Building Relationships…One Conversation at a Time

September 10, 2025 By Leave a Comment

In my view, reducing injuries and incidents is strongly related to our relationship with our people in the organization.

We build these relationships by talking together, treating each other with respect, listening and learning together, deciding what we need to do together, and doing it with integrity.

In doing these things, here is a simple list of subjects we can talk about and build upon to build relationships. You may have other things to talk about.

  • Who are we as individuals and together?
    • Do you know the people with whom you are working?
    • Do you talk about the work together?
  • Do you talk about what you are trying to do?
    • Do you talk about how to do the work better and more safely?
    • Do you talk about the customers you are serving?
    • Do you talk about your team and how they are doing? Does everyone know we need to be a team and that bullying and/or sexual harassment are out of bounds?
    • Does everyone know that all forms of workplace violence are not okay?
  • Does everyone know why you are doing this particular work before you?
    • Do you know the quality and safety standards?
    • Do the people feel that it is okay to talk honestly about these things?
    • Do people feel confident that they can stop work if they see a safety or quality problem, without any negative repercussions?
  • Does everyone know the production schedules and when things need to be done?
    • Does everyone know about the flexibility in the schedules?
    • Do the people put the right emphasis on fixing a safety problem? Some fixes can wait for a break in the schedule, but some need to be fixed now!
    • In your conversations, do you talk about the subtle things like creep and drift from the required procedures?
  • Does everyone know where to go to get help to get things done properly, without cutting corners or taking short-cuts?
    • Do people know where all the PPE is located and how to use it properly?
    • Does everyone view the safety people as guides and experts?
    • Do the line supervisors participate in these discussions regularly, so they are up to date on things?
    • Do you talk about safety being a line responsibility; the supervisor is in charge and the safety person is an advisor and expert?
    • Do you talk about the bottom line – that everyone gets to go home at the end of their shift with their eyes, ears, legs, arms, and all body parts intact?
  • Does everyone really know how to do their job and look out for the others on their team?
    • Do you talk together about the proper qualifications for the work?
    • Do you talk about keeping the training and development work up to date?
    • Do you talk about surprises in doing the work that can help or cause problems?

safety professionals building relationships

Change Happens One Conversation At a Time

These kinds of conversations are important and need to be done every day, to build relationships. Some variation of these conversations is fine. If we think that we can do these once a month and mark our check list, then we miss the point and will have little positive impact. This is about integrating caring conversations of consequence into our daily interactions.

Daily conversations about one or the other of these questions will have a big impact over time. We’re talking about meaningful, constructive change for better safety, quality, and productivity. Each of these small conversations are like grains of sand falling in an hourglass.

The potential energy slowly builds and then one day, positive change will happen. Most of the changes will be small, some will be bigger, and some will make a huge difference. We can’t predict when or where the changes will happen, but they will happen.

We have to be persistent in our conversations, look for weak signs of change, and celebrate success. Ultimately, these conversations build solid, safety-minded strength into our team’s and relationships.

This is the stuff that I did as plant manager, and the results were amazing. Over a 4-year period, all of us together cut our injury rates by 97%, emissions dropped by 95% and earnings rose by 300%. I can’t claim credit for these improvements; everyone contributed because they wanted to make things better.

authenticity and integrity can build relationships and workplace safety

Safety Is About Having People Go Home To Their Families IN One Piece

Did you ever complete the investigation of a tragic, fatal accident by going to the funeral of the person who lost their life in your facilities? Have you talked with the family and apologized for that terrible event? Have you felt the depth of the tragedy? It never goes away for them. You do not want to have to do this.

Go talk with the people. Listen, learn, and act together.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Safety Partnership Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Decades of Non-Improvement in Key Safety Stats Reveal Concerns

August 25, 2025 By Leave a Comment

Let’s try to climb out of this hole for the safety of our employees!

As you know, I have been talking for a long time about the need to reduce the number of people being killed at work and safety statistics have shown why there’s concern.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that about 5,200 people have died at work for each of the last 10 years. With all the people working diligently in the safety business, I expect that most people would think that these numbers should be getting lower and lower, but they are not going down.

Many ideas, models, and theories have been suggested, but we are not seeing a decline in the number of people getting killed. I wonder if there may be a deep, subtle force at work. The way we look at the people in the organization and think about them could be a key.

climbing out of the hole with safety statistics

Descriptions Are Critical

The most common label we apply to the people in organizations is “Employee.” This is a name for the contract between them and their employer. Most of us use this term to refer to anyone reporting to us in our organizations.

