safety values in the workplace | Safety Excellence For Business

Our safety industry is huge and makes a lot of good contributions across millions of businesses to help to make workplaces safer.

There is no question that thousands of safety people are trying their best for a safer workplace.

It seems to me that with all this effort we should see fewer injuries and deaths, but over the last 10 years the number of people being killed and injured has not gone down and is stuck at about 5,200 fatalities and 2,500,000 injuries year (based on BLS statistics). Everyone agrees that this is NOT okay – yet even with focused effort there has been no breakthrough. Why?

The safety industry is currently working with organizations as if they are machines with linear work processes that can be taken apart and have the parts optimized. There have been thousands of change processes trying to do this, but successes have been limited. This approach is okay for simple situations, but our challenge is with complex systems where many people and parts are interacting all the time. In this situation, trying to fix a part like safety does not work because the whole system pushes back and spoils it.

When I was a plant manager, I found that in two different plants that shifting from seeing and working with the organizations as if they were a machine to seeing and working with them as if they were a living system made a huge difference. In learning to lead this way, the entire organization changes for the better.

This approach is based on the belief that most people want to do better and that they are intelligent and can make good decisions about their work. We created the conditions where it was safe to think and talk together, share information, and encourage them to make decisions close to their work. The whole system changed for the better, not just the safety (the injury rates dropped by over 90 %).

When I moved into my 30-year career of helping organizations to improve, I have seen similar progress. Not only did the performance improve, it happened quickly.

Making the Safety Shift…

Each organization can begin to make the shift and do this. The site managers and leaders need to be on board. The safety people can be a major help in this shift since they work across the organizations having access to many people at different levels. They can tell the success stories and encourage people to begin to work together in new ways.

This begins with treating people with respect, listening to them, and learning together. The people working close to the work have a lot of valuable information to share and build upon. Managers shift their focus from trying to control the work to trying to support the shift in culture.

Right now, for example, safety people can begin to work this way by having focused conversations with the people about how to handle heat stress in their workplaces. What ideas do they have to improve their working conditions? What can they do to make things better? You can encourage and support them to do the needed work.

There is Help Available for a Safer Workplace…

I have developed a way of working with the people in organizations which I call Partner-Centered Leadership. My book, “The Leadership Dance,” available from Amazon, is a place to start. I also have some YouTube videos that will help.

You may also like to read this article, Faces of EHS: Richard Knowles on Being People-Focused.

If you concur that it is NOT okay for workplaces to be killing 5,200 people every year and injuring 2,500,000 people too, and want to make sure your workplace isn’t among the statistics, please connect with me at RNKnowles@aol.com or call me at 716-622-6467. I’ll share with you how your organization can achieve business and safety excellence at the same time.

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!

Beyond Compliance: Safer Workplace Culture

Our safety industry is huge and makes a lot of good contributions across millions of businesses to help to make workplaces safer.

Making the Safety Shift…

There is Help Available for a Safer Workplace…

YOU are the Reason…for safety in the workplace

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.

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