Safety is a performance, or at least should be.

I don’t mean a performance like a theatrical production, where workers and supervisors are merely “actors” while on a worksite. In this context, I mean performance as in activity and action.

Most times, we act on what we think and feel. The best safety culture exists at worksites where supervisors and workers all truly believe in safety and they act and “perform” in a measured and deliberate way to espouse safety for themselves and others.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Vinoth Chandar via a Creative Commons license] Safety performance, like a musical performance, is nto about rote practice of various actions; it's about creativity and having a mental and emotional investment in doing right and well.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Vinoth Chandar via a Creative Commons license] Safety performance, like a musical performance, is not about rote practice of various actions; it’s about creativity and having a mental and emotional investment in doing right and well.

In safety culture, the best safety performance is not in going through the motions; it is rational, yet emotional action. It is one thing to know logically what is the right thing to do; often, however, it takes an emotional investment to do the right thing that motivates a person to take action. Reaching into the hearts and minds of workers with safety can be a daunting task, but it is vital and can be energizing to workplaces that are able to succeed with this mission.

However, it can be easy to fall into some traps that sap morale and energy from your workplace in terms of safety, and not having that emotional investment or mental stimulation can lead to what we have discussed before as drift, which could lead to mistakes later.

Our old friend, Robert Pater of MoveSMART, wrote an article in collaboration with colleague Ron Bowles in the January 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine, discussing the concept of “safety performance” and how to get companies and their workforces into that culture and away from merely keeping with existing procedures and programs – a k a “pro forma,” or “going through the motions,” as it were.

Safety Mistakes

Pater and Bowles wrote the article to educate about what they call “five master keys” to safety performance – and a positive safety culture. The first thing they did in the piece, however, was to put on display what does not work in enhancing safety performance. Pater and Bowles calls these “five futile mistakes” that they call “cliches” that many companies can fall into without really being aware of them.

So, of course, the sfirst step to overcoming them is to actually be made aware of them.

The “five futile mistakes” are:

  1. Do more of the same old thing, which can become robotic and rote, which makes it part of a checklist and not something with actual intent and energy behind it.
  2. Working top-down and not bottom-up. When there is a negative discourse between management and workers (“Do as you are told”), that can channel worker energy into mutiny and pushback rather than improved mental and emotional engagement.
  3. Feeding workers new information without following up with actual action or demonstration. Words mean nothing by themselves.
  4. Not providing the support resources necessary for workers to fully learn and implement their new skills or habits.
  5. Failing to prepare management and supervisors for any progress in safety. No one likes surprises!

Changing the Math

If your company commits any or all of these “cardinal sins” of safety, you are essentially going against the basic math of capitalism – maximizing return of investment. Whether it’s capital, workforce, equipment, time – it does not matter the asset you are using, the goal is to maximize efficiency and increase productivity so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as the old saying goes.

When it comes to ROI, the math we all look to is multiplication – seeing productivity and efficiency improve exponentially. The five mistakes mentioned above will do nothing in that regard. Maybe you will get some improvement on return in the short-term, but over a stretch of time, you could easily lose efficiency without great engagement along all tiers of the organization.

But how to unlock the the secrets that change the arithmetic of addition and subtraction to one of multiplication? Pater nd Bowles put forth five “master keys” to turn your “pro forma” safety into safety performance at an elite level.

And as you might guess, that will be the subject of my next post Friday. Don’t you just love it when I tease you?