This may be troublesome in subtle ways because it carries a lot of baggage.

As their supervisor, one could feel you have the power to tell them what to do, to scold them, discipline them, make all sorts of demands on them, blame them for mistakes, not listen to them, even bully them. Many (uncaring and unenlightened) supervisors treat them as less than us, not as smart as us, etc. Employees can be seen as things which we can just move around (like puzzle pieces) as we please – all while being quite nice, but they can see right through this.

Most people do not like to be treated this way. All these employee-focused behaviors prevent trust from building. It blocks learning and performance from improving. We can push safety improvements very hard, but most of the time only get to compliance, which is where most organizations are stuck. Compliance does not get the organization to excellence.

Everything Changed

When I learned to think of the people as “people,” everything changed.

There were still differences in roles and responsibilities, but we are all people with similar hopes and desires as I have. They had good intelligence, knew a lot that I did not know, and wanted to make a positive difference. We all wanted to work safely, have the business succeed, and feel better about ourselves.

People do want to go home from their work shift with all their body parts intact. We were partners in this work. We treated each other with respect, told the truth, shared almost all information except personal stuff, helped each person to see the importance of their work, gave and received feedback. Bullying and harassment virtually disappeared. It was safe for us to talk together and share our ideas and thinking, to find better and safer ways to accomplish our tasks.

Partner-Centered Leadership Makes the Big Difference in Safety!

We discussed the work together to find better, safer ways to do it. People learned to make decisions to solve their own problems. More decisions were made close to the actual work. We coached each other. People self-organized within the boundaries we set together. The collective intelligence of the whole organization rose and got a lot better. Great ideas emerged from all around. Energy and excitement grew. Everything changed as we learned and grew together.

highly participative leadership process produces much better results that the top-down management process

My role as plant manager became much easier as more and more people pitched in and contributed. With so many making contributions, our total performance improved with the number of injuries dropping by 97%, emissions to the air, water and earth dropping by 95% and earnings rising by 300%. We used these metrics to keep track of things, but we led the improvements by partnering.

As we (as people) learned to partner this way, all the ways we worked together changed having a positive impact on all we did. This would not have worked if we had tried to stove pipe it and just do it for safety. Everything is connected and interacts so working on the whole systems is critical.

This effort to create a better way to safely and more economically do our work was not easy.

At first, standards had to be reestablished, which was difficult. People needed to know that we were determined to improve and quit hurting people. There was a serious problem with bullies who were blocking improvements. In the first two years I had to terminate about 30 people (there were 1,300 people at the Plant) for flagrant safety and bullying problems. Things got a lot better after this first difficult period. Most people want to have a safe environment and not have to deal with bullies.

We also promoted the most qualified people as openings developed to lead different parts of our efforts. We needed the best quality of thinking and working together in order to be really successful. We wanted to be good, not just look good! We became one of the best performing plants in the DuPont Company, in just 4 years.

climbing out of the hole for safety

Conclusion

We call this way of working “Partner-Centered Leadership.” It applies to all we do. Just a simple shift in how we think about things leads to big changes in everything.

I urge all of you to think about the people as people, build relationships of respect, trust and open communications.

I would be pleased to talk with any of you about this if you would like to do that. Please call me a 716-622-6467. I live in the Eastern Time Zone; calling between 9:00 am and 4:00 pm would be best.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Process, Safety Partnership Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Leading Safety in the Midst of Change is Important for Business

May 10, 2025 By Leave a Comment

The amount of change and the rate of change in the middle of DOGE is huge.

Different accounts and stories about what is happening swirl around like a storm. Organizations like NIOSH and OSHA are having to make adjustments for safety. Depending on the report, the stories of partial or even total elimination abound. Those of us outside the inner circles really do not know the details of what is happening, so we can get quite worked up about it all.

Some of the work being done in NIOSH may be vital in trying to improve workplace safety, but some of it may not be very important. From the outside, it is hard to tell. Hopefully any cuts in budget will focus on the less important work. NIOSH has been around for 50 years, and I’m told they’ve done much in the research end of safety and health.

