Expert View – Establishing a Safety Culture

Rosanne Danner, vice president – development, DuPont Safety Resources, began her career at DuPont in 1981 and has since held various technical, marketing, supervisory, finance and business roles.  In this interview she describes the key steps for instituting a safety culture in an organization, as well as some of the challenges companies face when trying to do so.

A. I recently asked that question to one of my colleagues and he said, "What people do when no one is watching."  There is certainly some truth to that.  But if you step back and think about the word culture, it's about what people do, how they interact, how they live day to day.  When you apply it to safety, it moves beyond simply being a program and becomes part of one's being.  And it doesn't just stay at the organization or workplace.  It goes home with you.  It's part of the fabric of who you are.  So for example, when I drive home, I automatically put on my seatbelt.  I also make sure that my passengers wear their seatbelts.  I do not use my cell phone when I am driving.  These actions are all a natural extension of being part of a safety culture at work.

A. First and foremost, you need an unwavering commitment from management.  This piece is essential.  Once management is on board, we advocate a four phase approach to culture change that spans an organization's people, processes and technologies:

1. Assess - The first step is to know where you are and to know where the gaps are.  How do you ingrain safety in the work that you are doing?  How do you institutionalize safety so that it becomes sustainable?  
2. Envision - Set your goals.  Where do you want to go as an organization?  The goals have to stretch the organization but also need to take into account the ability of the organization to absorb the changes.
3. Plan - This is essentially the output of the assessment.  How are you going to meet your goals and fill in the gaps?  The plan should take into account skills and capabilities building for all levels, process development, piloting of new processes and implementation timeline.
4. Implement - Execute, execute, execute.  Get those things in place that you outlined in your plan and develop corresponding metrics to measure your progress.

Based on our experiences, 3 to 5 years is a good rule of thumb for instituting a safety culture change.  But it really depends on where the company starts and its attitude toward safety.  A company where management is really committed to safety – both financially and emotionally – will be on the shorter end of that range.  For a company where the commitment is lacking and the infrastructure is not in place, it will take longer to get a safety culture all the way through the organization. 

A. It's important to recognize and reward success, but people should act safely because they want to do it, not because you pay them to do it.  What happens when the incentive goes away?  Yes - you need to hold people accountable for following process, procedures and doing the things required to make sure the organization is safe.  That's part of the job, not an incentive.

A. Based on my experience, I typically see three reasons that cause a company to fail in this regard:

1. Lack of commitment from leadership and management.  A safety culture has to start with the CEO setting the right vision of where you want to be.  That person needs to say, "This is how we do work."  Safety must be part of measuring performance.  It's not profitability or safety – it's both.  And that commitment must extend down to line management.  If line managers see something that is unsafe, and they don't call it out, and it happens a second time, then it becomes an acceptable way to do work and it becomes the new standard.  If something is viewed as not being important to the manager, then employees won't pay attention to it.
2. Inconsistency in how and where safety is applied.  Management must put in place the right procedures and consistently follow them.  At DuPont, we start all internal and external meetings with a safety message or contact.  It's a ritual that we have established.  It speaks to being constantly aware of your surroundings and thinking through actions that you would take in a variety of possible scenarios.
3. Loss of focus.   Instituting a safety culture is not an overnight proposition.  If you do it correctly, you will see a change in injury rates pretty quickly, but it will take time to make it ingrained in an organization.  You can’t let the quick results trick you into losing your focus for the long term.

A. Generally speaking, we see a 50 to 60% reduction in injuries that applies not just to employees, but also partners, guests, passengers, etc., depending on the industry.  From an operating standpoint, many organizations benefit from increased uptime, productivity and overall efficiency in operations.  There is also a positive impact felt in what we call "under the iceberg" costs - that includes things not as readily visible, related to quality, equipment damage, litigation issues, delays, fines, etc.  These costs can reach one to five times the worker's comp costs so, though less visible on the surface, they are incredibly important to the operation of the business and its bottom line.

One of the other interesting things that we have noticed in working with hundreds of companies is that the discipline applied to a safety culture often translates into improved discipline in other areas of operations .  This is not just due to the fact that you have less on-the-job injuries and lost time, but because people begin to more closely follow other procedures and processes as well.

A. As we discussed, instituting a safety culture must begin at the top of the organization, but employees have a responsibility to follow procedures and think about how they do work.  We use a model in our consulting engagements called the Bradley Curve.  You start off with an organization in the Reactive stage, where workers are reacting to incidences instead of thinking about how to prevent them.  Once employees begin to view safety as something important to them and something which they value, you move to the Independent stage.  This is where they are practicing safety because they want to do it, not because they are being told to do it.  The ultimate goal is the Interdependent stage when every employee is looking out for the other.  It's a "brother's keeper" mentality.  At this stage, any employee should be comfortable to call out a safety issue to the point where they will stop a line if they see a problem or stop a manager who, for example, isn’t wearing a hard hat.

A. Many organizations tend to focus on injury reduction and - while that is certainly important – it is a 'lagging' indicator.  It is useful for showing what has happened in the past, but it doesn't provide much insight into preventing future injuries.  It is important to capture ‘leading’ indicators that result from consistently performing audits, logging results and tracking progress over time.  Examples of leading indicators include information gleaned from incidence investigations or capturing details of ‘near-misses’ that could have resulted in injury or the number of unsafe acts that are observed, using tools such as the DuPont STOP™ Training Programs.  At DuPont, we also have a tool that surveys employees and management about their beliefs in safety. This serves as a great benchmark for charting people's changing attitudes towards safety. 

A. The drivers may be different, but the process is the same.  What changes is the how.  It goes back to where they are starting from.  Because they are in a certain industry, they have a certain culture.  The transit industry in the U.S. is different from the transit industry in Europe.  But the bottom line is that if you are trying to institute a culture change, it still starts with the management commitment and continues through those four main elements.  That never changes.