It is just as hard, if not harder, to sustain a company’s safety posture, than it is to develop and implement safety procedures and improvements.
How often are the safety strives you make undone by production demands, or lack of commitment or enforcement. I’m sure, at times, it seems like no matter how hard you try to implement safety procedures, improvements, and change, you are confronted with an overwhelming resistance that causes you to take two steps backwards. Don’t give up, there are a few simple techniques that can make all your efforts more sustainable and thus reduce the need to constantly start over or backtrack.
Making Employees Remember
Have you ever attempted to communicate a safety improvement or message (new procedure, lesson learned, best practice, etc.) to employees and found almost no one could remember it a week later when asked? Have you ever told someone how to do something and found they really didn’t “get” the message and quickly went back to doing it their old way?
I think you would agree that forgotten communication is no better than not communicating at all. To help employees remember, put information into story form and site specific examples. For example, presenting accident reports in story form or putting accident statistics into categories and totals can make both more memorable.
In a recent safety assessment, workers were asked what types of accidents happened most often. They either were unable to answer or were completely incorrect in their responses.
Even though they could remember several accidents in detail, they had not mentally tabulated the most-often experienced accident types from the accident reports they received over the course of the year. Their efforts toward safety lacked an accurate focus. They were not guarding themselves against the accidents most likely to happen to them.
Companies with excellent safety records not only tabulate accident types, but also employee precautions most likely to prevent these accidents. This minor enhancement in communicating accident data can produce a large improvement in focusing employee’s attention on the most effective accident prevention strategies.
Making Training Behavioral
Have you ever conducted a training class and found on your next visit to the production floor or construction site that virtually no one was doing the task the way they were just trained? Have you ever cringed when the OSHA inspector asked your employees to cite the last training or a regulation covered by training? In most interviews, employees can rarely cite the objective of the training they recently attended, let alone the specifics of the training.
For training to be remembered and, therefore, sustainable, the training should have behavioral objectives and standards, such as: attendee “will be able to perform___ (task) by ___ (target date) to the level of ___ (standard of performance).” Training that is aimed at action is more likely to result in action. It also is more easily tracked and its effectiveness is measured in terms of performance in the workplace.
Adding Expectations To Safety Procedures
Have you ever had a person defend their lack of results by quoting their roles and responsibilities and telling how they “went through the motions” of doing them? Do you have people in your organization who seem to mistake effort for results?
Safety procedures most always include employee roles and responsibilities. Clearly defining what an employee’s job should be (role) and what an employee should do (responsibility) can help define and shape workplace behavior and eliminate ambiguity. However, by also adding “expectations” you will make the procedure results oriented and, therefore more sustainable.
Take Small Steps
Have you ever started an improvement project expecting employees to get excited about the planning and potential of your project and found, instead, that they were de-motivated and feeling overloaded? Have you ever measured the results of a change initiative and found that only a fraction of it was moving in the right direction?
Some change initiatives fail because they attempt to change too much, too fast. There is an old Chinese saying, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Breaking change down into smaller bites almost always is the answer. Smaller change is easier to sell and easier to buy into. Minimizing the magnitude of change also minimizes the resistance to change and the feeling of overload. Smaller change also has the advantage of quick wins and momentum. Even a massive change effort that requires management of change (MOC) professionals can be divided into bite-sized pieces and made more palatable to the whole company.
Safety improvement requires a lot of effort and it is unfortunate when the effort doesn’t produce a lasting effect. Of all the techniques that have been used for safety-improvement sustainability, these are four that stand out as highly effective.
Total Environmental & Safety, LLC specializes in assisting companies into regulatory compliance; strengthen companies’ safety posture, and maintaining a sustainable safety culture.