As many of you know I have been asking why our fatality and injury rates are stuck at around 5,200 and 2.400,000 cases, respectively, for about the last 10 years. I do not know how the work of NIOSH directly impacts the workplace and in what ways their work has made the most difference. Based on the number of fatalities and injuries, you can make a case that NIOSH had very little impact so budget cutting may be the correct approach.

OSHA works closer to the actual workplace, thus having a more positive impact. But, again, the fatality and injury rates are not coming down so they may need to find out why that is.

I am more concerned about any OSHA budget cuts because OSHA is already spread very thin. OSHA has been around since 1970…can anyone say that our workplaces would be as safe as they are or that people would follow the safety rules that are in place without OSHA being the enforcer?

safety and security are the goals at the end of the day

We Can Do a Lot Ourselves for Safety

Even though all the changes and cuts are happening, we can do a lot in our own workplaces at the local, company level to make a difference.

Workplace safety is a local issue, which we at the local level can impact regardless of all the other changes going on. What is the mindset we each can hold as to whether we will go home from the workplace today and every day with all our fingers, toes, legs, arms, eyes, and ears intact? What about how well we look out for our co-workers being able to also return home from work with body and mind wholeness?

We can work directly with our people to help improve the total safety performance.

We can help our organizations get a whole lot better in all aspects of our work, not just in safety. We need to help all the people in the whole workplace to work more purposefully together. We need to treat each other with respect. Listen to each other. Help each other to share information more abundantly. Listen carefully to each other so we can learn together. We need to help people find meaning in their work and have more satisfaction with themselves.

safety and security in the business still can be profitable

When we work together doing these kinds of things, the whole workplace becomes much more open and healthier.

People do not have to fear that they will get punished in some way when they speak up and make suggestions. These kinds of behaviors positively impact all we do. In an environment like this, we can all learn and grow together.

I think that the only way we can create sustainable improvements in safety is to create a climate where everything in the organization is improving. And where people work to keep each other safe.

When I was the Plant Manager at a big plant that was having terrible performance problems, we on the Leadership Team decided to become the best producer and supplier of chemicals to our customers through improving all aspects of our work.

We focused on safety. environmental performance, people development, quality, customer service, costs, and our relationship with our community. Our total culture improved dramatically over the next 4 years, our injury rate dropped by 97%, emissions dropped by 95%, productivity rose by 45%, and earnings rose by 300%.

In the Midst of Great Change, We Can Do a Lot To Get Better!

We can take charge and sail our ships successfully in this great storm!

Call me at 716-622-6467 and let’s discuss how!

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Safety Partnership Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Overcome feelings of Impatience in the Workplace

September 10, 2024 By Leave a Comment

When leadership can help employees overcome feelings of impatience, frustration and anger, the energy and creativity of the people emerges, enabling much quicker, better decisions and more effective work to take place.

Impatience

In a long road trip over this Labor Day Weekend, we got stuck in an hour-long traffic jam on a very busy Interstate Highway. The GPS message was “Your route is closed.” We were sitting on the 3-lane highway with big trucks all around us and there was no way out.

My impatience level went way up as we just sat without knowing anything about the stoppage or a possible alternative way out. Other car drivers were also getting impatient and beginning to make poor decisions. For example, several impatient drivers wiggled thru tight spaces, actually turning their respective vehicles around – then began their journey against the normal traffic flow, maneuvering along the shoulder to get to the last exit we had passed so they could get off the Interstate and go around the holdup on secondary roads.

We just waited with the trucks to see what was going to happen. After about an hour the traffic began to move and open up. We never saw the source of the holdup, but we had a sigh of relief to be able to move forward again.

overcoming frustration and impatience in the work place

Ruminations

I began to think about the times in my own career when things got bogged down or we had had an incident that stopped everything. I struggled with these same feelings of impatience. Everyone was impatient and frustrated. Some people wanted to just push through before we had given things enough consideration to understand what was wrong and see a way out of the problem. Others spent time in their offices, away from the situation, trying to dictate solutions; it is easy to come up with possible solutions when you do not know what is really going on. This really became frustrating when the corporate people tried to tell us how to solve our problem. Others wanted to cut through the safety procedures since they felt the procedures were getting in our way.

We were all impatient, anxious, angry, struggling with a strong sense of urgency and frustration. This is a dangerous situation where it is very easy to make dreadful mistakes. The people working close to the problem feel acute pressure to solve the problem and get going. They are extremely aware that their managers want to get going. Their managers are also under a lot of pressure from their managers or from sales or from customers to get going.

