In seventh grade, I broke my arm while playing football. On the way back from the emergency room, my father said, “If you go through childhood without breaking a bone, you haven’t really had a childhood.” This learn-through-consequences approach to risk is how many of us grew up.
Toddlers learn not to touch a hot stove after getting burned once. Likewise, we might expect employees to learn from the accidents they experience. But consider this: an accident can cost a company between $600 and $2,000,000 or, much worse, lead to loss of human life. Our safety programs must prevent accidents before they ever happen.
In other words, employees must know not to touch the hot stove before they are burned.
How can a safety program prevent accidents without people having to experience them? Successful safety programs explain the why of the program’s processes in addition to the what. The most successful safety programs do these things well:
Organizations must know that safety is important at the highest levels, and it will not be compromised for profit or other business reasons. If it’s important to your boss, then it’s important to you.
At a minimum, a successful safety program will include these key processes:
These processes must be simple, easy to follow, and documented so they can be audited for enforceability. Checklists and graphical instructions work better than long, detailed documents.
Alerts, bulletins, and other communications express both the importance of safety and the “why we do it." Short, visual communication and storytelling are more effective than detailed graphs, tables, and statistics. It is possible to preserve the quality of information while keeping it simple and concise.
Detailed incident reporting and analysis, field safety observation programs, and compliance audit programs are key elements to continuous improvement. Capture the data, then use it to evaluate where changes to your program will have the biggest impact. If you try to work on everything, nothing gets done. Start with a few high-impact areas for improvement and do them right.
With a little thought and discipline, you can have a safety program that not only makes employees learn from incidents, but prevents incidents before they happen. Regardless of what my father said, you can have a great childhood without breaking a bone.
This is the second in a series of articles on operational excellence. Trenegy helps companies successfully manage operational excellence using a proprietary methodology. We help our clients get value of out their new programs quickly and relatively painlessly.
Alan Quintero is the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Rowan Companies. Immediately prior to joining Rowan, he was a Partner at Trenegy. He previously served in executive leadership positions at Transocean and Atwood Oceanics.
