Safety: The Trends Behind a Maturing Performance Dimension
The Blueprint for Safety Transformation™ reflects BST’s observation that safety is maturing as a performance dimension. The trends described below are key indicators of this maturation. Taken together, they mean that safety now contributes to business ethics, risk management, performance improvement, talent management and strategy implementation.
BST continues to monitor these and other trends to ensure its Blueprint evolves with the needs of the organizations it serves.
Trend #1: Safety is leading performance. Many forward-thinking organizations embarked on rigorous safety initiatives years before others did, simply because it was the right thing to do. Other pioneers in safety sensed that an ethical approach, while sometimes costly in the short-term, would also ultimately pay dividends not just in happier, healthier employees, but also in the “harder” metrics that these employees influenced. Both were right. We now know that companies performing well in safety also tend to perform well in production, quality and profitability. Many organizations are integrating safety into valuation estimates and due diligence metrics. And safety is leveraged as part of being an “employer of choice,” an increasingly important tactic in capturing and retaining the best of a changing workforce.
Trend #2: Culture has become an explicit target of safety interventions. In the recent past, mentioning the word “culture” was more likely to provoke a rolling of the eyes than a roll out of a serious initiative. While many grasped the importance of culture’s influence on safety, little was understood about what exactly “culture” meant, how to measure it or whether it could be improved for safety and productivity. Still, hints of a link between culture and safety emerged in the experiences of sites using employee-driven safety. In addition to more positive safety metrics, many of these sites reported improvements in cultural attributes such as trust in management and communication among peers. Follow-up work by BST uncovered that culture was not only a beneficiary of safety activities, but a determining factor in how well those safety activities performed. The implications of such an advance extend far beyond strengthening and supporting safety activities. It means that organizations can leverage safety to create a foundation for other areas of performance excellence.
Trend #3: Safety focus is shifting from injury to exposure. For years, safety has meant preventing undesired events by looking at how those things happened. Given that many injuries do follow from routine work, it is not surprising that this model was highly successful in reducing injuries. But inevitably, as companies became proficient at using the “injury-focus” model, it became apparent that this focus was not sufficient to prevent all injuries. There were injuries that occurred seemingly independently of this paradigm, oftentimes ones that were more serious and deadly than the “common” incidents this model so effectively mitigated.
Rethinking the dominant historical model, many forward-looking companies now focus on “exposure to hazards.” They expand their activities to identify and mitigate anything that represents a contact or hazard, even exposures that have not contributed to injury in the past. This approach requires a disciplined shift in organizational thinking and a rigorous integration across initiatives and activities. To be effective, employees have to be trained in how to identify exposures, and the culture has to be receptive to communication about such hazards, and managers need to be versed in the use of the hierarchy of controls to deal with them.
Trend #4: Leadership is guiding and shaping safety improvement. Finally, one of the most powerful trends in safety is the increasing role of leadership. Not surprisingly, studies of long-term safety initiatives have shown that, along with culture, the quality of leadership is a determining factor in outstanding safety outcomes. Leaders determine priorities, shape the organizational culture, provide the resources, and foster the talent that drives the engine of safety performance. Leaders also source and champion a larger vision of safety, a vision that safety is the means by which a high-performance and supremely ethical culture can be developed for the organization.