Sunday, October 22, 2023
Here are some things that can limit the building of a safety culture. As managers and leaders, we are responsible for building a culture of safety in our company, in our relationships at work and on our projects. It is up to each and every one of us.
1. Fear of blame: “If I report an incident, I’ll be punished”
This is all too common in organizations today. In attempts to keep employees from getting hurt, management establishes safety rules and sanctions for breaching them. However, one of the unintended consequences of doing so is that employees may end up under-reporting noteworthy incidents for fear of being penalized. When incidents aren’t reported, management and workers lose the opportunity to learn from near misses and low-severity events.
You can help reduce this perception by creating an environment in which employees are immediately rewarded or recognized for making safe behaviors and reporting incidents or near misses. This environment encourages reporting and gets people talking about not only unsafe acts to avoid but also desired behaviors. We have processes in place to do that with our pre-task card system. It does not work however, if the supervisor and project manager do not check if they are using the pre-task cards, asking to see them when making site visits and collecting them at the end of the day. Checking to see if they wrote anything on the card for additional hazards. Also, the supervisor is supposed to be checking the boxes at the end of the day that the work was complete. the work area was picked up and the tools were put away. These are check boxes for the supervisor on every pre-task card. If an employee does list or report a near miss or an additional hazard, praise them, and if you can resolve this issue, do so immediately, and report it to the Director of Education and Loss Prevention so we can benefit from it on all projects.
2. Disempowerment: “Safety is someone else’s job”
Often, we tend to think that safety is the Director of Educations and Loss Prevention's job, or the Safety Managers Job, or the superintendent's job. Those are all true statements, but they are very limited. Safety is EVERYONE'S job and RESPONSIBILITY, and we need to help our employees understand this. As leaders you have to be careful about your speech and your actions. Try to keep in mind that we all have important jobs to do and be respectful of each job and help each other out. Little things make a huge difference. Things like…. A leader in the company making fun of a safety person in front of others, even a small group of people. What message does that send to the entire operations team about their leaders’ opinion of safety? Making fun of an employee that wants to do things safe or has questions, or bragging about how we used to do it and we were much tougher. What message do you think you are sending to your employees? If you complain about policy, or if you ask employees to do something because " corporate said to do it", then you are telling them that you don't believe in safety policies and procedures, and they shouldn't either. Not everyone will agree with every idea or policy, but as leaders, we need to make our points in discussions about improvements and changes to policies at those times when they are appropriate and helpful. Once decisions have been made and policies implemented, we ALL need to support them.
We need to let employees know that we care as much about safety as we do about profits and productivity and appearance. Encourage your employees to be safe, find ways to do things safer, encourage them to take part in building a safe work environment. Also understand the importance of getting to the root cause of accidents. Don't stop short at the employee made a mistake. Continue digging until you get the true root cause and then talk about it, be transparent and find ways to keep that from happening again. Get the employees involved. Root-cause investigations often reinforce the notion that safety is “in the hands of employees,” you must also consider management’s role in safety. In many organizations, these investigations end after leadership establishes that the employee made the wrong decision. Stopping short in this way allows management to feel there is little they could have done to prevent the incident, even though it is their job to ensure people are empowered to follow the rules. More thorough investigations consider potential factors behind the bad decision, such as fatigue or distraction. An even better approach takes a broader look at causes of injuries and incidents to identify structural levers that managers can use to make better decisions.
3. Trade-off: “Safe means less productive”
A safety and productivity are often perceived as antagonists. Most employees come to work to “get things done” and feel satisfied when they hit their targets. Unless management signals that safety is the priority, employees may conclude that it is acceptable to focus on productivity at the expense of safety. Encourage your employees to ask questions, give them 100 percent of the tools, information and material they need to perform every task. Often the low amount of productivity has nothing to with safety and everything to do with not having done complete and proper preplanning, tasks laid out and material staged in advance of the work. Think about what it really takes to get work done and make sure you are giving your employee realistic expectations. Never accept an employee taking a short cut to safety save time. Every time you see something like that, SAY SOMETHING IMMEDIATELY. Take the time once per week to assess how your employees are doing.... are they submitting JHAs, are they submitting energized work permits, are they taking safety seriously, are you getting feedback from the employees that they are being safe, and that site supervision is making that a priority? Do you, as a manager, know the safety policies and procedures? Have to taken the time to look them up when starting a new project? Do you know if your supervisors are following the corporate safety policies?
4. Fatalism: “Injuries are part of the job”
In focus groups for new employees at another industrial company, workers said they were shocked at the wide gap between what they learned in orientation and what happened in the field. Other employees had come to accept this discrepancy, telling the new employees to “forget the safety stuff you learned in the classroom, or we’ll never get anything done out here.” Ask yourself...Are these statements and thoughts that happen on your projects? Are these things that you have heard from your crew or supervisors?
This learned tolerance to risk has to do with the pervasive belief that some risks can’t be mitigated. This mind-set is common—even in organizations where managers claim to have signed up for “zero safety incidents.” It is also very common in the electrical industry. Managers often haven’t made the effort to understand the implications of aiming for zero. For example, the manager or supervisor may have given the crew enough time to perform an activity safely, using good practices and then laid out the crew without explaining that to them. They may tell the crew we have to get this done so let's get out there and knock it out. The crew may understand that instruction that it has to be done quickly and proceed to take shortcuts to get it done. Take the time to explain the plan, the deadlines and the processes that you have designed into the plan so everyone understands.
5. Complacency: “Cultural change takes time”
Many managers assume it takes years for a culture to change. Even those managers committed to change often have low expectations about the pace of improvement, while the uncommitted engage in passive resistance—they wait things out. In either case, the results are the same: a failure to enlist key influencers, generate momentum, and deliver the early wins critical for successful transformations. We can make safety a culture if we as leaders all take safety seriously and communicate it with our words and actions. The pace of change is up to us.
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