Workplace Safety is the Leading Edge of a Culture of Accountability

“What do you want me to do, save money or save lives? You can't have it both ways.” This quote comes from a frustrated manager who feels whipsawed by these competing values. Of course he knows the company line, “Safety comes first,” but then he adds, “But we're not in business to be safe. We're in business to build product.”

Many organizations face this challenge; they value safety, but maintaining a safe workplace often provides little strategic advantage. It's easy to find ROI reasons to fund productivity, quality and efficiency, but safety is a costly line item and can be hard to justify on paper.

Of course, there are business reasons for maintaining a safe workplace. Injuries also are costly, and in some industries a poor safety record can disqualify a company for new bids and contracts. But in most organizations, workplace safety is considered more an issue of values than of business.

We have spent the last several years studying organizations that have “broken the code” on safety — firms that have extraordinary safety records — and we have an amazing discovery to report. But first, a bit of background:

We were working with Mike Wildfong, general manager at TI Automotive, a firm with an exceptional safety record. Mike and his team maintain an obsessive focus on keeping people safe. Here's how he explained this focus: “I use safety as the leading edge of accountability. We need accountability to achieve the quality, productivity and cost targets we set. But I start with safety. If I can't achieve accountability around safety, then I can't achieve accountability around anything.”

Wildfong and the other safety-focused executives we studied use safety as an accountability incubator. They build a culture of accountability, where everyone holds everyone accountable for safe practices. The brilliant leap they make is that once you've achieved this level of accountability around safety, you can employ it to improve quality, productivity, cost control, customer service … everything!

Wildfong and his peers deny there's a tradeoff between saving money and saving lives. They argue that the reverse is true: In their experience, it's not whether you hold people accountable for saving money or for saving lives that matters. It's whether you hold them accountable at all. They believe managers who hold employees accountable succeed at everything — safety, quality, productivity, etc. Likewise, managers who don't hold employees accountable fail at everything.

We put this idea to the test by examining 420 supervisors and managers, divided into two groups. The leaders in the first group were selected because they held their people accountable for every aspect of safety. The leaders in the second group were selected because they did not. We wanted to test whether there were tradeoffs between safety and other priorities or whether accountability in safety predicted success across all priorities.

The findings couldn't be more dramatic. When we compared the 20 percent of leaders who focused the most on safety to the other 80 percent, the safety-focused leaders were five times more likely to be in the top 20 percent on productivity, quality, efficiency and employee satisfaction.

Our data clearly shows that being the best in workplace safety makes you the best in each of these other areas. And these results hold true across industries as different as oil and gas exploration, chemical manufacturing, power generation and construction. Regardless of the industry, the leaders who are best at holding their people accountable for safety also achieve the best quality, productivity and efficiency.

This study shows the strategic importance of the norms, skills and behaviors involved in accountability. It's clearly an area every leader should master. But what does it mean to master accountability?

ACCOUNTABILITY IS NOT ABOUT BLAME

Some leaders believe accountability is all about blame and punishment. Find the guilty party and punish him or her. Is this what our high accountability leaders were doing? To find out, we measured each leader along two dimensions.

1. The analytical side of accountability: Did the leader tend to analyze safety problems by singling out and blaming or by diagnosing and understanding?

2. The interpersonal side of accountability: Did the leader tend to resolve safety problems by threatening and punishing or by explaining and involving?

Our high-accountability leaders were 3.4 times more likely than the rest to emphasize explaining, involving, diagnosing and understanding techniques when faced with safety concerns. They proactively uncovered problems, spoke up when they had concerns, diagnosed the causes of problems, reached decisions on solutions and followed up to ensure success. Many used quality tools like the “5 Whys” and communication training tools like Crucial Conversations to understand and address accountability issues that, if left unresolved, would have led to an increase of errors and accidents. Perhaps this is why these high accountability leaders also led the pack in employee satisfaction.