Podcast: Safety is more than paperwork and PPE — How manufacturers can build a better safety culture
Shawn Galloway is the CEO of ProAct Safety, a global consultancy firm that works with hundreds of clients across all major industries. He is also a professional speaker and author of several bestselling books on strategy, culture, leadership and employee engagement. Over the course of his career, Shawn has contributed to over 700 podcasts, 200 articles, and 100 videos. Shawn recently spoke with Anna Townshend, managing editor of Plant Services, about some concerning trends he’s seeing in safety cultures and practices.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
PS: I think sometimes it's easy to talk about safety in a vacuum, or only in that context. In many cases, we're really talking about life and death issues, so that's often the main focus and should be. But I would like to have you talk a little bit about the ways in which safety does affect other parts of the business. How might poor safety performance lead manufacturers to quality, reliability, or efficiency issues?
SG: If you look at the triad of things that come together, that produce incidents, illnesses, events, there's really three areas. There's conditions, behaviors and judgments, and I forgot who it was that originated that theory decades ago, to give credit to them, but it's something a lot of us tend to look at. And if you look at how those things come together, very often what I find, more often than not, however you want to say it, that safety is a symptom in an organization. So if you have a business, a location, a group of people, that can produce injury free outcomes for years and years and years, that means they're able to manage the complexity of where behavior meets conditions, and judgment drives all of that successfully, which typically yields good quality goods, meeting schedule and all that, because we could manage the complexity of all different types of risk.
Now, conversely, it’s very often I find that if we're having safety issues, injuries, events occurring, continuous breakdown in equipment, that is often a symptom of larger things that are existing within the organization. So you're going to see that represented in quality defects, the inability to continuously meet schedule production demands, all of that. So when we look at undesirable outcomes, and that's what an injury, an illness, an event, it's an undesirable outcome. We have a deviation from how we thought work was going to go as planned, and very often, we don't find out about those deviations until that event occurs, which, of course, is reactive. But when you look at managing risk, there always has to be two sides to this, and it's prevention and it's recovery. If we have equipment that goes down, and if we don't have redundancy or backup parts, and we saw that during COVID with supply chain issues, that definitely affects the business.
If we have an individual that tragically loses their life on the job that absolutely affects business continuity, the right to even operate within a community, if you're known as a terrible place to work. So you have to look at these things holistically and all together, and when you have a very immature organization that views safety as something that's managed by a person, then this absolutely affects how successful the organization is going to be in all those other areas as well. And this is that old argument, is safety a priority or is it a value, which is pretty cliche, but it has to be both. It has to be a priority, and it has to be the way we do things. And this is where I've seen for a couple of decades now how safety professionals are perceived, and that's the professionals that understand the technical aspects of the equipment and how that could harm humans, all the way to those that look at occupational health, etc, that safety evolves from being perceived as a grunt to a guardian to a guru. So the grunt is managed by Anna, managed by Shawn. Just take care of it, fill out the reports, etc. Guardian is we're starting to have oversight. We're managing systems. We're managing the administrative side of safety, and we're getting it to become operationalized in the organization, and a guru is that true subject matter expert like general counsel that advises an organization. They don't run the business, they don't make the day-to-day decisions, but they're making sure they're protecting the decisions that are being made and still nudging people in the right direction. But as you look at it and how I framed it here. This isn't something that's managed. This is really how we manage the interface between the judgments that people make, how they perform, their actions at work, and where they're performing and what they're performing with that is much more complex than just being managed by a single individual or a single function within the organization, at least, if you have matured your thinking like what we're talking about here today.
PS: Okay, I like the outline of safety professionals that you gave and the idea that safety is a symptom. I think this next question is somewhat related to what you were just talking about. But bad safety performance can be a symptom of other organizational problems. So in the work that you do, how do you see safety as an organizational problem?
