Building a Genuine Safety Culture: Lessons from the Plant Floor

During his interview for the job of plant electrical engineer, Bob went on the obligatory plant tour. Just before the door to the plant was a floor mat emblazoned with “Safety is No Accident.” So far, so good. But when he reached up to the box of earplugs, he found it was empty. Three weeks later on his first day of the job, he checked the box again. It was still empty.

Toward the end of the first week, he met with the safety director and sat through a rah-rah speech about safety. This concluded with a safety tour of the facility. Unsurprisingly, most of the operators were not wearing hearing protection. Some were not wearing eye protection. Others had their faces turned away from their work (not watching what their hands were doing) while chatting with each other.

Every so often, the safety director would stop and point out some problem such as an allegedly missing machine guard; amazingly, the he would spot these things from twenty feet away. When Bob would say something like, “Let’s look at that so I understand what you mean,” the safety director would say he was too short on time to get into one specific problem. He did, however, seem to have the time to send out a weekly safety report that was multiple pages long. The general format was an exercise in dense legalese with various OSHA regulations quoted in whole. No other department head had any use for it.

This safety director valued resume bullet points and performance appraisal talking points over real results. He also felt a need to gaslight other managers about workplace safety conditions only he could see, while ignoring unsafe acts and the message sent to workers via the empty earplug box.

This example is obvious, but do you see any less obvious examples in your workplace? For example, last week there were five incidents of employees standing on the top rung of a ladder, but there’s no requisition for a taller ladder. When supervisors and managers are safety problem solvers instead of safety violation accusers, you have one of the key elements of a strong safety culture in place. One employee standing on the top rung would indicate a problem with that employee, but two employees doing that within a week would indicate a problem with management. Do you own up or gaslight?

Now consider this. Gordon was a plant manager of a three-shift appliance plant. He started noticing candy bar wrappers on the floor near one particular five-operator machine. So he took the plant maintenance manager on a short tour through that area. Wordlessly, Gordon picked up one candy wrapper, walked to a trash receptacle, deposited it, and walked back to where the plant maintenance manager had been standing waiting for him. After they left the area, Gordon said, “What do you want to bet all of those wrappers are gone when we circle back through there?” Fifteen minutes later, they circled back. The candy wrappers were gone.

Gordon explained that this worked because he was leading by example. The real goal was to get people to stop eating in the plant, something some operators were doing even though the plant had a full cafeteria. Gordon also said that chastising people for breaking what to them seemed like a silly rule would simply result in avoidance of detection behavior.

Rather than create a fake safety culture so he could look good on paper, he did things by example to foster a real one. Of the eleven plants in his division, Gordon’s had the highest scores for productivity, safety, employee retention, and quality. His also had the lowest for scrap rate and absenteeism for three years in a row. It is not a stretch to say he knew what he was doing.

Tips for supervisors and managers:

• Set expectations for the specific behavior you want to see. Rather than tell an electrician to simply “be safe,” ask that electrician to demonstrate how to check for the presence of voltage.
• Never make excuses for doing something in a less convenient but safe manner; instead, give reasons why it’s important.
• Take any safety complaint as serious and urgent. Stop what you are doing and ask the complainer to show you. Ask probing questions, if needed. Determine the solution, and get that implemented as soon as practical. If “immediately” is not practical, then immediately take action to protect people via such things as barriers, guards, and de-energization.
• Be vigilant about personal protective equipment (PPE). Make someone responsible for monitoring and replenishing consumables. One solution many firms use is to outsource that to their electrical distributor. Their distributor uses some system to monitor supply levels, then replenishes automatically.
• Any time you see an unsafe act, stop. Address the issue with the person, and ask them how they might perform that task differently so they are safer. If the person is cooperative and sees this as a coaching moment, let it go at that. If the person is uncooperative or is a repeat offender of the same unsafe behavior, then you go to progressive discipline.
• When discussing safety with employees, don’t just spit out the rules. Ask individual employees to explain the “why” for a given rule. And also ask what injuries they might sustain if they skip that rule. These are the injuries they are preventing.