9 Ways to Improve Safety Performance in your Organization

 

1. Leadership Commitment

I’ve worked with many organizations and figured out that the most important element in safety is the commitment from top leadership, without their commitment, no organization can achieve the level of safety they desire for. It gives employees a sense of responsibility when they see their leaders preaching and practicing safety in every aspect of business.

In any organization, it is the leaders who drive the cultural change by inspiring and influencing other employees with their actions and Felt Leadership. Many leaders show their commitment but get in conflict when the rest of the employees see their actions and words not aligned, in simple words – they do not walk the talk.

2. Understand your employee’s Mindset & Behavior

Many organizations have safety improvement initiatives in place that help them monitor their employee’s safe and unsafe acts; one way is to develop a behavior-based safety program. All these improvement initiatives will be useless if you don’t understand what is going on behind the brains of your employees, why people do what they do? What drives their actions? What are their values, beliefs, and attitude? The answer to these questions lies in cognitive human psychology. The approach towards improving safety nowadays has stepped beyond behavior-based safety, organizations now conduct Values, Attitudes and Beliefs (VAB) study to understand their employees better and work it around.

3. Make your employees accountable for Safety

Safety is not just the leader’s responsibility, it is everyone’s responsibility. Employees at all levels should understand their role in safety and participate in safety improvement initiatives. Leadership should hold employees accountable for non-performance or engaging in unsafe acts.

All employees must understand that the ultimate goal of implementing safety rules is to save lives, and at the end of the day it is beneficial for them, no one else.

4. Understand, analyze and eliminate risks involved in the process, technology and facility

Many leaders ask me this question; our employees have the real sense of personal safety, why do they still get hurt? Well, if your employees are well committed to personal safety but are still getting hurt, then there must be something wrong with the process, technology, or the facility they operate in.

This is one area that can be addressed by a well-balanced Process Safety Management program. Many organizations just perform a HAZOP of PHA study and feels they have completed their compliance obligation. Process Safety is much broader than just HAZOP or PHA. It contains 14-elements that help organizations completely eliminate hazards from any operations such as PSSR, Mechanical Integrity, Incident Investigation, Emergency Response and Planning, Management of Change etc.

5. Too many improvement initiatives? Integrate them

If you’re an organization with too many improvement initiatives, you might find your employees telling each other, I have too much on my plate and can’t focus at my ultimate role.

When an organization adopts different programs from different consulting firms, it sometimes creates confusion too, because all these programs carry different approaches towards safety. To align your approach with your vision, you need to integrate these approaches and develop one integrated system that allows employees to speak one language.

6. Have a well-trained incident investigation team

I have seen many incident investigation reports, in many cases; the root cause is way too far from reality. Safety personnel need to understand the importance of the real and accurate findings, because these findings will eventually help the organization solve the real problem. Moreover, an incomplete or inaccurate report can lead us to a direction that has nothing to do with reality, and eventually waste of time, and demotivated employees because your corrective and preventive actions will deeply depend on the initial findings from investigating team.

In many cases, we perform the why tree analysis, blame the employee and close the case. In my experience, if we dig a bit more, we will find the real problem. For example, an employee was rushing to finish his job before the end of the shift and got himself hurt on the machine. The team investigated and blamed the employee for the incident; however, no one noticed why was he actually rushing? Whereas his supervisor has given him a heavy production goal to achieve before the end of his shift and he was trying to achieve that goal. So, what was the root cause here?

7. Make use of technology; get a Safety Management System in place

If an organization in today’s technological world tells me that they still use those old school Microsoft Excel data sheets to monitor and track their progress on safety, my advice to them will be to get a Safety Management Software System, it’s worth spending some cash for the value it provides. Your time worth millions that can be spent on other important activities rather entering data manually into excel sheets.

A Safety Management System can make your life easier in many ways, it helps you automate the whole process, all your safety policies and programs gets into one integrated system, your employees know where exactly they can find information they need, your leaders know what reports they need to look into, it helps you track progress in a timely manner and you don’t need to run over half a million files in your computer to look for one policy. It’s all there, just one click away.

8. Recognize and reward employees for their contribution to safety

Ever wonder what a motivated employee can contribute to your organization? Recognizing and rewarding your employees is another key area that can lead to success. Many organizations turn strict on their employees for unsafe activities; some even get to the extent where they fire them.

This will only create fear among them, and they will only follow rules because they are asked to, not because they want to. This is what distinguishes compliance from commitment.

What I have seen in organizations with world-class safety culture is different, they motivate and reward their employees with safe behavior in such a way that inspire others and eventually change their behavior towards safety too. Many times, companies reward their employees with cash, but this has a negative impact. Too much of cash rewards can encourage employees to hide the real facts because they want to win cash.

9. Train your employees regularly on safety

Even your best people need a refresher after some time to keep them on track. The best way people learn in any organization is through its culture, but again, your employees at some point will turn complacent at their job and complacency is the most dangerous form of hazard. Refresher training can teach them some new techniques on how to be safe at work, plus it will remind them of their role in safety.

At the end of the day, safety is all about care, saving lives, families and the society we operate in.

 

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