SG: I look at it in building capacity and the three most important capacities that an organization has to have to safely operate are system capacity, leadership capacity and cultural capacity. None of those three can be managed by one person. Now, a safety function can work to put the hierarchy of controls in place, and that's where we asked, if you're looking at the standard five levels, can we eliminate that task or that interface of equipment? Can we substitute it with something else? Can we put some engineering controls, administrative controls, and then personal protective equipment? A person, a function can make those decisions, but that function will never have the bandwidth to provide oversight to see, are people following what we've put in place?
Safety is really three things. It's knowing the risks. And there's two types. I used to call them big risks. Now in the industry, we call them serious injury, fatality types of risks. Those are the high probability, high severity risk exposure. But then there's other risks that are common to the tasks, and that's typically low probability risk.
The second piece is, do they know the precautions? So do we know the risks? Do we know the precautions? Now, there are two types of precautions here. There are required, and most of the developed world, we don't say pretty please de-energize that piece of equipment before working on it. Lock out, tag out is a mandate. So those are required. Other stuff when it comes to the low probability are at the discretion of the individual. So they are desired, like make sure you look before you move any body part. And the behavioral terms we call that ‘eyes on path.’ So that's at the discretion of an individual. It’d be really hard to write a rule that says, thou shalt look where you're going. Or at least it'd be hard to enforce it.
And then the third part of safety is, are we regularly taking those precautions? So we have to have oversight that ensures we have consistent adherence to the rules. A company called Koch Industries calls it 10,000% compliance, and that's 100% compliance, 100% of the time. So what are our systems to ensure that? And then on the low probability risks that are at the discretion, what are we doing to coach and influence that? That is not a department's job. Now the safety department or professionals can work to build that capacity, the hierarchy of controls, and make sure we're doing more engineering than putting paperwork and PPE on people, which is a constant problem. But then we also have to have recovery mechanisms. What happens if things don't go as planned?
If you think about eyewash stations or fall protection, the event has occurred, contact has been made. What are we doing to minimize the resulting severity, or even from equipment going down? What are we doing to bring the environment, the equipment back to the pre-incident state? Now, safety professionals can be, to a degree, managed as a function. But the next capacity, leadership capacity, it's not the safety department's job to ensure leaders are providing the oversight of their employees to ensure that they're following the rules, policies and procedures, but also out there coaching for the discretionary precautions and learning from where deviations are occurring before they turn into a breakdown of equipment, an injury, any of those types of things. So that's leadership's responsibility, and the most important leaders to shape those judgments and decisions are the first line supervisors. Now again, safety professionals can go out and find some education. They can provide tools around that, but to whom that first line supervisor reports becomes the next level of importance. And if those, let's say department managers aren't holding those first line supervisors accountable for their ability to be out there shaping judgments and learning from deviations, then it's not going to happen. So that's not the safety functions department.
And then that third capacity that we teach and coach and help organizations with is the cultural capacity. What do people do when the boss isn't around? What are we doing after that new employee has been through onboarding, job shadowing, and they're now let loose. Do we have the right things being reinforced? Or are some employees saying, ‘Now, let me show you some shortcuts. Or let me show you the way we really do things. I know you're trained that way, but let me show you really how to get that product out the door.’ So that's not the functions’ responsibility. That's the leadership, that's peer to peer, and to whom those people report really is where the responsibility lies. I'll rephrase this politely, but Steve Jobs says, what interests my boss fascinates the heck out of me. He chose a different word, but fascinates the heck out of me. So what people, what the bosses are paying attention to, people pay attention to. Again to belabor the point intentionally, that's not the functions’ responsibility. This is now, how do we lead people? How do we put them in positions to make the right decisions? And what are we doing from an oversight standpoint, whether it's how they're operating equipment, how they're unloading parts, what are we doing to ensure adherence to the things that are required, coaching those folks and learning from deviations before they produce an unwanted outcome again. That's not a functions’ responsibility.
