Safety Culture Plus

By Linda Bashwiner and Steven Galeotti

Our guest bloggers today are Steven Galeotti and Lydia Barbara Bashwiner.   Steven Galeotti, ARM, Principal of SRM Consulting, sgaleotti@srmconsulting.net. Steve has over 32 years experience in risk management and risk control consulting with significant expertise in risk assessment and Enterprise Risk Management.  He has developed a methodology for assessing business risk in organizations.  He has made presentations to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, the Risk and Insurance Management Society and other national organizations.

Lydia Barbara Bashwiner, Esq. is the General Counsel and Claims Manager for Otterstedt Insurance Agency, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. She is a licensed New Jersey attorney, and a licensed property and casualty producer. She holds the professional designations of Certified Workers’ Compensation Professional and NJ Workers’ Compensation Professional.

Do you have any unpaid students working within your organization? If so, are they working toward a degree? Do you have any unpaid workers who are not students? Regardless of whether the unpaid worker is a student, what are risk management consequences of having unpaid workers in your facility?

While the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled in 1999 that unpaid workers are not employees because they do not work for compensation or the expectation of compensation, the Department of Labor (DOL) has recently issued several opinion letters regarding volunteers and students. These opinion letters state when volunteers and students are considered employees and subject to minimum wage and overtime laws. In order for an employer to avoid paying a student or volunteer, six requirements must be fully met (see sidebar on next page).

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That assumption of most managers in the past is a good place to start. From experience in working in assembly line type work places I remember that most of the managers didn’t really give a rip about safety performance as long as the quota of the day’s production was met. They stood up on Monday mornings and said all the right things about being safe, but the underlying message was production. There was no reflection of the pain and suffering of an injured employee. Safety meetings were really just production pep talks. And employees got hurt. And an employee getting hurt in this line of business was the “cost of doing business”. They didn’t figure in the implication of that cost to the business. Money was just pulled out of the emergency room fund (direct cost) to take care of the injury and the whistle blew again to signal the end of break and go back to work. The indirect cost of that “accident” was never considered as the “cost of doing business”. There was then no management commitment in the safety of the employees. Managers managed the day’s production not the day’s business. And, I believe, that is the difference of the commitment.

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Leadership from the top down is the most important part of any process. "Lip service”, is not going to work for you. If management demonstrates a true commitment (not only when some occurs), provides the motivating force, and the needed resources to manage safety, an effective system can be developed and will be sustained. According to OSHA, this demonstration of leadership should include the following elements that are consistent with an effective program:

• Establishing the program responsibilities of line managers, supervisors, and employees for safety and holding them accountable for carrying out their responsibilities.
• Providing managers, supervisors, and employees with the authority, access to relevant information, training, and resources they need to carry out their responsibilities.
• Identifying at least one manager, supervisor, or employee to receive and respond to reports about safety conditions and, where appropriate, to initiate corrective action.

This is the first time that OSHA has used the term "demonstrate”. In reality, demonstration means “do as I do.” This is an important concept no matter what you are tying to accomplish, always “walk-the-walk, and talk-the-talk”.

Where to start?  This question has come up so often, that I decided to begin a blog series that might offer ideas and thoughts on the topic.    I have been a consultant for…a number of years.  I have had the opportunity to work with great people, interesting people and even strange people, all of whom were trying to work towards improvement of their organizations’s safety program.

As with religion, there’s a long list of ideas and philosophies as to approaches to reaching the promised land of an effective program.  Can we get there?  What map do we need to follow?

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One thing that we often forget and equally if not more important than employee behaviors is management behaviors. If management is trying to create or improve the safety performance, they need to ensure that they demonstrate the same behaviors they expect from their employees. Employees are watching management very carefully during any process change. If management’s personal behavior is not consistent with the verbal and written messages they are sending, then the process will not work, the safety culture will not be trustworthy, and the management system will fail. (more…)

In my opinion, there is one mis-understood concept, the audit. How many “audits” have you performed? What does the word audit mean? Typically, it means that you have to find something wrong. In my opinion, this is the case with most auditors. We feel that if we do not find anything wrong, then we are not doing our jobs and out BOSSES, Not Leaders, will be upset with us. In my opinion some auditors find joy in finding things wrong.

We need to get over this attitude and stop looking for all the “bad” things that have happened. After many year in the safety arena, I have done it various ways, but have learned that you need to be fair and only report what you find. Do not out of your way to find something wrong. I would encourage you to look at “audit” as a “conformance appraisal”, which means looking at your management system to see how it is conformance to your expectations. This will help to keep you focused on a positive approach. Under these conditions, you will be focusing on conformance to practices and procedures of the management system and/or program requirements. We continually need to understand how to focus on the positive aspects of safety.

While climate is difficult to define, it is easy to see and feel. According to Dan Petersen, “Probably the best definition I’ve ever heard on culture came from a worker I interviewed who stated, "Culture is the way it is around here". It’s the unwritten rules of the ballgame that the organization is playing. Culture is what everybody knows, and therefore it does not have to be stated or written down."

Safety climate reflects if safety is perceived by all employees to be a "key value" in the organization. The term "climate" and "culture" are both used here. The question is: has a safety climate (culture) been created that is conducive to adopting safe work attitudes and habits?

The concept of culture had been around long before "In Search of Excellence" was published. Dr. Rensis Likert wrote a book called "The Human Organization," where he described his research on "trying to" understand the difference in "styles" of different companies, and how these "styles" affected the bottom line. Dr. Likert coined the term "Organizational Climate”. We now call it culture.

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As the change process continues, personal successes become more apparent. Injuries will decrease and attitudes will become more positive. This is where employees begin to understand the change. Observable behaviors indicate a change in the norms. Employee participation increases. Companies begin to move from a reactive to a proactive state, with increasing enthusiasm for safety. One important thing to remember is that management needs to be aware that newly developed safety management systems are very fragile and can be damaged easily. Step out of line one time and you will have to prove you self again.

Note: You can 100 things right and one thing wrong, what are people going to remember?

Constant attention is needed to unsure that the right values (not priorities) are being promoted and demonstrated. As this new way of thinking and acting about safety takes hold, stronger roots take hold. If nurtured with positive emotions, the safety management system continues to grow, expands, matures, and will outlive many changes, good and bad. All employees and the organization start to become a fixed asset of the organization. The system will begin to sustain itself.

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