Do You Have the Guts to Manage a Safe Organisation?
Executive Summary: managing a safe company that would dare to do better than “industry average” takes new initiatives from top and senior management. These initiatives would include thinking of safety as a business driver; investments in safety may be longer term ways of protecting assets; spreading the actual responsibility for safe operations to the highest possible level.
“Why did you kill my daddy?” This question was asked of a VP (Operations) by the 9 year old daughter while attending the funeral of the father who was killed in an on site accident. On his return from the funeral the VP asked his companion how he could prevent being faced with a question like that. The response was a strong response that boiled down to: “do you have the courage to run a safe organization?”
What they subsequently did in their company was done independently in at least three other companies which the authors have visited in the USA. All three of these companies’ safety performance is better than any other in the construction industry in the USA over the past 5 years, and their accident rate is significantly below industry average.
Safety is a business driver.
One company we visited branded their safety hats with the words “better, faster, safe”. Notice “safe”. In planning their workflow, and dealing with everyday contingencies, the question of how to work the best productive way includes the concern that “best” is safe. Unsafe work practices create the potential for wastage and loss of productivity. The question then becomes: is better and faster also safe?
One effect this has on managing safety is that operational meetings are also safety meetings. These companies’ do not run a separate “safety” meeting since “safe” is a condition for good practice and good business.
Like having an uncompromising concern with technical excellence, innovation, customer engagement, similarly these companies have a passion about safety. From the very top they send one message about the importance of safety: if it is not safe, or better or faster, we don’t do it. They avoid the message: “how good, how fast, and how profitable? And safety will be discussed by the minors on Thursday.”
In addition to the legally required investigations, internal audits are held on every incident reported. One company calls it the “root canal interview.” The team as a whole, including supervisor and site manager are invited to attend. “People don’t easily attend more than one of these meetings since they can be brutal. Our objective is to understand how this happened, what were the contributory factors, including a possible role by management. Then we want commitments to prevent a repeat of such an incident.”
The challenge: not to explain other people’s behavior, but to be held accountable for your own. Simply: what did you do?
Investment in safety: the longer term perspective.
With no question to the fact that safe practices are good business, the thinking follows that investing in safety has the same rationale as protecting any other assets.
We observed that one USA company, during a project planning stage of a contract, included 5 different safety gloves for one phase of the operation. Their question was simple: “what gloves do we supply that would allow people to do the job safely and not want to take the gloves off because they get slowed down by clumsy gloves?” “Customized” PPE is one example where the longer term perspective is helpful. Maybe, instead of thinking of safety as an expense which needs to be controlled and kept to a minimum the alternative could be to realize that if people use their PPE effectively because it is effective for the job, people won’t take off their PPE.
The challenge: How are you applying pay-backs from Workman’s Compensation? Does this become an injection/investment into your safety budget?
This article was co-authored by Pieter van Wyngaard (Risk Director, Fraser Alexander BulkMech).