Companies serio
us about safety performance often talk about the injury-free culture. These three simple words carry a lot of weight and importance. Indeed, it is hard to know how an organization could espouse any different vision of safety. Yet, saying that you want to be “injury free” is not the same as actually moving to this level of performance.
For one thing, what do we mean by injury free? Is such a thing even possible? Numbers can’t make up the whole picture; there are too many examples of organizations with low injury rates that continue to have fatalities, record keeping violations, and so on. So how do leaders need to think about framing the injury-free goal for their own organization?
To start, getting to an injury-free culture is less about the number of injuries or the injury frequency rate than it is about creating organizational functioning consistent with safety excellence. Practically speaking, an injury-free culture doesn’t mean “zero injuries”; it means creating an environment where injuries are not acceptable and where we do everything possible to prevent them.
The focus is not going forever injury free, which for most people is too hard a concept to support or stand behind. The focus is continuous, sustainable improvement. An injury-free culture is present whenever an organization is saying and doing things such that they go increasingly longer periods without an injury. For example, an organization going 45 days without an injury, sets their next milestone to go past 45 days. In these cultures, leaders communicate a reasonable standard in which people can see the logic, and generate alignment around these goals throughout the organization.
You can assess the level of alignment around the concept of “injury free” simply by speaking with people in the organization:
- Is the idea just a set of words or is there a true understanding of the concept?
- Is it being communicated and driven throughout the organization?
- Do we even agree what we mean by injury at all?
It is okay for different organizations to have a different definition for “injury” in this context. If my organization is concerned with lost-time injuries, “injury free” would mean a focus on those events. If we have achieved sustained periods of lost time injury-free performance, the next milestone would logically be going free of injuries that require medical treatment, and so on.
What’s important is that there is clarity within the organization both about what we mean by the term “injury”, and what our safety improvement objective really is.
