Category: Safety Management Series

When beginning a journey, the two most important things to know are: where are you now and where do you want to go. Next, you need a map to see how to get from here to there.

When building a positive safety culture in the workplace, you must begin by assessing where you are right now in respect to workplace safety. Total Case Incident Rate or TCIR is a good indicator. Take the total cases of workplace injury and illness and divide by the number of man hours. Then, multiply the result by 200,000. This number allows you to compare your safety ratings with other facilities while adjusting for the number of employees.

Compare your TCIR rate to other facilities in your industry and with other types of work. If your number is higher, then you know you are not doing as well as others in similar conditions. See what you can learn from them. If your number is already lower, then you may have to look at more advanced safety management systems to lower your score.

Next, take some time to creatively visualize what a safe workplace looks like. Do you see safe work practices as interfering with production? Or, do you see employees working efficiently and safely making quality products at minimal cost? You need a clear vision of where you want to go before you can map out how you plan to get there.

When building a safety culture into the work environment, you need to establish safe work practices. Often, safety procedures are made separate from the work instructions. In facilities with a strong safety culture, the work instructions include the steps to do the job safely and efficiently to produce quality product.

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One of the most important steps you will take along the journey to building a safety culture is to establish the safest and most efficient procedures for all work practices. After these procedures are in place, it becomes the job of supervision and audit teams to ensure that the procedures are followed. If the work practices change, then the procedures are rewritten to reflect the changes. Separate safety inspections will no longer be needed as the safest way to do the job has already been established.

When mapping out a course to create a safe work environment, it is very tempting to make a detour through accident avoidance. However, if you want to take the most direct path to building a safe work culture, you will want to go directly to creating safe work practices and not get bogged down at trying to avoid accidents. Most experienced safety professionals will tell you that anytime you implement an accident avoidance plan, you will end up with more accidents before you get your plan in place. So, my advice is to head directly to creating safe work practices and steer clear of all types of accident avoidance systems.

Focus your energy into visualizing a safe work environment. Most often, this place is a clean, bright, well organized facility. It is always a facility where workers are well trained and know how to perform their jobs. These workers take pride in producing quality product and enjoy coming to work each day. They also enjoy leaving each day with all their body parts intact, so they can enjoy their off time. When a positive work environment is created, then there is no need for a separate safety program. A strong safety culture will evolve as the rest of the work experience becomes more positive.

The first steps are to establish what are you going to measure. What are the measures that you can apply that will indicate the level of safety performance? Firstly, we must eliminate the measurement of injuries and the severity of injuries because they are a byproduct of safety performance. Although they are very popular measures, eventually they will reinforce the wrong behavior because of under reporting, minimizing the effects, or just not reporting the accident and allocating the injuries to out of work situations. This means that we have to measure other things that are indicators of workplace safety. We would suggest that the presence of safe conditions and the demonstration of safe behavior would be reasonable criteria for measurements.

Once this has been established as the basis for measuring safety, then it’s necessary to include the people in the workplace to set a series of goals. This can be quite a challenging task because sometimes some people have difficulty in grasping the concept of safety after years of focus on accidents. We have found it best to engage staff members in conversation about safety and gently put forward the proposition of safety.

Most of the time it is accepted but occasionally there are people who have accepted the historical emphasis on accidents as a prime indicator of safety. One of the ways of strengthening your case is to ask this thought-provoking question, “Is it possible to work unsafely without having an accident?” You will generally find that the answer may create some discussion but eventually you will get agreement. You can then gently point out that unsafe behavior does not always result in an accident and therefore the accidents are not a good measure, but the unsafe behavior is.

Once you’ve got agreement from the majority of people, it’s worthwhile having a meeting to set some goals and standards with them. The most effective way is to ask the group what they believe the end goal should be and what are the milestones on the way to the goal. When this is been established, it is wise to review what needs to be achieved and how it is going to be achieved.

Beware of setting goals that are too difficult and ambitious. The reason is that the goal will not be positively reinforcing because it is too difficult. This will have the effect of demotivating the people which is the opposite of your objective. Make the goals achievable and then spend some time discussing what the recognition will be, how frequently will it be applied and at what point do you have a celebration.

Plan all this in advance so that there will be a degree of anticipation generated. Make sure that you put in opportunities for discussion and review during the process.

Setting Standards With Staff is a Key Leadership Responsibility

An area that troubles many people in leadership positions is the standards that they should set for performance. It is true, if you expect the worst from people you generally get their worst. If you don’t expect the best performance from your people, it’s unlikely that they will give you their best performance. The dilemma for the leader is that just expecting the best performance will not automatically produce it. The leader has to do other things as well. However, in not expecting the best usually produces a negative result. Expecting the best from people means that you have to explain what you expect and discuss how it is going to be achieved.

