Closer Look: Safety, People, Culture, Change, Business Excellence, Agility, Impact…It all Fits Together!

February 10, 2020 By Leave a Comment

Avoiding the losses and waste means that our businesses are more competitive and healthy. How much do you suppose an OSHA lost time injury costs the business?

  • The pain and suffering is miserable.
  • There is the direct cost of the doctors, hospitals, medications, etc.
  • We lose time
    • having to investigate the injury and incident.,
    • writing reports,
    • having an OSHA investigation,
    • perhaps the cost of challenging OSHA’s findings,
    • legal costs for the company attorneys,
    • preparing for a potential law suit,
    • the cost of lost production time,
    • the cost of bringing someone and train them to replace the injured person,
    • the cost of lost sales,
    • the cost of bad publicity,
    • the cost of lower morale among the people,
    • and so on.

When the safety gets right, everything else gets right as well. In this more positive culture, not only does the waste of injuries and incidents go away, people shift the way that they chose to work together resulting in other improvements like:

  • fewer arguments,
  • fewer grievances,
  • better meetings,
  • fewer meetings,
  • more suggestions for improving our systems and processes,
  • people taking the lead in helping to fix something that is not right,
  • new ideas for better customer service emerge,
  • lean manufacturing works better,
  • the quality of products and services get better,
  • absenteeism drops, and
  • people can work together to build a better future.

Cultural improvement: bullying, harassment and dysfunction decrease.

When the safety performance and culture get better, the organization thrives.

These are things that each organization can work on right now. In Partner-Centered Leadership, Richard N. Knowles & Associates can help organizations to achieve all these things. This does not require investment.

  • Get clear on your thinking and purpose.
  • Go into your organization talking with and listening to the people.
  • Help them to build on their ideas.
  • Let them know how important they are to the success of the business.
  • Do this with respect and honesty.

Change is happening all the time!

organizational culture is shaped by leadershipChanges are coming fast and furious. Everything seems to be changing all around us. This can cause unsettling feelings and a loss of control. However, in the middle of all this change, one area that can be steady for us is our relationships with each other.

If we have a good agreement about how we are going to work together including things like respect, listening, helping, learning together, these can provide us the stability we need.

These are like the pole in a subway car. With everything around us bouncing and moving, holding the pole provides the stability we need.

We can treat each other with respect,no matter what is happening in the world around us; this is within our control.

Please look out for and help each other. Let’s keep our agreements. Now is the time for being our sisters’ and brothers’ keepers, which is really important. It is up to each of us!

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As the World Turns…

January 10, 2020 By Leave a Comment

We are coming to the end of another decade of change, turmoil and uncertainty.

can make a marked difference in workplace safetyArtificial intelligence and robots, block chains and bitcoins, the opioid epidemic, political strife, and workplace violence, international worries and potential conflicts are some of the challenges facing all of us. There is a critical need for people, in all walks of life, to come together to openly and honestly talk about our challenges, share our thinking and learn together. We do not have to be blindly swept along. We can make decisions and do the things that we need to do to help to make the world a better place.

We can make a marked difference!

One important challenge that we can do something about is in improving the safety performance in our own organizations.

For the last 4-5 years, the number of people getting killed at work has been holding steady at around 5,300-5,500 people. Lots of safety professionals and other people are working to improve safety in many ways, but we are stuck at the level of safety compliance. We have to shift our thinking in order to break out of this box and significantly cut the numbers of people getting hurt and killed.

This is not about blaming the people and seeking root cause. It is not about just working on safety. In our complex world, there is so much more going on and there is no single root cause. Organizations are complex, adapting, self-organizing networks of people so our thinking has to shift to fully grasp this complexity and do the things we need to do.

Partner-Centered Leadership

The best way to improve the organization’s safety performance, beyond compliance, is in using Partner-Centered Leadership©, which I have been developing for over 3 decades. I used this approach when I was a Plant Manager for many years and together, the people cut our injury rate by 97%, our emissions dropped by 95% and earning rose by 300%. I further developed this approach in my consulting work over the last two decades. Everywhere this approach is used has resulted in rapid, significant improvements in the organization’s total performance.

