a seasoned safety professional.  His last statement in the article on preferring an effective safety culture over a perfect safety award plan is well taken, although from our perspective, it should not be a case of either or.  We’ve always recommended that clients have a solid safety culture in place before embarking on any safety award system.  Properly designed safety award plans will reinforce all the important elements of an effective safety culture, not take the place of them.

The next time you plan your safety programs, think of the awards as the icing on that cake! 

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net.