Check Out: S.M.A.R.T. Goals Guide

In the process of discussing the accountabilities of the individual, you also work with them to establish mutually acceptable standards of performance. You can use this opportunity to subtly motivate these people by involving them and letting them tell you what they think they can achieve. In many pieces of research and study, it has been stated that staff members complained their supervisors don’t expect enough from them. These studies have shown that the staff members tend to expect more and set higher standards for themselves than their managers or supervisors.

Often when leaders discuss setting goals and standards with their staff, they have to persuade them not to set their standards and their goals too high and make them achievable. Experienced leaders always follow this path of setting standards and goals with their staff because they know that people are more likely to commit themselves to decisions that they make them to decisions which are made for them or prescribed them.

Because experienced employees usually know what to do and how to do it and they normally take pride in their work, letting them set their own standards will boost their motivation.

One of the most effective ways of getting the best from people is to let them reach for increasingly higher standards, to compete against the standard rather than other people. However, restraint may be required to ensure that people do not set themselves unrealistic standards and goals because that is the way that disappointment occurs and the motivation vanishes.

As soon as the target is too difficult, people’s will to achieve it diminishes dramatically. It’s important to not only set targets but also set milestones on the way. Each milestone reached is an opportunity to celebrate. When you celebrate reaching the milestone your motivation increases. If the milestone is reached and nothing happens, your motivation will diminish rapidly.

It is very important to help your staff to emphasize that you need flexible, objective and realistic performance standards. One of the ways of achieving this is to set a range rather than a fixed point for achievement.

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Leadership Influence in the Workplace is the Driver for Managing Performance

Performance management teaches managers and leaders how to influence behavior. When you think about it, the behavior of people is the only way anything gets done in business.

If leaders don’t understand behavior management methods and can’t apply them consciously and correctly they are almost certainly decreasing some behaviors, they want and increasing some behaviors they don’t want.

Every single accomplishment that takes place in any organization is dependent on behavior. Consequently, the one thing that executives, managers and supervisors should know the most about is human behavior. No business or organization can survive and grow without knowing the conditions under which people do their best.

Every management system ever devised to bring out the best in people will fail if it violates the basic laws of human behavior.

Most of us look at the behavior of other people and wonder why they do certain things. We look for the answer in what happened directly before the behavior in question. In other words, we think that the behavior was caused. It was motivated by some sort of internal or external force driving need or desire.

When you understand behavior analysis you will realize that a person does things because of what happens to them when they do it. In other words, because of the behavior is not because of the conditions prior to the behavior but what happens and immediately after the behavior.

Now, it might seem that scientific methods to change behavior are not practical for front-line leaders. But it is actually the most practical way to manage people.

Everybody knows that people don’t do what we tell them to do. Yet we run our businesses as though all the performance and productivity problems are caused by people who don’t know what to do, don’t want to do or simply don’t care. So, we try and find better ways of telling them what to do. A good example of this is training courses. We put people on training courses and tell them what to do. Then when they don’t do it, we blame the training course or the unwilling course members. We don’t understand how people learn.

When our behavior changes the environment in some way that we like, we repeat it. And when we do something that changes in the environment that we don’t like, we stop it. Every single thing we do produces a consequence for us.

If a company has got productivity problems, quality problems, cost problems then the behaviors associated with those undesirable outcomes are being reinforced. This is not theory, this is reality.

People don’t resist change provided the change delivers an immediate positive consequence for them.

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We know that the best reinforcement is positive immediate and certain. Peers are the most effective source of reinforcement at work and the most underutilized. They are in the best position to deliver positive and immediate reinforcement. They can observe performance more closely and more often than managers or supervisors. The whole concept of teams has missed the concept of peer reinforcement and as a result has met with little success in improving overall organizational performance.

When peers recognize that they can and should be a major source of reinforcement for each other, improvements occur more frequently, much faster and last much longer.

Before you can introduce a change to your safety culture you have to make sure that you know exactly what it is currently. Remember that a culture is built up over a period through behavior, anecdotes, stories, boundaries of behavior, way of doing things, events that pass without comment, events that cause problems and so on. It is a complex, multi-layered element in the workplace and the belief system about safety has had contributions from all these factors. It is not a single entity but rather a combination of many things that are all intertwined, they are not separate.

The first thing you do is find out what your current safety culture represents, then you must look at what you want it to be in the future and design a plan to bridge the gap. The changes that you want to make may not be big changes but a series of small changes. If you find that there is a major change to be made, break it down into smaller elements. It is strongly advised that this planning exercise include the staff that are going to be affected.

In the back of your mind the reasons why most people resist change in the workplace. People don’t like change because normally, they are not involved in it and the change is imposed on them. This lack of involvement is probably the greatest reason why people resent change and actively fight against it. When this happens, these people will perceive the consequences of the change to be negative and they will persuade anyone that will listen that the change is of no benefit to anyone.

