Those organizations that are achieving safety excellence recognize that they must:
- Abundantly share all information about their safety, environmental and business performance,
- Engage openly and honestly with everyone building trust and interdependence and,
- Help everyone to get a sense of their collective whole and see their part in achieving total success.
The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand is on the pathway to safety excellence. We worked with Carl Stent, the NIWA National Manager, Safety and Wellbeing, in a series of 7 full-day workshops involving over 100 managers and scientists to develop clarity and focus on the best ways to help their people working remotely, like in the Antarctic, to make the best possible decisions and work safely – every day, every task.
This (picture above) is their Operations Leadership Team who met with us in Wellington for two days at the beginning of our work with NIWA. We helped them to see that organizations are complex, adapting, self-organizing networks of people. Using the Process Enneagram©, our proprietary complexity tool for having the focused and disciplined conversations, they were able to effectively address their opening question, “How do we build and sustain an effective safety culture across our organization?”
The energy and excitement built during the day as information, ideas and breakthroughs emerged during the workshop. The Process Enneagram© map they created is serving as their living strategic safety plan.
We conducted workshops in six NIWA Centers across New Zealand, giving us an opportunity to meet a lot of outstanding people and to see a lot of their beautiful country. We also conducted one public and one private workshop which were also extremely successful in opening people up to the ideas of complexity and to approaching safety from this perspective. With Carl Stent’s ongoing, excellent support, NIWA is on the road to safety excellence!
Hardly any of us can do our best work all by ourselves.
There was a video on Facebook a few weeks ago about Buddy Benches being placed in schoolyards. The video explained the importance of the communication and training that is essential to their use and effectiveness.
In our Partner-Centered Safety realm, we go beyond this to having everyone (the people on the floor, the supervisors, the managers, and all the others) feel they are cared about. Caring means helping each other, listening to each other, sharing information, being respectful, asking for help and receiving it, looking out for each other, saying we are sorry when we make a mistake, and treating each other as whole persons. Just what caring means for people is something on which they should all agree. Management, alone, should not do it for their approach can often be quite patronizing – treating the people in the work place as if they are children. All the people, at all levels, together, need to come up with their ideas about what caring is for them. Management should not try to dictate the answers, but management needs to open up and lead this discussion about caring or it will not be addressed. Caring is visible; as is non-caring. Partner-Centered Safety is visible caring. Mistreatment of people is non-caring.
At one of the highest geographical points in Florida, at Lake Wales, is a large, 205-ft high, carillon tower. It is beautiful, as are the gardens surrounding this tower structure, made of glistening coquina stone. The tower and gardens were a gift from benefactor Edward W. Bok, who cared deeply about nature, beauty and sanctuary spaces. Millions of visitors have traversed this place of solace since it opened in 1929. Edward Bok was all about CARING for future generations – to be able to enjoy peace and beauty. His tribute signature is this:
For our workplaces, this is about the way we think about safety, the way we engage around safety, and the way we bring a third unifying force to the whole culture of safety.It’s the missing link in our respective workplaces. Without it, we tend to stay engulfed in a culture of compliance, yet despite trying and trying, we never reach excellence. Without it, we keep repeating the same mistakes – round and round we go.
I spoke about Partner-Centered Safety™ and the importance of this as the quickest way to achieve sustainable safety excellence. As many of you know, I have written and spoken about this many times over the last several years. The information and data I share clearly shows that this approach to leading safety is very powerful, producing improved results quite quickly. Many of you have seen the terrific results the people at the DuPont, Belle Plant achieved. This approach has a very strong scientific basis in complex adaptive systems theory.
When the Safety Culture is right…what do you see? What does Excellence look like?
On December 16-18, 2015, I was able to attend the Cruise Line International Association Safety Conference in Miami. The focus was on improving the safety culture and Bridge Resource Management. This is a very interesting business for me to learn about. I was there to give some perspective from the chemical industry.
There is a big need to be sure the managers of chemical plants are qualified so that their employees and neighboring communities do not suffer the consequences of chemical releases and spills. Many manufacturing businesses that do hazardous work, aside from chemical manufacturing, should heed this thinking too.
I’m reminded about the organization that thought their safety performance was always good, because they were primarily an office environment. They scoffed over how bad could a paper cut be? Or, what’s the worst that could happen if someone fell off their chair? Little did they expect that one of their office workers, when on a healthy outdoor walk during her scheduled break time, tripped over some roped off tape that had been blown by the wind. She actually walked into it – not paying attention to her surroundings – got caught up in it as it wrapped about her feet. She fell, twisted her knee, required surgical repair, etc., etc. Try to explain that office worker lost-time injury! (The good: healthy walk; The bad: not paying attention; The ugly: lost time injury).
We see organizations as complex adapting networks of people who are the vital keys to its success. When the people in the various parts of the network are sharing information and helping each other, all aspects of EHS Performance rapidly improves, resistance to change disappears and the energy bubbles up spilling over into all other parts of the work lifting the organization to new, higher levels of performance.
In many places, the hunting season is underway or just beginning. This is always a time of change and hazard. Some years when I was a plant manager, we would have one or two serious hunting-related, off-job injuries – like falling from a tree stand or tripping over something and breaking a leg. There is a lot of change as people go into the woods and fields looking for game. Many have not done this for a while. Others may not be fully prepared for a sharp change in the weather where a heavy rain could come in or the temperatures drop below freezing and hypothermia becomes a worry. It is often dark and visibility is poor. I have read of hunters getting killed with their own weapon when they have tripped and accidentally shot themselves. Don’t load your gun until you are ready to use it.
I have been talking about checklists in my previous newsletters and they can be useful as people go out hunting.
I recently read of a fatal accident where a man was killed while working on a lathe. It was properly shielded and okay for the normal conditions, but the unexpected happened. The part he was working on exploded apart under the high rotating speed when he engaged the cutter. The parts from the exploding piece went right through the shield and gave him terrible, fatal wounds.
Another thing that can happen around hunting season and the holidays is the need to hire temporary people to backfill for those who are out. These people need extra care and attention, but things are often so busy that it is hard to give it to them. These people just don’t know the hazards.