The people working close to the problem are aware of all these pressures, but also know that they have to do things right so no one gets hurt, so the process will really run correctly when things are restored, and so there will not be a new safety or environmental incident on startup.

Leadership’s Role

In these situations of high frustration and impatience, the people close to the work need to be helped and supported by their management and leaders.

As a Plant Manager, my role was to create a safe space for those working close to the problem to think things through, organize themselves, plan the restoration processes, and make the other decisions needed to get back up and running safely. The operators, mechanics, engineers, and safety people know what needs to be done, so as the Plant Manager, my role was to create a safe space where they could do their work. I also reminded them to work with high safety, environmental and customer standards, helping each other to do their best in the situation.

As we shared information on the progress to solve the problem and the things around it, we also helped to maintain respect and caring among everyone and gave credit to them as progress was made. These made a big, positive difference.

When we can minimize the feelings of impatience, frustration and anger, the energy and creativity of the people emerges, enabling much quicker, better decisions and more effective work to take place. This is Partner-Centered Leadership in action!

Call me at 716-622-6467 and I’ll be pleased to talk to you about Partner-Centered Leadership. It is the way forward.

feelings of impatience in the workplace

Filed Under: Safety Leadership, Safety Leadership Process, Safety Partnership Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The Focus on Safety Situations is Not Working Well

November 10, 2023 By Leave a Comment

Each day I read in various news reports and items about different safety situations and people getting hurt or killed.

It is rare that there is no report of a fatality somewhere.

These are real people getting killed doing their work. Most of these incidents are not new. Things like a boiler explosion, a grain silo explosion, a train wreck, someone caught between things, someone falling, a crane tipping over, a fire in a refinery, a boat accident, and I could go on and on. It is very sad to think of all the families, their losses and suffering.

The technology is there to avoid most of these situations. There are often safety people somewhere around the incident. Presumably there are supervisors around. Most of these incidents are not occurring with people who are working alone. Who is paying attention?

Tool-box sessions at the start of the day help some organizations.

Training is advocated by a lot of people. Some safety professionals look closely at the causes of these incidents. Sometimes the employer is cited by OSHA or fined. Some states pass new laws to try to force better compliance. All this is focused at things and situations, and not having the positive impact we all want.

Partnering with the People

All this safety stuff, the good and the bad, occurs through people. Most people want to be engaged and involved in their own safety…if anyone will listen. Many people are angry and cynical about safety because no one listens and just imposes the rules. Meaningful conversation is missing.

safety is about teamwork

One of the top reasons the OSHA cites organizations is the lack of proper hazards communications.

Hazard Communicating is a core element of any OSHA safety training compliance program, yet it has often been trivialized. You would think that supervisors and safety people would utilize the HazCom opportunity to converse with employees on a regular basis – not wait for an annual review.

Hazards are in the workplace; people need to understand the hazards and Management needs to create the conditions for meaningful, respectful conversations to occur. The conversation avenue for partnering is right there – among our people, not only about hazardous chemicals, but about all safety concerns…all people concerns. Why is there this level of disrespect for the people doing the work? Who cares? This is not difficult work. It takes commitment and time, but aren’t these both worth doing to save a life?

As I engage with people about their work, they are usually quite willing to talk about it, and often have good ideas about how to improve the situation. I have found that in talking together to explore what is the best way to do something, the people get quite interested and pay a lot more attention to what they are doing. Talking with the people, listening, and learning together results in a lot fewer injuries and incidents.

Our safety efforts across the various industries needs to shift to working with the people. We need to help people do things right. We do not need new safety philosophies; we need to be with the people, talking together, listening, learning, growing, and releasing our skills and insights to really make a difference to improving workplace safety.

All of you can walk among the people in your organizations, talking together, listening, learning, and doing together. Try it for 20 minutes a day, every day, for a few months and see what happens. What do you suppose you will begin to see and hear?

Changes Before Us

Change is a time when the possibility for getting hurt increases. By the time you read this, we will have shifted back to standard time. Daylight hour will change. Conditions around commuting will change with different hours and day light.

Some people will be extra tired until they adjust to the different hours. Work conditions may change. Our weather will be getting colder, often wetter, and slippery. Our windshields will need scraping, so we need to start a little earlier.

All this change, the bigger and the smaller ones, will cause us to be more alert and focused. Please pay attention to yourself, others and come home safely each day.

