Safety Excellence | Safety Excellence For Business

Shifting the Safety Culture to Excellence

October 3, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

When we work together with our people, we can shift the safety culture.

self organizing leadership culture The first part of this work is sharing all information and talking together about it. Another part is building trust and interdependence with the people as we openly discuss what is happening, what we are doing and why. The third part of this work is helping people to see the big picture and how important their part is to the success of the whole business.

These are the core elements of Self-Organizing Leadership. When we co-create our Safety Strategic Plan™ using the Process Enneagram©, we produce a living strategic plan that we use going forward. We keep it posted, talk about it weekly and modify it as things change.

We have found that walking around and talking with, rather than at, our people often feels new and awkward for many managers. It takes some practice and persistence.

Being in dialogue with the people makes us feel exposed and uncertain. Sometimes people ask questions we can’t answer. That is okay – just get the answer and go back to talk some more. This is not a spectator sport. There is a Spanish saying, “It is a lot easier to talk about the bull than be in the ring.” Yet, this walking around and talking and listening together is key to our success. In these conversations we are building the BOWL. This is the container that holds the organization together. It consists of our vision, mission, principles, standards, and expectations. As people learn to function within the BOWL, they find the freedom to create new solutions to problems, taking the lead to solve them and become leaders.

When the culture shifts in this way, the people begin to see other things that they can do to improve the business. Quality problems that were once ignored get solved. Cost problems that lingered get fixed. Customer issues among the plant and their customers, like delivery requirements, get solved. Turn-around times between production campaigns needed to clean and re-pipe the equipment drop from weeks to just days. I have seen all these things happen.

When the safety culture gets right then everything gets right! Moving to safety excellence becomes the leading wave for total cultural change to excellence.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: creating a safety culture, safe work environment, safety excellence process, Self-Organizing Leadership

Changing Safety Culture

September 18, 2014 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

I am becoming more and more focused on changing the safety culture of organizations. There are lots of training programs and fine instructors teaching all aspects of safety technology. Yet our organizations still have to deal with a lot of people getting hurt.

Most people don’t come to work expecting to get hurt. Most organizations want people to work safely. I think a large part of our challenge to moving towards safety excellence is the way our organization’s culture influences how people decide to work together, or not.

safety excellence in business leadership Most of the safety people I’ve come to know approach organizations as if they are mechanical things to manipulate. Organizations are structured in functions. Knowledge is structured in pieces. People are narrowly skilled. Motivation is based on external factors. Information is shared on a need to know basis. Change is a troubling problem. People work in prescribed roles seeing only their part of the work. If change is needed people are moved around like chairs. Training is provided in abundance. Safety programs are set up as step-by-step processes where things are arranged in a prescribed sequence.

There is a big emphasis on teaching people what to do and then expecting them to do only as they are told…as if they checked their brain at the locker.

In my experience, organizations are not mechanical things to be manipulated, but rather they behave more like a living system. Knowledge is seamless. Organizations are seen as a whole system. Work is flexible and without boundaries. People are multi-skilled and continuously learning. Motivation is based on links to the whole system. Information flows openly and freely. Change is happening all the time, and seen as an opportunity for improvement. People work beyond their roles. People see their work in relation to the whole, knowing and doing what needs to be done. People work safely because they want to go home safe at the end of the day. They understand the larger expectation of the business.

Organizations are complex adaptive systems. The tools to work in complex adaptive systems are different from those that work in organizations seen as machines. When the tools of complexity are used, things work much more effectively, people become engaged in working towards the success of the whole system and change can happen quickly.

