health and safety in the workplace | Safety Excellence For Business

There is a lot of stress all around us – in our personal and workplace lives.

The war in the Ukraine, inflation, gas prices, groceries, apartment rents, and the mass shootings are a few examples. This stress affects us all in one way or another. It feels as if everything is under some sort of threat. Do we have to make churches, schools, grocery stores, playgrounds, offices, factories and even homes hard targets to try to protect ourselves? Stressors are many – negativity is high.

In previous posts I have talked about the need for situational awareness. This is so important for all of us. It is a first line of defense. We also need to take basic precautions around our homes being sure that we have taken reasonable precautions like having bright, outside lighting, keeping doors locked, picking up packages from our front porches, etc. When we go out to mix in big groups like bars and night clubs, or events, or any gathering, we need to ask ourselves if this is the right thing for us at that time.

When we are at work, we need to be cognizant of everyone that is feeling stress and preoccupied. Things we say or do may be taken in the wrong way. People may have short tempers. Some will be hurrying and careless. We each need to avoid contributing more stress to the situations.

All this stress and preoccupation makes us vulnerable to our own mistakes and errors. I tend to make poorer judgements when I am stressed like another driver and I did recently – we had a fender bender. Fortunately, there were no injuries other than egos being beat up. Preoccupation like this at work can lead to injuries and incidents as well. Perhaps the biggest threat we face is our own impatience and anxiousness.

For me, I need to slow down a little and ask myself what I am doing to be able to do the next task correctly. Do I need to take a deep breath to clear my mind before I do the next thing? Am I centered before starting the next conversation? Am I paying enough attention to what is going on around me so I do not cause problems and get someone hurt? Am I trying to select the correct words for the next conversation so I do not cause unnecessary troubles? Is one of my friends or coworkers feeling stress and do they need some extra kindness from me?

The number of road rage incidents is going up as well as the severity of the violence in these incidents. I need to be more aware of my own behavior. Small things I do may cause someone else to get angry. I need to keep my phone put away. I do not want to be caught up in one of these road rage incidents, so I need to be sure that my speed is appropriate, and I am not driving aggressively. I need to be sure to leave plenty of space between me and other cars and not to crowd people as I give way to my stress and start hurrying.

These are tough times for all of us. Stress levels impact all areas of our lives. We need to be kind to ourselves and others to help relieve the stresses a little.

Signs of Hope

Many of you reading my posts know how highly I value using really good processes for participation in our workplaces, sharing of information, building trust, and helping people to find meaning in their work. (Having meaning in one’s work helps to lessen work stress!) Over the last 50 years of my work in the field of Leadership, I have gradually seen progress in this participative and meaningful way of working. While there are plenty of bad examples of leadership, I am seeing improvements taking place. More people are talking about working this way. Some recent articles in Professional Safety, the journal of the American Society for Safety Professionals, have begun to talk about this. Other business journals are also talking more and more about this.

There is a growing awareness that our traditional top-down management approach is not up to the rapidly changing and more complex world. I have even seen some recent papers indicating that some of the professionals in government are more aware of the need to recognize and use ideas like Ross Ashby’s Requisite Variety, Complexity and Reflexivity so we can lead, learn, and think more clearly and effectively about how work is being done. It is heartening to me to see this participative progress!

I urge all of you to work on expanding your own leadership thinking so that you can also be more effective in your own work, and as you lead others. It has been extremely important for me in my own journey over the last few generations. I urge you (also) to learn about and practice situational awareness – for your safety and for others. If you have questions, please contact me at 716-622-6467 or send me an email.

Remember, it takes Leadership to improve Safety.
It takes being “aware” to notice what’s happening in your surroundings.
It takes de-stressing measures to bring calm to the moment.

Bringing Safety People Together…It’s all in the Venn!

I want to share some experiences I’ve learned about the importance of sharing information and building trust – especially as it applies to the various safety aspects of our workplaces.

We surely had our hands full in 2020 with all the COVID-19 issues. While the new vaccines will help, change will always be with us. Each of you can make a positive difference for the people in your organizations by sharing information about what is going on, building respect and trust and listening carefully, so you really understand the issues and concerns.

I have noticed that those working on occupational safety and occupational health do not interact much with the people working on process safety management (PSM), and vice-versa. For example, at the ASSP meetings, I rarely hear any one talking about PSM and at the AIChE Process Safety meetings, I don’t hear much about occupational safety and/or occupational health. It is as if these are different stove pipes. But each of these are areas where people are deeply involved in the total safety performance of the organization. I have found that when everyone is talking together about the total safety, synergy emerges and all areas benefit.

When I was the Plant Manager of a big chemical plant, the people working in these three areas were engaged in conversations and contributed to improvements across the board. This Venn Diagram illustrates how we brought them together while maintaining their unique contributions.

Each safety area was managed separately, using their own operating discipline. Where the three areas came together, we talked about what was happening and looked for input from each other. This significantly raised the total safety and environmental performance of the site. PSM also has a big impact on the environmental performance when spills, accidental chronic emissions, release incidents, improved yields and fires and explosions are eliminated; and a lot less is emitted to the environment.

The area of overlap of the three safety disciplines (at the center of the Venn diagram) is where we engaged in Partner-Centered Leadership:

Sharing all information
Building trust.
Listening to each other’s problems and opportunities.
Learning and finding better ways to do the work together.

For example, we talked about the three disciplines in our site Central Safety Meetings, keeping careful track of our safety workorder backlogs, meeting our safety equipment inspection schedules and talking about incidents and injuries that had happened, and what we could all learn from them. The engineers went into the various production areas and sat with the operators to learn what the operators were experiencing as they ran the processes, and the engineers taught the operators the engineering technology supporting their work, helping them to understand what was happening in the manufacturing operations. The supervisors, engineers, operators and maintenance people talked together as safety and work procedures were developed. The gap between work-as imagined and work-as-done virtually disappeared. As trust and the open dialogue improved, our safety and environmental performance really improved.

In just three years, the Total Recordable Injury Rate dropped by about 97% to a rate of about 0.3, and the people sustained this for 17 years. PSM improved with much lower levels of releases and upsets. The emissions to the environment (accidental and permitted) went down about 95% in four years. When the PSM was run as a separate stove pipe from the occupational safety and occupational health stove pipes, the Plant’s performance did not come anywhere close to these low levels. This is significant!

The improvements we made in how we worked together in safety spread into all the other parts of our work in running the big (1,300 people) chemical plant. The more we shared information, treated each other with respect and listened to each other, the more the total performance improved. For example, productivity rose by about 45% and earnings rose about 300%.

Learning to work more effectively, through our safety work, spread to the whole organization. Each of you reading this newsletter can make a big difference as you engage with the people in your organizations, sharing information, building respect and trust. The impact of your work will spread.

Want to know more? Contact me at 716-622-6467. Or, Order my book, “Partnering for Safety and Business Excellence” on Amazon.

Note: Venn is a diagram that shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets. Take a look at what sits right in the middle!

Workplace Stress

There is a lot of stress all around us – in our personal and workplace lives.

Signs of Hope

Bringing Safety People Together…It’s all in the Venn!

I want to share some experiences I’ve learned about the importance of sharing information and building trust – especially as it applies to the various safety aspects of our workplaces.

Want to know more? Contact me at 716-622-6467. Or, Order my book, “Partnering for Safety and Business Excellence” on Amazon.

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