Below is a link to a short recap video on Hazards Communication. As you watch this, count how many opportunities you are provided with daily to:

1) Talk up general and/or chemical safety
2) Converse respectfully with an employee about the work
3) Respect and honor the individual and the task being done

Communicating is a huge key to Partnering in the Workplace. HazCom communications lend an excellent start for meaningful conversations across the board.

Hazard Communication Training for General Industry
from SafetyVideos.com

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Safety Partnership Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Building Respect and Trust

December 12, 2022 By Leave a Comment

Why do so many managers and safety professionals keep treating the people in organizations as objects to be controlled so they will work safely?

They seem to assume that the employees can’t or won’t think for themselves and have to be made to work safely. These managers and safety professionals are not bad people, but they are stuck in their basic assumptions about people. So many seem to think that they have the answers and the power to make people do as they are told.

Thinking of the people as “employees” is part of the problem. Thinking of people as “employees” brings different thoughts to mind. The word “employee” is a legal word that defines my relationship with my employer with respect to things like hours of work, pay rates, benefits, etc. It also carries some tough top-down implications. If the boss gives an order, it better be done. The boss and the employee are not seen as equals in terms of respect, hopes, aspirations, good ideas and creative energy.

safety focus building respect and trust

This has been the approach for generations and yet, there are still over 6,000 people a year getting killed at work and thousands are suffering serious injuries. Just using the same approach, with variations, over and over, and expecting to see real improvements is a problem!

There needs to be a fundamental shift to assumptions like these.

My Safety Focus: Building Respect and Trust.

My basic assumptions are:

  • We work with people who have brains and can think; their hopes and dreams are similar to my own.
  • People do want to work safely and not get hurt.
  • People want to be treated with respect.
  • The people doing the work have important knowledge and ideas to contribute.
  • People want to be listened to.
  • I do not know what they know, so we need to share information together so we can do our best.
  • Safety is connected to everything we do; it is part of the whole system.
  • It takes everyone pulling together to achieve excellence.
  • I do not have a right to make my living at a place where it is okay for people to get hurt.

I did not work on safety as such. My focus was on the people and building trust and a better, safer future. The more I worked this way with the people, the better our performance became. Within 4 years, our Total Injury Rate had dropped by about 97% to a rate of about 0.3. (The rate was only a way to keep score.) The people liked working this way and sustained their performance for 19 years. I wrote about this in my recently published paper in Professional Safety [Knowles, R.N. (2022, Nov.). Leading vs. Managing: A tale of two organizational processes. Professional Safety, 67(11), 42-46].

The importance of building trust and working with people has been known for a long time. Douglas McGregor wrote The Human Side of Enterprise in 1960 about Theory X and Y. Recently the work of others like Rosa Carrillo in her book, The Relationship Factor in Safety Leadership, 2020, and even in this current issue of Professional Safety [ Sarkus, D.J. (2022, Nov.). Building community through servant leadership. Professional Safety, 67(11), 24-29.] are emphasizing the importance of respect and trust.

This shift in thinking and working with the people results in a lot fewer people getting hurt or killed at work. Yet why do so many safety people seem to be all wrapped up in chasing injuries and incidents? Some just counting the numbers. Others developing more advanced ways to get employees to work more safely, or to develop better ways to analyze incident situations. Many are just pushing production with little or no regard for safety. Some safety consultants have learned to give great motivational talks that are fun to hear, but have almost no impact in the workplace. The BLS statics on workplace injuries and deaths are not showing much improvement.

The global safety improvement industry was estimated to be over $20,000,000. The trade shows have lots of very fancy safety equipment and the consultants are selling their approaches. Is there a vested interest it doing things like we have always do it and getting the same results?

Many managers think that you can not have excellence in safety and earnings at the same time. That is not what I found at the plant I led where we cut the injury rate by 97% and increased the earnings by 300%.

safety focus building respect and trust

Conclusion

If the whole safety effort was shifted to treating people with respect, listening and learning together and doing what makes sense, there would be a huge improvement in total safety and a lot fewer people getting injured and killed.

Is the effort to build trust, learn to treat people with respect, to listen more carefully, to build on each other’s good ideas too high a price for saving many, many lives?

What will it take to make the shift?

