Mind-Shifting Into Safety Excellence

In his book, First Break All the Rules, Gallop Organization Lead Consultant Marcus Buckingham summarizes the group's research on peak performance with this key finding: “Excellence isn't the opposite of mediocrity.

This finding suggests that average (mediocre) performance can't be elevated to excellence by doing more of the same faster, harder, longer or higher; new strategies are needed. This advice, however, has been largely ignored in safety. Businesses remain complacent in doing the S.O.S.S. — “Same Old Safety S----“ (Stuff), and are paying a high price for the lackluster results produced by traditional approaches.

Safety excellence organizations aren't just “luckier” than most other organizations; they differ from their peers in two very distinct ways. First, they achieve significantly different (better) results, and second, they do significantly different (best practice) things. Most importantly, they recognize that the two are linked! Excellence companies have insights on excellence that are very different from most.

Based on numerous occasions I've worked with safety excellence organizations (and hundreds more that are not safety excellence organizations), I've been able to look inside the mindset of excellence. The following six organizational mind shifts are common to the best — and separate them from the rest.

MIND SHIFT NO. 1

This is a shift from measuring safety by incident rates to valuing safety in hard dollars.

Let me share an opinion with you: “The biggest impediment to safety excellence is the use of incident rates as the driving measure of performance.” — Dan Zahlis

Now, let me tell you why this is true. I'll start with a career question for all safety professionals: “What do your CEO and CFO value most — reduction in rates or reduction in costs?” I'll bet most of you picked costs, and I agree. Why then do so many companies emphasize incident rates as the driving metric of safety performance?

Dan's answer (without hesitation): “Because incident rates are easy to manipulate, and they make management look good.” I agree.

Here's another question: Would you like to know how to significantly improve your safety performance without investing any additional time, money or resources? My answer: Start lying; no joke. Safety & Health magazine recently asked its readership: “Do you believe occupational injuries in the United States are underreported?” A resounding 86.3 percent of respondents answered “yes.”

Need more convincing? ORC, a prominent EHS consulting firm, convened a task team of over 50 of their clients to assess the effectiveness of safety measurement in today's practice. They conclude that incident rates are not an accurate safety and health measure, and that the more pressure we put on them, the less accurate they become.

At a seminar I presented a while ago, the issue of safety measurement prompted quite a lively discussion. A safety engineer from the petroleum refining industry commented that her facility had just achieved an incident rate of .50, the lowest rate ever achieved in the history of that facility. Another attendee blurted out: “Heck, we'd kill for a rate like that.” Little did any one of us know at that time that just weeks later, that refinery in Texas City, Texas, would be the site of one of this nation's greatest catastrophic events resulting in multiple fatalities and over 100 serious injuries. But, but, but … the incident rate!

Dan Zahlis, founder of the Active Agenda project, formerly was regional risk manager for the Häagen-Dazs Co. When he took that position, his most immediate challenge was to reduce high workers' comp costs generated by the California facility. He discovered that corporate-imposed incident rate measurements had frustrated supervisors because they were held accountable for something over which they had little control, had created employee cynicism because workers knew that numbers were suspect and had driven real problems and near-miss events underground until they ultimately surfaced as costly injuries. Dan's solution was to buck the corporate IR measurement and implement what he calls the ultimate safety metric — an average loss cost calculated by the following formula:

Average Loss Cost = Total cost of all incidents/Total number of all incidents

By “incidents,” Dan meant them all: near misses, first aid, medical only, restricted duty and disabling. His goal was to build trust and remove cynicism by removing the negative consequences associated with reporting, which in turn would expose real problems and foster real safety progress.

The genius of this metric is that the only two ways it can be improved is by increasing the number of incidents reported (exposing hidden problems), or by reducing total costs (forcing better management of employee claims). Dan actually imposed a “pay for reports” incentive program to increase the number of incidents reported. While at the plant for a contractor issue, an OSHA inspector asked to see the company's OSHA log. Once Dan shared the strategy with him, the inspector smiled and passed Dan his card with home telephone number, and said, “Call me. Let's have coffee some time.”

By the end of the first year, the plant reported 33 percent more claims, but produced a 30 percent reduction in claim costs. And, of course, Dan was fired for bucking corporate policy … dumb bastard! The story has a happy ending: Dan went on to a Dole Foods Division where he applied the same approach and reduced loss costs from $385,000 to $30,000 in the first year.

MIND SHIFT NO. 2

A shift in belief from people are the problem to the recognition that process is the solution.

In his article, “Serious Injuries & Fatalities: A Call for a New Focus on Their Prevention” (Professional Safety, December 2008), Fred Manuele describes the difficulty safety professionals have in identifying causes and predictors of severe injury events. He concludes that incident reports seldom reveal the core causal factors of the incidents, and observed, after analyzing over 1,200 incident investigation reports: “The quality of the incident investigation reports reviewed was, on average, abysmal. A large percentage of the investigations stopped when human error — the so-called unsafe act — was identified and corrective action focused on modifying worker behavior. The investigations seldom proceeded upward into the decision-making that may have influenced what the worker did.”

Safety excellence organizations reject the myth-conception that accidents are caused by what people do, or P.D.D.T. (People Doing Dumb Things). They believe that accident causes are embedded in why people do what they do. They seek to discover and remedy the real reasons for poor performance, including leadership values, organizational processes, organizational structure and management practices

MIND SHIFT NO. 3

This is a shift from safety as reactive (after-the-fact activities) to safety as preemptive — a strategically planned business improvement process.