In building on the base of safety compliance, the focus of our work is on developing more effective leadership and improving the total performance of the organization. Safety performance is just one aspect of the organization’s performance so when the entire organization improves, safety improves as well.

partner centered leadership can make a difference in workplace safetyWhen I talk about safety. my thinking goes well beyond the traditional safety numbers, training and procedures. It includes ideas about respect and how everyone has agreed to work together. It includes ideas about personal responsibility, integrity and dedication to helping everyone improve. It includes openness, honesty and sharing information abundantly. It includes ideas about the deeper, often hidden patterns of behavior which have a profound impact on the work environment and drive much of the behavior. It includes the fact that the managers and leaders have the largest impact on their organization’s performance. It includes the understanding that managers focus on reliability, stability, predictability and control as they try to maintain the status quo and that leaders focus on the people, change and the future sharing information abundantly, treating people with respect and helping people find meaning in their work. Both good leaders and managers are needed.

It includes spending a significant amount of time in the workplace with the people holding both casual and formal conversations about how the people are doing, asking them how I can help to improve their job, looking for feedback on my own performance, seeking better ways to do things as well as talking about the things that are important for the business to succeed and prosper. It also includes the need to maintain high standards and operating discipline. I spent five hours a day in the plant when I was the Plant Manager, every day for 5 years.

Keeping the Continuous Conversation Going is Key

These conversations are a very important part of building the metaphorical container that holds the organization together and provides guidance for everyone. Sometimes these conversations can get quite intense as we all are searching for the truth and better ways to do things. When people have a good understanding, the vision, the mission, the expectations, the standards of behavior and performance, and their own role in building the success of the whole organization, they have a sense of this container, and they are able to make the decisions they need to make regarding the details about how they can best improve their own work as well as the business. The container, which I call the BOWL, provides the order and focus for the organization and the freedom for the people within the BOWL to learn, grow and improve.

Improvement and change come one conversation at a time. As we talk together, listen and learn, everyone gains new insights and a better understanding of how things are going. As this thinking swirls around the ideas begin to synthesize into concrete pictures and new possibilities emerge. The people co-create their shared future. Everyone is growing and learning together.

Partner-Centered Leadership is the best approach that I know about that is proven to help us break out of compliance and move into much better levels of total organizational performance. Call me to learn more about this way of working and the central tool we use which is the Process Enneagram©. If you really want to make a difference then call us at 716-622-6467.

(We are on the cusp of a New Year, so as you draw up your strategies for improvement in 2020, know that the old way of doing things won’t get you to where you want to be…Give us a call…We’ll get you moving forward to better safety performance.)

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Safety Leadership Workforce Challenges

September 25, 2014 By Leave a Comment

Edwin G. Foulke, Jr., Partner in Fisher & Phillips and former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, spoke at the American Society of Safety Engineers, Region 4 Professional Development Conference about the changing nature of our workforce.

Existing employees are getting older and many will be retiring before too long.

workplace safety workforceLots of critical knowledge, experience and skills will be lost. Younger people, who have grown up in an electronic world of texting and games, will replace these people. Many are out of shape and bordering on being over weight; some are developing diabetes. This will pose significant challenges to employers and the need to work safely and well.

These changes will pose even more challenges than those of the very high growth rates mentioned by Amir Farid in his Keynote address at the AIChE Conference mentioned above.

Seeing Safety as a Complex Adaptive System

This means we’ll have to learn to work together in new, safer ways.

This shift in our safety culture and the way we work is the core of our work and the subject of our Newsletters, Blogposts and Safety Flashes. When we make this shift, everything changes. The patterns and processes become clearer and our work with the people becomes much easier, resistance to change almost disappears, and new things can be implemented quickly and effectively.

What steps has your organization put in place to adapt to an aging workforce?

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Complex Systems Safety Leadership Process©

August 21, 2013 By 2 Comments

Our work in helping to create injury-free work environments is complex.