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Safety Partnership Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Improving Workplace Safety for Your Employees…

September 10, 2021 By Leave a Comment

Many Thousands of People are Being Injured and Killed at Work

Many, many good, safety professionals are working to maintain and improve workplace safety. Yet the number of people losing their lives in our workplaces (in just 4 years) has increased from 4,836 in 2015 to 5,333 in 2019, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From 2015 through 2019 there have been 25,746 people who have lost their lives at work. To put this into an alarming perspective, compare this to the losses in Afghanistan since 2001 (over twenty years) where there have been 3,592 allied forces who have been killed, based on Associated Press.

With all the effort put into improving safety performance in our workplaces, why have we not seen a reduction in the number of people being killed at work? New papers sharing improved ways to ‘improve workplace safety’ are presented at safety conferences by the American Society of Safety Professionals, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Global Congress on Process Safety, and many smaller conferences as well as in publications in a variety of journals. The informational know-how is available!

Each of the specialties of occupational safety, occupational health and process safety management have a huge amount of information that has been developed over the years to improve safety performance. While some progress has been made in reducing the total number of injuries from a rate of 3.0 in 2015 to 2.8 in 2019 (2,814,000 injuries) this seems slow to me.

What is Missing?

The fruits of all this work has to be carried out by the people actually doing the physical work, those close to the actual operating and maintenance processes. We need to help these people, and not just pile more stuff onto them.

wokrplace safety comes down to the frontline people

I have found in all my 60 years in working in research, production and consulting globally that a missing link is not talking with the front-line people and exploring and learning together how to improve the work so that fewer injuries and incidents occur. None of us have all the answers. We need each other. (Talking down to people doesn’t work; talking to people (one-way) doesn’t work—the key is in talking with our people!)

Here is a Simple Solution…

When I was the Plant Manager at the 1,300 person, DuPont Belle, WV Chemical Plant I changed this. In my leading process, I spent 4-5 hours a day for 7+years walking around in the Plant, being respectful, sharing information, listening, asking how I could help the people, asking them for their help, learning together to improve things and building trust and interdependence. I talked with everyone. My mantra was “I do not have a right to make my living at a place where it is okay for you to get hurt, and we have to make a living, so let’s figure this out together.”

Our injury rate dropped by about 97% in three years, emissions to the environment dropped by about 96% in 4 years, productivity rose about 45% and earnings rose about 300%. Safety is connected to everything so as we made safety improvements everything else improved. In this approach which I call “Partner-Centered Leadership”, all parts of our safety work came together as shown here.

partner centered leadership for workplace safety

Each of occupational safety, health and process safety have their unique knowledge and management disciplines. When they are brought together, in the region of overlap in the center of this Venn Diagram, this is where the people and the leading process described above come together. In addition to talking with everyone about all the dimensions of our safety work as I walked around, there was one place where this all came together and was clear to everyone. Our monthly Central Safety Meetings were open, and all aspects of our safety work were discussed openly with everyone. All questions and concerns were welcome, and fixed. I strongly urged our supervisors to talk with their people and the engineers to sit with the operators to teach them the elements of process safety.

This is Simple.

Go into your workplaces, respectfully talk with the people, listen, share, ask them where you can be of more help, help them to follow up on their ideas and concerns, solve problems, build trust, and have everyone go home healthy and in one piece. Engagement!

You can do this!

To learn more about this approach see our web sites:
RNKnowlesAssociates.com and SafetyExcellenceForBusiness.com or give us a call at 716-622-6467.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Safety Leadership Process, Safety Partnership Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Bringing Safety People Together…It’s all in the Venn!

January 11, 2021 By Leave a Comment

I want to share some experiences I’ve learned about the importance of sharing information and building trust – especially as it applies to the various safety aspects of our workplaces.

We surely had our hands full in 2020 with all the COVID-19 issues. While the new vaccines will help, change will always be with us. Each of you can make a positive difference for the people in your organizations by sharing information about what is going on, building respect and trust and listening carefully, so you really understand the issues and concerns.

I have noticed that those working on occupational safety and occupational health do not interact much with the people working on process safety management (PSM), and vice-versa. For example, at the ASSP meetings, I rarely hear any one talking about PSM and at the AIChE Process Safety meetings, I don’t hear much about occupational safety and/or occupational health. It is as if these are different stove pipes. But each of these are areas where people are deeply involved in the total safety performance of the organization. I have found that when everyone is talking together about the total safety, synergy emerges and all areas benefit.

