America’s Safest Companies gather in Atlanta, Georgia

October 28, 2013 By 1 Comment

The America’s Safest Companies Conference is being held in Atlanta, Georgia this week.

The America’s Safest Companies Conference is sponsored by EHS Today and will have about 350 company presidents, Vice Presidents, EHS directors and managers and others interested in helping the people in our facilities go home in one piece. There will be keynote speakers on safety and sustainability as well as four conference tracks relating to:

  • Safety and Risk Management
  • Environmental/Sustainability
  • Compliance
  • Safety Technology

The Conference begins on Monday, October 28th with a reception and then the paper sessions will run on Tuesday and Wednesday up to 2:30 PM.

This is an interesting mix of people and tracks with many papers presented by high-level people with an emphasis on integrating safety into the culture of the companies and leadership. One of the key sponsors is Fisher & Phillips, a large law firm specializing in environmental, health and safety issues among the rest of their practice relating to labor law. The lead EH &S person from Fisher & Phillips is Edwin G. Foulke, Jr. who was a former OSHA Director.

america's safest companies conferenceI’ll be participating as a sponsor for the Conference Program Brochure. I’ll have an ad in the Brochure as well as a display table. My tag line is “When safety gets right, everything else gets right”. Since I am not an official speaker, I am going to use my display table as an opportunity to talk with people about the Complexity Leadership Process that I wrote about in a previous.

While there will be papers about leadership and moving to safety excellence, I will be the only one talking about the three major areas of safety (occupational safety, occupational health and process safety) and showing how to use the Complexity Leadership Process to achieve sustainable levels of excellence and improved business performance. I’ll share my work from the DuPont Belle, WV plant, the New Zealand Steel, Auckland, NZ, and the CSR Invicta Sugar Mill in Ayr, Australia and powerful case studies.

I’ll be working my display during the Monday evening Reception as well as at all the breaks so I am hoping to connect with a lot of the Conference attendees in one-on-one conversations and open up their thinking to complexity and the importance of learning to think and live this way. This will be a very difference experience for me compared to presenting papers that I have often done and expect to do in the future. I am very interested in meeting so many people who are focused on Safety.

In April of 2014, I will also be presenting the Keynote at the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia SHE Conference – another gathering of great minds in this industry.

As you can surmise, I am very dedicated to getting the ideas about complexity and its importance in helping people and organizations in their journeys to excellence. More and more people are beginning to see the world as Complex and are more open to learning to live and work in this paradigm.  As readers of these Blogs, I hope you are one of these on the leading edge of our thinking.

If you are at the conference, please stop by and say hello!

Richard N. Knowles, Ph.D., The Safety Sage

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

The Case for making Safety a Priority in Business

June 4, 2013 By 2 Comments

In my interactions with companies I often hear the people saying things like:

“If only my management really supported safety we would really get a lot better. If they say safety is number 1, then why don’t they behave that way?”

The people at the top probably know that they can have big losses, lawsuits and bad publicity if there is a serious injury, toxic chemical release or explosion. They may even wake up at night thinking about these things.

Yet safety is not their core business. They have revenue and earnings goals looming over them. Quality and production problems may be pressing them. In this environment safety is a pain in the neck, intruding at the wrong times. It is seen as more costs.

I think that we may have the safety messages backward. Rather than feeling under-valued and not supported by management around safety, let’s turn the picture around so that excellence in safety performance is the path to total business excellence performance and enhanced profits.

Everyone can play an important part in this. We achieve safety excellence by shifting the culture. We share all information, build trust and interdependence and help everyone see how they are important to the success of the entire business. We engage each other, listen for all the ideas, help people to solve the problems and challenges that come up. We ask for help because none of us can do this alone.

As the culture shifts, injury and incident rates drop thus saving a lot of money directly, people feel more valued and interested in the total business. As the credibility around safety is built, people begin to see other things that can be improved to help the business and they do them.

As we shifted the safety culture at the DuPont Belle, WV plant where I was the plant manager in the 1980s and 1990s the injury rates dropped by about 97% and earnings went up about 300%. People felt a lot better about things and focused at really making improvements. Not only did we save money with fewer injuries and incidents, people went after things like lowering the demurrage rates (the rent we pay owners of tank trucks after their deliveries were made and the trucks were left on the plant) by 75% in just a few months. We also learned how to change our process control systems from pneumatic systems to electronic systems without running parallel—thus cutting the time and costs for the conversions by about 50%. We did this 16 times without failure.

As the culture shifted towards excellence everything else shifted towards excellence. When we turn the story around from safety being a pain in the neck to becoming the leading edge for shifting the total organization to high performance and excellence, then safety becomes a focal point for the organizational change efforts.

About 80% of the large-scale organizational change efforts fail to produce the desired results and are not sustained. Rather than beginning with a large-scale change effort, we can begin with a smaller effort, focused at safety and then spread the effort as we learn how to do it and gain everyone’s support. Success is much more likely and it is sustainable. At Belle the culture shifted! One measure of that was the injury rates dropped to world-class levels and were sustained for 16 years. Everything else we measured also showed significant improvement.

Let’s shift the safety message from being a pain in the neck to becoming the leading wave for total organizational excellence!

