Tools for Building a Foundation in Safety

This blog utilizes research and data from a range of professional safety journals (i.e., Professional Safety) and research reports, and blends it with economic realities and common company leadership expectations.  It is written as a series for those who are new to safety or have an expanded role within safety.  It is meant to be easily digestible by reviewing one to two key points.

Lastly, this blog does not intend to be the end all, but is designed to mentor by overviewing basic safety program organization and key concepts. 

Part 1: Your New Boss May Not Really Understand Safety, October 2020

The Changes That Just Occurred

Due to the Pandemic, the Safety Director you reported to for the past 15 years has taken an early retirement package.  As the company adjusts to the Pandemic economy, they have promoted you from your plant position to be the new Safety Lead for the company.  In addition, your new boss, is also new to their position of COO.

The Challenges You Now Face

As we know, the Pandemic has changed the economy dramatically – what were stable industries are now stressed, what were secure jobs now are furloughed.  As a result, the COO is looking to cut everything non-essential.  You are told to reduce costs and that “we are only going to comply with safety regulations and do nothing else – none of that risk-based crap.  You have no excuse to go backwards.”  This new COO has come from accounting and has no operational experience or expertise.  Lastly, despite a 16 year reduction in the company-wide DART rate, every 2-3 years there has been a serious injury or fatality.

So being thrust into a leadership role, you now know your challenges:

• You need to deliver on cost savings; and
• The company cannot regress on its safety performance.

Your Opportunity

So how will you meet these challenges?  In theory, it is quite simple, but the implementation is quite challenging on how to:

1. Over time, educate the COO on why elements other than regulatory compliance are needed in a safety program; and
2. Bring the risk reduction techniques to the workforce that will actually that allow them to identify and address hazards before they are exposed.

First, determine your new COO’s understanding of safety, both the depth and magnitude.  There is often a reasonable understanding of the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) or a Days Away, Restricted or Transferred (DART) rate and as with any metric, the desire and demand to continuously improve those rates.  To drive improvement in the rates, it is easy in a leadership position to say ‘you need to comply with all our safety regulations or you will be fired’.  Now as a safety professional, leading a safety program based on just the TRIR and DART rate is the equivalent of driving a car and only looking through the rear view mirror.

So how do you help leadership to better understand safety and over time, show them a bigger picture of the program and its components.  It may be best to layer the education process, to explain it takes more than reacting to rate and threats to improve safety.  The primary objective is to explain that not every hazard or risk is regulated or has a work instruction.  As outlined in Figure 1, multiple tools, processes and programs are needed over time to build a culture that proactively identifies and addresses hazards.