Beyond A Safety Culture: Protecting People, Processes and Operations

By Steven D. Burtch, President, DuPont Safety Resources Asia Pacific and Vice President – Global Energy Practice, DuPont Safety Resources

Over the years, DuPont has seen how improved safety enhances a company’s bottom line. Safety and protection can be a strategic business value that links reduced workplace injuries to improved business performance.  Yet many companies continue to struggle with profitability and sustainability while experiencing avoidable injuries to people and damage to equipment and assets.

Safety and operational excellence are increasingly top priorities for growth-oriented companies around the world and DuPont expects the emphasis on these priorities to continue well into the foreseeable future. This trend will be fueled as more and more companies realize that business excellence and safety excellence are closely related and not in conflict.

The Foundation for Excellence

To establish a strong foundation for safety excellence, a safety management system is essential. DuPont has developed and uses a 22-element safety management system that addresses both the “hard” technical aspects of safety management as well as the “soft” people considerations.

The “hard” elements relate to the critical components of a company’s core technology as well as its facilities. The “soft” aspects address the critical people-related issues that are essential to the realization of outstanding safety performance.  

This safety management system is a powerful approach encompassing leadership, organization and operational components that guide organizations on a journey toward zero injuries and incidents.  Responsibility is clearly placed in the hands of line management, yet all employees are required to act in a safe way as a condition of employment.  Training, auditing and correcting deficiencies immediately are intrinsic to the safety culture.

Safety as an Interdependent Culture

DuPont clients have seen significant drops in workplace safety incidents as they move from reactive approaches to an interdependent safety culture where all employees are responsible for safety, and where doing one’s job safely is part of doing it well.  In a reactive state, the rate of injuries is high and line management plays just a small role in driving safety responsibility.  As companies move toward an interdependent state, they experience increased management involvement and employees take on good safety habits as a result of training.

Achieving the interdependent safety culture requires prevention through observation and through practices and personal commitment that instill organizational pride and individual accountability.  In this interdependent state, companies witness an ‘others’ keeper’ sense of responsibility.  The incident rate is greatly reduced in this state as companies reap the financial and operational benefits of a high power safety organization.

Felt Leadership and Safety

While safety is a shared value by all employees in an organization, it needs to be actively embraced by leadership. We call this “felt” leadership and know it to be integral to building a safety culture. DuPont adheres to several keys to good safety leadership:

• Management commitment that is seen by employees as genuine and considered to have the same priority as quality and cost. 
• Policies and principles that indicate the priority of safety and provide a clear basis for decisions.
• Safety goals and objectives that hold a prominent place in standard operating procedures.
• Performance standards, applicable to all safety matters, that are obvious to all employees.

Embracing a safety culture is hard work. Safety champions may also face the challenge of helping the workforce see safety performance as having the same level of importance as production, cost or schedule. Once a safety culture becomes established, it will be clear that safety leadership at the management level is a key factor in allowing more workers to return home safe to their families every day, and for company owners to have greater confidence that strong safety performance drives business performance.