To learn more about this topic, see my blogs posts on Safety Excellence.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Tagged With: safe work environment, safety education in the workplace, safety programs, Self-Organizing Leadership

A Question to Ponder

December 10, 2013 By Richard N. Knowles Leave a Comment

In my previous Blog I talked about the America’s Safest Companies Conference in Atlanta, GA. There were about 400 people in attendance for the fine papers, displays and the awards to the 10 Safest Companies of 2013.

safety excellence process It was fascinating to see the contrast between the usual, linear, mechanical approach to safety and The Complexity Leadership Process (CLP) that I discussed at my display table. A large number of people talked with me at my display table about The Complexity Leadership Process which was new to all of them. Many could not believe how quickly and dramatically the safety performance improved using the CLP. At one level the CLP looks like a simple employee involvement program, yet it is much more and also different at a deeper level than the usual employee involvement processes. One fellow, who recently wrote a book about changing the safety culture to excellence just brushed the CLP aside as something he’d already seen. The approach to safety excellence he’s written about involves 43 linear steps that take 3-5 times as long as the CLP and require a very high level of persistence and determination over many years.

In an example of a long, slow, linear process was in a presentation by one of the Award–Winning companies about their journey to safety excellence. The presenter showed a chart showing their progress from a Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRIR) of about 8 to about 0.5 over 12 years, one little step at a time. It is great that fewer people are being injured, but it took way too long, and too many people were hurt along the way. When I count the number of injuries they suffered over this 12-year period, they had about 36 more recordable injuries per 100 employees than we experience at my Belle, WV Plant when we went from a TRIR of about 6 to 0.3 in just 3 ½ years. If the average cost of an OSHA Recordable Injury is about $50,000, then the Belle Plant with 36 fewer injuries and the suffering, saved about $1,800,000 for every 100 people. At Belle, we had about 1,000 people so we saved closer to $19,000,000.

It is interesting to watch people try to reframe a new idea into their old paradigm. The evidence of the improvements doesn’t seem to have an impact.

I think that if people believe something, they will see it, but if they don’t believe it they won’t see it, and not the other way around.

The evidence of many fewer injuries and the large savings that this generates, while proven in real cases, don’t seem to have much impact.

So for you who are reading this Blog, here is my question for you:

How do we get people to see, to understand and to try this new CLP approach when it is proven to be so effective?

The photo above is a picture of Dick at his Display table at the America’s Safest Companies Conference, where he had the opportunity to speak with lots of managers about eliminating workplace injuries.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: safety leadership tools, safety performance, The Complexity Leadership Process, Total Recordable Injury Rate

When the Safety is Right, Everything Else gets Right!

July 1, 2013 By Richard N. Knowles 1 Comment

I recently read a book by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, The Three Laws of Performance. They have studied leadership in many organizations and developed Three Laws of Performance and three Leadership Corollaries for these (P.212).

The First Law
How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.
Leadership Corollary 1
Leaders have a say, and give others a say, in how situations occur.

The Second Law
How a situation occurs arises in language
Leadership Corollary 2
Leaders master the conversational environment.

The Third Law
Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.
Leadership Corollary 3
Leaders listen for the future of their organization.

These three Laws and Corollaries are almost identical to what we do in Self-Organizing Leadership as we use the Process Enneagram© with the people. In using this tool in conversations with the people we co-create the future with everyone having a say in it. We spend a lot of time in the organizations talking with and listening to the people seeking new and better ways to do things.

For some people in leadership positions, talking with people, seems to be quite hard. Yet it is as simple as for example;

“Hi Mary, How are things going today? I hope everything is going well on the home front. You look like you really know how to do this task. I’ve never done it before, could you show me how you do it? What are the safety challenges and rules? Is there a better way to do this? Is there an easier way? Let’s talk about that. If I help you, can you take the lead to develop the idea and see if it really works as well as you think?”

This conversation shows how the Three Laws of Performance play out. Mary usually gets pretty pumped up as she is listened to, respected and asked for a better, safer way. This may be the first time she’s been treated this way by management.

As this simple interaction occurs, over and over throughout the organization, the culture shifts to becoming more positive, resourceful and creative. When the people see that management is really listening and trying, when they see the manager as real people things open up. Ideas about things beyond the safety arena emerge and big savings develop for the company.