When I was the Plant Manager of a big chemical plant, the people working in these three areas were engaged in conversations and contributed to improvements across the board. This Venn Diagram illustrates how we brought them together while maintaining their unique contributions.

the importance of sharing information and building trust

Each safety area was managed separately, using their own operating discipline. Where the three areas came together, we talked about what was happening and looked for input from each other. This significantly raised the total safety and environmental performance of the site. PSM also has a big impact on the environmental performance when spills, accidental chronic emissions, release incidents, improved yields and fires and explosions are eliminated; and a lot less is emitted to the environment.

The area of overlap of the three safety disciplines (at the center of the Venn diagram) is where we engaged in Partner-Centered Leadership:

  • Sharing all information
  • Building trust.
  • Listening to each other’s problems and opportunities.
  • Learning and finding better ways to do the work together.

For example, we talked about the three disciplines in our site Central Safety Meetings, keeping careful track of our safety workorder backlogs, meeting our safety equipment inspection schedules and talking about incidents and injuries that had happened, and what we could all learn from them. The engineers went into the various production areas and sat with the operators to learn what the operators were experiencing as they ran the processes, and the engineers taught the operators the engineering technology supporting their work, helping them to understand what was happening in the manufacturing operations. The supervisors, engineers, operators and maintenance people talked together as safety and work procedures were developed. The gap between work-as imagined and work-as-done virtually disappeared. As trust and the open dialogue improved, our safety and environmental performance really improved.

In just three years, the Total Recordable Injury Rate dropped by about 97% to a rate of about 0.3, and the people sustained this for 17 years. PSM improved with much lower levels of releases and upsets. The emissions to the environment (accidental and permitted) went down about 95% in four years. When the PSM was run as a separate stove pipe from the occupational safety and occupational health stove pipes, the Plant’s performance did not come anywhere close to these low levels. This is significant!

The improvements we made in how we worked together in safety spread into all the other parts of our work in running the big (1,300 people) chemical plant. The more we shared information, treated each other with respect and listened to each other, the more the total performance improved. For example, productivity rose by about 45% and earnings rose about 300%.

Learning to work more effectively, through our safety work, spread to the whole organization. Each of you reading this newsletter can make a big difference as you engage with the people in your organizations, sharing information, building respect and trust. The impact of your work will spread.

Want to know more? Contact me at 716-622-6467. Or, Order my book, “Partnering for Safety and Business Excellence” on Amazon.

 

Note: Venn is a diagram that shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets. Take a look at what sits right in the middle!

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Safety Partnership Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

We Need More Partnering…COVID-19 and All

September 10, 2020 By Leave a Comment

The Problem – Fractured Organizations

more partnering is needed in businessesThe COVID-19 pandemic, the return to school questions, the protests and riots in so many of our cities, the bitter political campaign, the demand for using the “correct” words, are driving people crazy. The COVID-19, the questions, the anxieties and concerns, spill into our workplaces causing a lot of uncertainty and stress. We see this happening every day. Our businesses, our schools and hospitals, our governments, and not-for-profits, at all levels, are struggling. Changes and pressures are coming faster and faster.

So many of us seem to be trying to cope by withdrawing into our shells and trying to push the turmoil all away. The trust levels among all the various groups is very low. So many loud voices are pushing their version of the “truth” that it is almost impossible to find the truth.

Mary Eberstadt, in her 2019 book, Primal Screams, suggests that people are basically social animals and that many of our connections are broken. With all these, many have lost their sense of identity. Social distancing and COVID-19 concerns, changes in how family’s function or not, changes in where people live and work, changes in the way the strife in our society are making us feel isolated and lone.

At work, many of us do not feel psychologically or physically safe. The COVID-19 and other distractions pull us away from focusing on our work. This can lead to arguments, bullying, injuries, and incidents, as well as to lower productivity. Not only are these problems distracting us, they are very expensive for the business. For example, if we just spend the equivalent of one day a week for each employee trying to solve all the issues raised by these problems, that would amount to 20% of our payroll costs.

Pulling Together and Partnering are Needed.
We Can Each Make a Difference!

We can make choices about how we agree to work together, and build a community that is safe and productive.