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

What the West Texas Disaster Can Teach Us

April 23, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Wednesday evening, April 17, 2013, there was a terrible explosion in the West Fertilizer Company’s fertilizer plant in Texas. The latest reports indicate as many as 14 people were killed and over 160 injured.

The plant was located right in the middle of the town of 2,700 people and the explosion caused a huge amount of physical destruction in addition to the human devastation.

The plant handled ammonia and ammonium nitrate for fertilizer use.

These are well-known, hazardous materials that can be, and are, handled safely by most companies. There is extensive process safety technology regarding the handling and use of these materials. The technology applying to these materials as with many chemicals is strong and effective.

There are two major dimensions to using, making and handling hazardous materials. One is the process safety side, which is well known and effective, and the other side relates to the way the people choose to work with these materials, and choose to use the technology. The best process safety in the world is of no use if people don’t apply themselves and use the process.

In 2006, according to the Dallas Morning News, the Company was fined $2,300 for failure to have a risk assessment. In one EPA report they said that they handled anhydrous ammonia assuring them that no one would get hurt in the event of a release.

While we do not know specifically what happened, my many years of experience in managing chemical plants, would suggest to me that these are indications that the people side of their systems failed in some way. These are hazardous materials that need to be handled with professionalism, dedication and attention to procedures.

The lesson to be learned here is to rethink your situations in your own factories, plants and businesses where you handle and use hazardous materials. Think about questions like:

  • Do you talk together and share safety information?
  • Do managers get out of their offices and into the operating area to talk with the people on the floor?
  • Is the level of trust high enough that employees will freely report safety concerns and near misses?
  • Des everyone work together to solve safety problems?
  • Are your Material Safety Data Sheets and Safety manuals up to date and used?
  • Are employees properly trained and is the training schedule maintained?
  • Do you have high housekeeping standards and are your facilities properly maintained?
  • Do your employees have the resources they need to work safely?
  • Are you cutting corners to speed up the operation?
  • Do people have the proper personal protective equipment and do they use it?
  • Do you have a system of follow-up so that suggestions can be implemented quickly?
  • Are people able to shutdown a process on their own if it is unsafe?
  • Can people refuse to do a job if it can’t be done safely?

The questions can go on and on, this list barely hits the surface in what can be addressed when making a commitment to safety in the workplace and having a leadership team where safety is a priority. It takes discipline and hard work to stay on top of safety issues, but these are the kinds of responsibilities and burdens any organization working with and using hazardous materials must bear. If you use these materials, then you must accept the responsibility that comes along with the use. The people in your facility and those living around you depend on you to do your job well.

As a manager of plants handling and using hazardous materials, my mantra was “I don’t have a right to work at a place where it is okay for you to get hurt. Now let’s get the safety right and make money.”

What is your safety mantra, your deep, authentic safety message for your people?

As we have seen from this indecent in Texas, the results can affect more than just your plant or business – entire towns can bear the brunt of accidents, explosions and the destruction that follows. My heart goes out to the town, the people, families and the plant workers. Situations like this are preventable…with Safety Leadership that comes from top down.

If you don’t have a safety mantra or message and follow the processes…I strongly recommend you get this in place and FOLLOW IT. Your business and the people that sustain it are depending on your leadership for their safety and the safety of many others.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: , , , ,

Safety Excellence for Business

March 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

The Goal is Zero sets us up for failure.

None of us wants to have anyone get hurt in our organization. We are trying hard in various ways to keep people from getting hurt. Sometimes organizations can achieve very long periods of injury-free performance. One large plant I know of went 24 years without a lost workday case (LWC), and another one went for about 10 years. These sorts of strings of injury-free days are commendable. This can tempt us into believing that if we just work hard enough that we can achieve workplaces where there are no injuries.

We do indeed have to work hard, but I don’t think that we can ever achieve injury performance forever.  The things that people do or don’t do relating to safety are the cause of over 95% of all injuries. None of us is perfect. Our minds wander. We get into a hurry. We forget something. We get distracted. We are upset by a problem at home or at work. We develop bad habits.

I expect that all of us do something unsafely every day and don’t get hurt. But one day the conditions will be just right for things to come together in a new, different and unexpected way. Then we suffer the consequences.

When management sets the “Goal is Zero” we set ourselves up for failure. There is very strong pressure in most organizations for people to report what management wants to hear. If the “Goal is Zero” then the pressure builds to look for ways to avoid having to report an injury or near miss and the cover-ups begin. People will tend to just report things that are too big to hide. A major source of our safety information disappears. When we don’t report the small things then we can’t learn from them. Problems persist, bad situations are not addressed, and reporting can get a person on the wrong side of their management. Sometimes management creates a reporting system that is so difficult and exposes the person making the report to criticism, that the people just avoid reporting. Trust among the people in the organization is impossible to establish. When trust disappears, learning stops!

In order for trust to be built information needs to be openly available to everyone. The environment needs to be secure enough that we can talk and learn together. We need to help each other becoming our brothers and sisters keepers. Listening and respecting each other is critical.

When management creates a culture of openness, trust and interdependence, and an environment where everyone can see the big picture long periods of injury-free performance can be achieved.

John, a wise friend, told me once  “When the safety gets right, everything gets right!”

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: , , ,
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