How can we talk about safety in such a way that everyone doesn't get sick of hearing about it and therefore stop listening? Stick to developing, maintaining, and improving the safety process.
Instead of barraging your employees and managers with information, it's important to talk about safety effectively.
Talking of safety
It never ceases to amaze us how many people want to talk about safety. Injuries are a concern for everyone and hits at our emotions. Injuries affect virtually everyone in the organisation and at home. Nobody wants to see anyone hurt and nobody wants to get hurt.
Think about what it means to focus on the safety process rather than on emotions. First, understand what the emotions of safety are.
The emotions of safety
Far too often, safety is viewed as, and dealt with, in an emotional way. Management gets frustrated when injuries start happening and sooner or later they come out swinging "the safety hammer". Pressure mounts and management steps-up discipline (or corrective action).
Not too long ago, we ran into a colleague who is a safety director for a large company. An employee was fatally injured and two others had experienced serious injuries. The safety director had tried for years to get the attention of management about needed improvements without success. Now, everyone was a safety expert; every executive has the answer - and none of their answers are the same. It's mass confusion.
When this kind of situation emerges, everything becomes a mess. Finger pointing abounds and people choose sides. Employees often begin to be fearful of retribution and decide not to report incidents or injuries. It's important to diffuse the situation by focusing on the safety process.
The process of safety
In order to maintain safety at a level that prevents injuries, we have to work on dealing with the emotional issues so that decisions to work safe become objective. It's important to recognise that safety is both art and science and needs to be treated as such.
- The "art" is about dealing with people - establishing accountabilities, holding them responsible and building trust.
- The "science" of safety is about dealing with behavioural and technical processes.
Hazard control is an example of a process that includes both behavioural and technical aspects. The technical process of safety involves identifying the hazard, abating or controlling it, engineering it so that it no longer exists, or changing work processes to include use of protective or personal protective equipment.
When a hazard control has been established, practiced, and proven over time, workers and leaders accept it as normal and it becomes "common sense" safety. Yet historically, the changes had to become accepted - some after a long period of time.
What would happen if workers in your organisation listed the hazards they face every day, and identified and quickly adopted a solution without emotion? The ability of an organisation to function without emotion and make correct decisions depends on the availability of internal leadership.
Best practice
Here are three actions that can help workers and leaders discuss the "best practices" with regard to hazard control:
- Have every work team (usually no more that 20 people) meet and facilitate a session asking this question: What hazards does our team face each day that can cause an injury to people and equipment?
List these on the far left side of flip chart paper. Your work team could easily fill more than a dozen sheets. Next...
- Ask the team: What rules and safe work practices do we use to prevent injury to people and equipment? (If you have a company safety book, use it for a resource)
Write the responses from team members next to the hazard. Make sure everyone participates and understands the controls. Then...
- Ask the team: Which of these controls can we agree that we will always do? I want to put a check mark beside them.
Most of the time the response will be "All of them!". Discuss this at length with the team and confirm that they understand that always using these controls will provide a 99.9% probability that, "nobody will get hurt".
Employee involvement means a safe workplace
This kind of employee involvement will pay the highest safety dividend possible: elimination of injuries. While it involves a lot of discussion, it is the right kind of talk. Research shows that employees who challenge themselves individually and as a group will come up with difficult goals and will do what it takes to achieve their targets.
Use this exercise to promote employees to create a workplace where nobody gets hurt.