We’re not trying to say this is going to be easy.

But for the sake of the safety and health of your workers, you should at least think of this is very necessary.

We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. James Loud says as much in his recent Professional Safety magazine article about major incidents in the workplace. (This is the last of a series of posts about this – you can start the series here and work your way through it.) What we have been doing has been effective in reducing the number of incidents that occur in workplaces, but what we haven’t done is lower the risk of serious and fatal incidents.

This all seems to revolve around some kind of unintentional hypocrisy.

The Heinrich Hypocrisy

As was mentioned before, Heinrich’s Pyramid has been the basis for much of our safety programs and protocols in the last 50 years. His idea that nearly 90 percent of incidents are a result of worker actions has led us (to our credit and benefit) to safety steps that have greatly reduced the numbers of overall incidents in the workplace.

On the other side of the coin, Heinrich’s theory claimed that if we strove to reduce the numbers of incidents, then the numbers of major incidents (the ones that result in serious injury or death) would be reduced by the same measure.

We know from data that the second part of the theory is completely wrong – incidents in general have gone down, but the percentage of “serious” incidents has gone up – and yet we are hanging onto the first part of the theory, continuing to work on reducing the numbers  of incidents in general and not addressing the fundamental flaw.  We accept the one part of the theory but either discard or look past the other part.

For the sake of workers, that is not healthy.

Ch-ch-ch-Chaaanges

Loud stepped into an important messenger role in his article, taking on the challenge of waking us from our rote trance and trying to help us understand the urgency in addressing this negative trend of serious incidents not decreasing at the same rate as the overall incident rate. He attempted to inform us that we have tools in place to take a hard look at our people-centric safety protocols and to look more at our safety systems and address those deficiencies in order to change the trajectory.

However, you can’t get from one to the other without causing changes to your safety program. Worker-centered and systems-centered philosophies aren’t entirely inclusive. At least, they aren’t if you really want to create a different culture.

5 Tips to Winning the Battle

Well now that you have “suffered” through all these posts and have gotten to this point, this means that there is something that Loud discussed in his article that speaks to you and you have been thinking about how your operation is currently working. Maybe you see the same thing that others see – a decline in overall incidents for a time, but now you have plateaued and your serious incident risks have actually increased because those incidents are not dropping in frequency.

You are now ready to make the change necessary to turn your safety program from one that is focused on the worker and their activities, to one that is focused on the safety systems in place (i.e., the working conditions) so that all workers can be safe regardless of their personality and job description.

In order to make an effective change, Loud suggests five guidelines for making this kind of transition:

  1. Get to know the management systems. If you are not familiar with Deming and the PDCA cycle (which is covered briefly in this post), or if you have not read ANSI/ASSE Z10 lately, those would be two strong suggested readings to get familiar with safety management systems and how they work (or should).
  2. Allocate your resources more wisely. If you spend so much safety capital on reducing incidents in general, you miss opportunities to address the core issues that cause serious incidents to occur – and if you don’t address those, you won’t get to zero and your risk of serious injury or death will continue to rise. Spend the time to get to true root causes; don’t stop at “worker error” in the cause of an incident.
  3. Take incidents out of siloes. Incidents are rarely in isolation. Every incident needs to be addressed from a macro view of the entire workplace and all the safety protocols you have in place. If you take incidents in a holistic way, you may be able to find some commonalities that can suggest systemic failures rather than automatic “worker error” problems.
  4. Get the rank-and-file involved. This is true of any safety program you implement. You won’t get a culture change by preaching and lecturing down to the workers; you have to train them, get them engaged in helping them understand why safety is important, why you’re doing what you’re doing, and encouraging the workers themselves to mentor each other in the new system. The more they feel like a piece of the puzzle, the more likely they will take a pride-of-ownership attitude.
  5. Develop a roadmap. Just as driving a car, you need a map to navigate from point A to point B, you have the same thing when changing your safety system. Your map has a destination, which is where you want to be in your safety (namely, greatly reduced serious incidents and deaths), and your starting point is where you are now (the status quo).  And like a road trip, you don’t just get there; you have to drive a mile at a time and check for the landmarks and mileposts along the way to confirm the right direction. You can’t just go from people-centered safety to system-centered safety; you have to create a strategic plan that migrates one piece at a time, not moving the next piece until the workforce has grasped the previous concept.

Moving from a people-centered to system-centered safety program will not be easy or quick, but for the sake of your workers and their health, it’s important to take steps as soon as practicable, before another incident costs you time-loss or a death on your worksite.