When I was the Plant Manager at the DuPont Belle, WV Plant, working this way with about 1,200 people we made huge changes that endured for many years. For example, injury rates dropped >96%, emissions dropped 88%, productivity rose 45% and earnings rose 300%. Together we achieved world-class safety performanece with total recordable injury rates running at 0.3 or less. They maintained this excellent performance for 12 years after I left for another DuPont assignment.

Zaffron and Logan have a case study in their book about New Zealand Steel near Auckland, New Zealand. The mill was struggling and the management decided that they really needed to change the culture to survive and grow into their future. In just 2 years New Zealand Steel transformed themselves. Injury rates dropped 50%, productivity rose 20%, costs dropped 15-20% and return on capital rose 50%.

As I was reading the story I realized that I knew the people they’d named and that Tim Dalmau, my associate in this work, and I had led the transformational effort using the Self-Organizing Leadership approach. The Process Enneagram© was the key tool we used to help the people have the important conversations and discover their future.

These two stories of the transformations of the DuPont chemical plant in Belle, WV and the New Zealand Steel plant in Auckland, New Zealand clearly show that the work with the people to shift the safety culture is the leading edge of change for the entire organization.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: creating a safety culture, safety excellence, Safety Lessons for Business, The Process Enneagram, workplace safety case studies

The Case for making Safety a Priority in Business

June 4, 2013 By Richard N. Knowles 2 Comments

In my interactions with companies I often hear the people saying things like:

“If only my management really supported safety we would really get a lot better. If they say safety is number 1, then why don’t they behave that way?”

The people at the top probably know that they can have big losses, lawsuits and bad publicity if there is a serious injury, toxic chemical release or explosion. They may even wake up at night thinking about these things.

Yet safety is not their core business. They have revenue and earnings goals looming over them. Quality and production problems may be pressing them. In this environment safety is a pain in the neck, intruding at the wrong times. It is seen as more costs.

I think that we may have the safety messages backward. Rather than feeling under-valued and not supported by management around safety, let’s turn the picture around so that excellence in safety performance is the path to total business excellence performance and enhanced profits.

Everyone can play an important part in this. We achieve safety excellence by shifting the culture. We share all information, build trust and interdependence and help everyone see how they are important to the success of the entire business. We engage each other, listen for all the ideas, help people to solve the problems and challenges that come up. We ask for help because none of us can do this alone.

As the culture shifts, injury and incident rates drop thus saving a lot of money directly, people feel more valued and interested in the total business. As the credibility around safety is built, people begin to see other things that can be improved to help the business and they do them.

As we shifted the safety culture at the DuPont Belle, WV plant where I was the plant manager in the 1980s and 1990s the injury rates dropped by about 97% and earnings went up about 300%. People felt a lot better about things and focused at really making improvements. Not only did we save money with fewer injuries and incidents, people went after things like lowering the demurrage rates (the rent we pay owners of tank trucks after their deliveries were made and the trucks were left on the plant) by 75% in just a few months. We also learned how to change our process control systems from pneumatic systems to electronic systems without running parallel—thus cutting the time and costs for the conversions by about 50%. We did this 16 times without failure.

As the culture shifted towards excellence everything else shifted towards excellence. When we turn the story around from safety being a pain in the neck to becoming the leading edge for shifting the total organization to high performance and excellence, then safety becomes a focal point for the organizational change efforts.

About 80% of the large-scale organizational change efforts fail to produce the desired results and are not sustained. Rather than beginning with a large-scale change effort, we can begin with a smaller effort, focused at safety and then spread the effort as we learn how to do it and gain everyone’s support. Success is much more likely and it is sustainable. At Belle the culture shifted! One measure of that was the injury rates dropped to world-class levels and were sustained for 16 years. Everything else we measured also showed significant improvement.

Let’s shift the safety message from being a pain in the neck to becoming the leading wave for total organizational excellence!

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business Tagged With: business safety, creating a safety culture, injury-free workplaces, Safety Lessons for Business