There’s a reason – a very good reason for practicing Safety: YOU! Your life, your eyes, your ears, your fingers, your toes, your arms, your legs, your brain.
At its core, the purpose of safety is not compliance for its own sake. Compliance is a means to an end. The ultimate goal is to protect people – YOU… employees, supervisors, contractors, vendors, visitors and the public – from injury, illness, and fatality. It is about preventing serious incidents before they occur and ensuring that everyone returns home safely at the end of the day.
When an organization embraces this purpose, compliance becomes the foundation upon which a stronger culture of care, responsibility, and operational excellence is built.
Compliance establishes the minimum acceptable standard of performance. Safety excellence is achieved when people voluntarily do what is right, even when no one is watching, because protecting one another has become part of the organization’s culture and values.
In a previous post, I shared how the number of fatalities (people being killed at work) is around 5,200 every year in the United States. Unfortunately, that number has fluctuated very little from year to year. If we have more safety professionals, more training, more audits, more regulations, more data, and more oversight than ever before, why do workplace fatalities remain relatively constant? What is being missed?
The next frontier in safety is not doing more safety activities; it is ensuring that safety activities influence the decisions, behaviors, and conditions are focused on the real outcomes we want.
The purpose of safety is not to create more safety programs – it is to prevent harm to people. So, to make sure that we’re really doing what we should be doing in the workplace, what are we really measuring?
- Do workers trust management?
- Do supervisors feel pressure to prioritize production over safety?
- Are workers comfortable to stop work, for a valid safety concern?
- Are critical hazards understood?
- Are we watching for warning signs of a catastrophic event being ignored?
- Why, after all our investment and effort, do serious injuries and fatalities continue to persist? What’s the root of this?
- If our current approach is producing the results we see today, and the results are not good enough, then how should we be thinking differently now?
How about beginning to shift our focus:
- Instead of asking if people are following the rules—how about, “Do people really understand the hazards?”
- Instead of asking who made the mistake—how about, “What conditions made the mistake possible?”
- Instead of asking how many audits we completed—how about, “What are the few things most likely to kill someone, and how certain are we that they are controlled?”
Compliance seeks certainty through rules. Safety Excellence seeks resilience in the face of uncertainty.
For years I’ve been sharing about the Partner-Centered Leadership process because it works. It keeps people safe and fosters relationships, plus a healthy culture – Yes, your organization can become world-class in safety.
The Safety Leadership Process(TM) described in “Partnering for Safety and Business Excellence,” helps leaders to lead their respective organizations beyond compliance, to safety excellence, with virtually zero injuries. Huge costs are saved as the waste of human suffering, injuries, and lawsuits and bad press are avoided.
You can order a copy of “Partnering for Safety and Business Excellence” on Amazon and learn more about the five simple steps to get you there!
The pain and suffering is miserable.
Changes 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.
Artificial 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.
When 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.
Lots 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.
Overlap: 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.