There are three major areas of work that overlap to some extent. Depending on the work of the organization the emphasis may be different for the three areas of work.

Occupational Safety:  One area of our safety work relates to Occupational Safety. Here we experience acute incidents like slips, trips and falls. Some of these lead to deaths. This area of safety work has been around a long time and is well developed. The systems, process and equipment for this work are managed by those closest to the work itself. These are the operators and mechanics as well as the first-line supervisors and the safety people who are working with them. This work not only saves the people from injuries it saves the company about $40,000-50,000 per average OSHA Recordable injury. A powerful leading indicator I have found useful is the Safe Acts Audit which is a quick and simple way to asses the safety climate as it shifts around. This is not a punishment procedure.

Occupational Health:   A second area of our safety work relates to Occupational Health. Here we experience long-term, chronic problems. These can be related to low levels of exposures to toxic materials like asbestos, benzene and lead or repetitive motion problems like carpel tunnel syndrome and poor lifting positions. This area is newer than the Occupational Safety area and we are still learning a lot. As our workforce age, we will run into more Occupational Health problems. Often, by the time that we become aware of the problem, a large number of people have been impacted and the costs for remediation are very high, running into the millions of dollars. This work is best managed by those close to the work like operators, mechanics, clerical people, and health and safety experts. The leading indictors for this area of work are the discomforts experienced by the people doing the work, and also by researchers and experts who are studying large populations of people and can see trends and wider problems that are more subtle.

Process Safety:  A third area of our safety work relates to Process Safety. A lot of new work is developing in this area of safety. Here we have acute problems like spills, releases to the air and water, fires and explosions. There can also be chronic dimensions to this like very low levels of emissions to the environment that result in public health hazards. This area of safety work is best managed by the operators, mechanics, engineers, researchers and other scientists close to the work itself. When a Process Safety incident occurs the costs in terms of lives and money can be very, very big as British Petroleum can attest to. The leading indicators in this area of safety work are things like near misses and close calls. Leading indicators are also the adherence to standards like timelines to get things repaired, schedules, the reduction of backlogs on safety work orders, and timely inspections of relief valves and thickness measurements of vessels and pipelines.

leadership safety in the workplaceOverlap:  All three of these areas of safety are often lumped together as SHE, EHS or HSE. When we lump these all together we can miss things so I think it is useful to see these three overlapping, interacting areas of our safety and health work. There is some overlap between Occupational Safety and Occupational Health like the proper selection and use of respirators. There is some area of overlap between Occupational Health and Process Safety like preventing chronic exposures to toxic chemicals. There is some overlap between Process Safety and Occupational Safety like locating trailers and offices away from operating areas using large quantities of flammable and explosive materials.

There is also overlap among all three areas of our safety and health work. This is where the people issues and culture become important. Everything happens through people! We need to have strong, effective leadership in order to bring all the work together and do a solid job in this work. There are many safety consultants who are teaching leadership of safety using linear, top-down processes that do have a good impact. However, in my experience, these are hard to do, often cumbersome and very hard to sustain. This is because these people are trying to lead safety using linear processes that are suitable for complicated situations.

Interactivity:   All the interacting people and areas of safety and health are a complex system requiring different tools for successful leadership. Coming out of my studies of chaos and complexity science and my own experience in leading safety I have developed the complex Systems Safety Leadership Process©.

Complex systems often have a few simple rules that govern their behavior. The Three Simple Rules for The Complex

Systems Safety Leadership Process are;

  1. Share all information with everyone except private personal information.
  2. Build trust and interdependence among all the people.
  3. Help everyone see their part in and the importance of fulfilling the work of the organization successfully.

Building on these Three Simple Rules are the Four Steps to Safety Excellence which are:

  • Use the Process Enneagram© with the leaders of the organization to develop clarity, coherence and commitment to achieving safety excellence.
  • Together, walking around, openly talking and sharing information, listening, sharing and learning, fixing problems, improving the safety systems and processes and building on all the safety systems, processes and tools we already have to manage the safety work.
  • In doing this with integrity, we build trust and interdependence among all the people.
  • The result of this way of engaging with everyone results in having everyone pulling towards safety excellence and continuous safety performance improvement.