We can choose to:

  • Be respectful of one another.
  • Listen to each other.
  • Learn from each other.
  • Look out for each other and be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.
  • Learn from our successes and our mistakes.
  • Give each other the benefit of the doubt and not jump to judgement.
  • Talk together about how to improve our jobs.
  • Talk about our differences and figure a way through them.
  • Be aware of people who are bullying or harassing others and speak up about this.
  • Create a safe space where it is okay for people to ask questions and provide feedback.
  • Help each other to be successful.

make good choices in your business while under pressureIn thinking about your own place where you work, what do you suppose it would be like if you did some of these things? Do you think that you could begin talking with others about the COVID-19 challenges and building a more respectful environment? What do you think it would be like if you could openly talk together about the important issues like workable, social distancing and improving the safety of your job?

What would it be like if the managers and supervisors openly shared more information about these issues, as well as about how the business is doing? Would talking about how other businesses are handling these issues be helpful? What would it be like if you felt you were in an environment of trust? What would it be like if people really asked important questions and talked about them?

Hopefully, the people in upper management will be asking you for your honest opinions and really listen.

Each person can make a positive difference, if you decide to do it. It is a matter of will. If you do not step forward to make our workplaces safer and more productive, who will?

There are people with whom you can partner and begin these focused conversations. These do not have to be big projects. Start small, start slowly and it will spread it as it grows.

Change happens one conversation at a time!

I would be glad to talk with any of you about building Partner-Centered Leadership with you. Please call me at 716-622-6467.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Partnership Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Highly Participative Leadership produces the best results

August 10, 2020 By Leave a Comment

A 19-Year Case Study

On Tuesday, August 18, 2020, from 4:15 to 4:45 PM, I will be making a virtual presentation at the AiCHE 16th Global Congress on Process Safety. The paper is a 19-year case study demonstrating a successful plant leadership transition that improved process safety performance.

highly participative leadership process produces much better results that the top-down management processWhen I was transferred to the DuPont Belle, West Virginia plant in 1987, the Total Recordable Injury Case Rate (TRC) was about 5.8 and emissions to air, water and ground, as reported in the EPA Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) annual report, was over 6,000,000 pounds/year. Within three years, both of these had dropped by about 95% to a TRC of about 0.3 and a TRI of about 275,000 pounds/year. Emissions to the environment is one way to measure how well the process safety is working; the better the process safety work, the lower the emissions to the environment.

I was using a highly, participative leadership process I called Partner-Centered Leadership for Occupational Injuries and Health, as well as for Process Safety; this was a highly integrated process with just about everyone involved, and consciously working together to make our plant safer and have less impact on the environment. When I was transferred by DuPont in 1995 and replaced by a traditional plant manager using a top-down driven management process, things changed.

The process safety work was pulled away from the occupational safety and health effort and taken over by the managers. The occupational safety and health work continued to be led by the first and second level supervisors using the Partner-Centered Leadership approach. The highly participative leadership approach and the top-down management approach were running in parallel (the same business conditions, the same regulatory pressures, the same people, the same community). The occupational safety and health performance stayed at a rate of 0.3 or better for the next 15 years.

But the five different plant managers who came in during that period gradually cut back the process safety management resources and effort. They cut back on the manpower, allowed work-orders to pile up, stretched out the inspection intervals, ignored feedback from the operators and mechanics about the deteriorating conditions, etc. The TRI emissions rose by about ten-fold to over 2,500,000 pounds/year.

transformation can happen in the workplaceThe process safety management collapsed in January of 2010 with major, accidental releases to the air and river and they had a man get killed with a phosgene release. When the US Chemical Safety Board investigated in late 2010, they reported that while the occupational safety and health performance was the best in the DuPont Company, the process safety management had fallen apart and the plant was not even using the DuPont standard procedures. This was a sad commentary about how far things had fallen.

This 19-year case study clearly shows that a highly participative leadership process produces much better results that the top-down management process.

An Online Course Offering

Beginning August 24th, I will be presenting a six-week course on Leadership and Using the Process Enneagram©. The Process Enneagram© was a key leadership tool I used when I was at Belle. I have used this tool successfully around the world with people in all sorts of organizations and businesses in the 25 years since I retired from DuPont. Wherever I have used it in my consulting, safety and total performance has improved.

This Online course is the first in a series to teach about leading and using the Process Enneagram©.

If you are interested in taking the course, please go to my web site, RNKnowles and associates.com, and sign up. Or, call me and I’ll answer your questions. I’ll be using Zoom for the calls. This is important work.

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Process, Safety Partnership, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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