So, planning your change means that you must involve your people as well. And one of the ways of doing this is to get them to look at the current situation and take out the undesirable parts and recommend alternatives. Then you’re able to ask them to help design a vision for the future. If you can get their cooperation at this stage, you are well on the way to establishing a process of change that can be repeated in the future.

Once the vision for the future has been established and discussed, you can then ask your staff about the process of bridging the gap and delegate some of the tasks. You will find that there will be a degree of enthusiasm for change when you follow this process and you will find that this enthusiasm is infectious.

The actual changes themselves can be timetabled by the staff and progress can be discussed in group meetings as a form of feedback.

Check Out: Safety Training Is About Behavior Change

How Good Leadership Will Overcome Resistance to Change

Firstly, we must understand that people in leadership positions are constantly dealing with change. Change is part of being a leader. Sometimes it is the design of change but more frequently it’s the implementation of change. Because of poor planning and a failure to sell the need for change, a myth of considerable proportions has developed in the business world. We are told that people naturally resist change. This has become a major concern for most businesses and many have invested millions learning how to “manage change.”

We are continually bombarded with rhetoric about the urgency and acceleration of change in today’s “fast-paced business world.” The fact is people don’t resist change if the change provides immediate positive consequences for them. Properly presented change and immediate consequences that are both certain and positive is the recipe to ensure that change is readily accepted and supported.

Think about it this way, nobody resists change when the immediate consequences favor it. “Do it this way, and you won’t hurt your fingers.” “Hold it this way, and you will be able to see it better.” “Move your right hand this way, and you will be able to hit the ball straight.” If the correct behavior follows these instructions, and positive consequences occur, you will not have a difficult time getting people to accept change in those situations.

It is only in situations where the immediate consequences of change are punishing, or when the new behavior is not immediately reinforced, that you run into trouble. Often, we are so busy trying to cope with a new environment because of change that we forget to use positive reinforcement to cement it in.

Regrettably, most organizations have a list of historical events where the implementation of change has failed. Because of this, subsequent and future changes are met with a less than enthusiastic approach by the people who are going to be affected by the change. They have learned that change has got unpleasant consequences. Our failure to take an intelligent approach to change has built an environment that actively resists change. The only way we can overcome this is to build trust and this can only occur if our words and actions match. Better leadership that creates an environment of trust will also create an organization that accepts change as part of business life.

Almost every corporate initiative impacts the performer negatively at first. While the staff member may understand that there are long-term benefits to the company and to the individual personally, the immediate consequences of doing things differently are usually negative. New behaviors require extra effort to learn, result in increased mistakes, cause the performers to get behind in their other work, and create stress because people fear they won’t be able to learn or perform as well under new conditions.

To make change a positive experience, we need to be less concerned with managing the change and become much more attentive to managing the consequences associated with change.

How Leaders Use Persuasion to Introduce Change

Introducing change is one of the primary functions of leadership, however, introducing change is a process that can be exceptionally difficult. Resistance to change tends to come from the leader. When change exposes individuals to failure and punishment, they resist. However, when change exposes the individual to positive reinforcement, they actively seek it out. Resistance to change is the indication to the leader that something is wrong with the methods being used to achieve change.

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If, during the process of change positive reinforcement is not used or misdirected, resistance will be the result. Effective leaders use a variety of methods of persuasion to create the need for change. One of the most successful tactics is to take a process and ask the question, “Is there a better or smarter way of doing this job?” This question can be posed either to individuals or groups.

Sometimes, it is posed slightly differently making the assumption that there is a better or smarter way. “What is the better or smarter way of doing this job?” When you ask this question you are not necessarily looking for an instant solution, you are provoking thought. Often you have to ask the question more than once and then when you have a selection of answers ask your team which is the most practical and potentially effective one. During the resulting discussion the solution may even undergo a process of refinement and improvement.

Obviously the next question is, “Who is going to do it, how will they do it and when is it going to get done?” The element of persuasion which is being used by the leader is indirect. He or she may know the answers but will refrain from offering a solution. It is a deliberate attempt to involve the group in the solution and come up with ideas to make the job easier, safer, quicker or improve quality. If the leader has sufficient patience, the answers will come from the group. This has the added advantage that they will continue to think about the process even after the change has been installed.

The alternative to this process is one of prescribing change and managing it closely to ensure compliance and implementation. By asking questions the leader has involved the group in the solutions as well as the process of change. This is a much more effective way of managing the process of change by using the group members to come up with solutions and be involved in the implementation. Although this will not completely eradicate resistance it will minimize the effect of it. After several changes have been installed the group will trust the process and accept it readily provided there is sufficient and frequent positive reinforcement.