This may sound rather strange to many of you yet this is the process to lead all aspects of safety to achieve sustainable excellence in our performance. The work I did with the people at the DuPont Belle, WV and with New Zealand Steel mentioned in earlier blogs, show that this way of leading safety is proven, robust and sustainable.

 

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

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Moving to a Safety Culture of Excellence

April 2, 2013 By 2 Comments

Most organizations seem to be comfortable with being at the level of safety compliance. This is a start, but is not good enough over the longer run. We have to meet the OSHA guidelines and train the people in how to work safely and use equipment properly. There are lots of people doing the safety training and the American Society for Safety Engineers (ASSE) has many, many resources for the safety professional. Most of the people in most organizations have some knowledge about how to do the work safely, know how to use the PPE and have some knowledge of the safety rules.

Reaching high levels of safety performance when working in organizations like these is very hard. Sustaining these levels of performance is even harder. Once the people have been trained, proven that they know and understand what they have learned and then actually doing the work as they have been trained often falls short. For a variety of reasons people don’t follow through; people take short-cuts, forget, are pre-occupied, feel pushed, don’t believe that management really cares, there are not enough people to do all the work, management does not listen, they hear the words about working safety but their supervisor ignores the words.

There is a powerful need for our organizations to shift to safety cultures of excellence. Way too many people are being killed (~4,600 in 2011). Most of these accidents are preventable. Our existing cultures need to shift from top-down driven processes to ones that are more self-organizing and sustainable. Yet many people resist change.

Being fearful of changing job assignments, bargaining unit challenges, abuse of the rules, not knowing what is going to happen to them and their jobs is one major reason for resistance to change. Another fear of change comes from the uncertainty of who the new people will be that they’ll need to work with if they are reorganized; they have a set of relationships in their current job and any change will upset these. Another fear of change can relate to their status as relationships and structure change. Another reason to fear change relates to the level of control that a person currently has in their job over their work and uncertainty about how that will change. Almost all of these fears come about because change is imposed with little input from the people who will experience the change.

However, change is with us all the time. It is not some unusual incident which is being shoved at us.

If the processes of Self-Organizing Leadership are used most people will not resist change. With Self-Organizing Leadership the people are co-creating the changes that need to be made. People do not resist changes that they create, but rather they push these changes. Most imposed change efforts fail; most co-created change efforts succeed.

The four-step, Safety Leadership Process we use enables the people in the organization to co-create their safety culture and transform it to one of excellence where injury and incident rates drop almost to zero. In this process the first step is to use the Process Enneagram© to work with a cross-section of the organization to co-create their Safety Strategic Plan. In using the Process Enneagram an important, compelling question is developed; one that the group feels is really important and one they want to resolve. Then the facilitator begins to move the group through the sequence of conversation relating to each point helping them to develop clarity and coherence relating to what they want to accomplish and how they will do it. Everyone makes inputs which are written down onto the Process Enneagram Map.

The space is created so that the environment is safe and open for honest conversation.

This part of the Safety Leadership Process usually requires about a day so that the issues, assumptions, Principles and Standards, and goals are understood and the energy required to accomplish their transformation is released.

In the next part of the Safety Leadership Process, the Process Enneagram Map they have created is taken out to those who were not involved to share the thinking and to seek improvements. In these conversations, trust and interdependence are built as people see what management wants to accomplish and are walking the talk.

The next part of the process is to talk with people about what they are doing, listen to them, discover ways to improve the work and help the people to make the needed changes. As we do this, people become more comfortable in talking together and opening up.

Another part of the Safety Leadership Process involves actually looking at what people are doing.

Systems problems show up as we make our observations. We often see very high levels of unsafe behaviors that are the result of people trying to work within the work environment and making mistakes. This is not an employee discipline process, but rather a process of discovery and learning. As the organization continues to make observations enough data is collected that the observations can become a predictor of a potential injury. Then we show the leaders how to react and avoid the injury.

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