PS: Yeah, definitely a team effort to develop that full culture, more than paperwork and PPE, as you said, So Shawn, you have spent a lot of time in workplaces in many different industries, and you're seeing some things that concern you. You have observed that post-COVID safety oversight and engagement at companies is decreasing overall. Can you talk a little bit about what you think is going on here that has led to these decreases, and what can manufacturers do to turn that around?
SG: Yeah, there are 10 themes that I've seen, and I'll briefly outline them, and then, I can talk about a couple of them. There are things that since COVID, since the workplace, not every organization, came to a halt, but a lot of things changed post-COVID. And manufacturing is one industry (and I work across them all) I would argue, has probably been hit the hardest as far as change in personnel. But when I look at it, if things have changed and we're not producing the same outcomes, it's changing one or many of three areas. And I refer to it as the playing field, the players, or the game itself. So the players have changed a lot. We've lost a lot of people. The playing field, how decisions are made, even moving to automate equipment changes the playing field because it changes decisions, how the work goes and sometimes even the game, the business, the pace of the game, has changed.
But the 10 things that I've seen that are consistent across all industries are workplace shortages and decreased expertise so having less operational experience. The average knowledge levels become pretty shallow in a lot of organizations. Gallup continues to reinforce that engagement scores are just continuing to decrease. So people feeling buy-in, ownership, willingly participating in things has decreased. It's been a problem for decades now. Everybody tends to complain about less training. But now we have new people training new people so that Xerox principle that the right things aren't getting passed along, and sometimes you have to be in a role for years until you really understand the complexity of how work is done. Some jobs, you could be in it for decades, and new things happen weekly or monthly.
Corrective actions are more paperwork and PPE. What I was just talking about, when we assess the average corrective actions against the hierarchy of controls, that's usually what we find, is that 80/20 rule. We're putting more paperwork and PPE on folks, and that becomes particularly dangerous with new people, or new people training new people, because we're hoping that they adhere to following the rules, policies and procedures.
Oversight has decreased, and that's both from the safety professionals, the technical folks, the engineering folks and the people leaders, that oversight has decreased. With all of that, I've seen an increase in normalization of deviance, so that came after the Challenger tragedy, but deviating from the norm becomes the norm and also normalized by leadership. You'll see that in an increase in housekeeping issues, or leaders used to stop and contribute to cleaning up, and now we're walking over the scrap or parts or waste on the floor. Supply chain disruptions still continue in some areas. Some of that's been addressed, but I still see it.
And finally, I've seen, really sadly, heightened anxiety, stress, and even suicide rates within America have just continued to increase the past 10 years, and despite all the work we're doing on what I mentioned earlier, serious injury fatality prevention, the last numbers I saw, I think it was 296 more people lost their life in 2022 with workplace fatalities than did so in 2021, so the fatality rates are actually increasing.
And despite all those terrible things, organizations still have to hit the same productivity targets, or sometimes they've even increased, or we need a decrease in our injury rate. So we're still having to do the same things we've been trying to do with all of those themes now. And this goes back to your previous questions, those issues that I'm seeing evidence of across all industries, that's not a safety professional's problem or task, that's organizational. Leadership has to get together and say these themes, if they too, many or all of them, are our reality, that's not something that gets delegated. If we really want a culture of safety excellence, you don't delegate values. These are inputs to our system. And the old saying that your organizational systems are perfectly designed to give you the results you're currently receiving. If you're getting different results, and these are your inputs, this is something the organization has to look at, and again, you'll typically find it manifest in other areas, outside of injuries and illnesses.
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About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.
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About the Author
Anna Townshend
managing editor
Anna Townshend has been a journalist and editor for almost 20 years. She joined Control Design and Plant Services as managing editor in June 2020. Previously, for more than 10 years, she was the editor of Marina Dock Age and International Dredging Review. In addition to writing and editing thousands of articles in her career, she has been an active speaker on industry panels and presentations, as well as host for the Tool Belt and Control Intelligence podcasts. Email her at [email protected].