The Four Disciplines of OSH Execution to Achieve Safety Excellence

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1 Session No. 746 The Four Disciplines of OSH Execution to Achieve Safety Excellence Francis P. Sehn MS, CSP, ARM Vice President Willis Group This paper is based on the fact that discipline is a key element of all successful activities. The author was schooled in a setting where discipline was a basic element of learning. If the student works hard and pays close attention to detail the learning process is fairly simple. This does not imply that the author followed all the rules. As Eleanor Roosevelt noted, If you follow all the rules, you are not having any fun. Eleanor may have had the right idea in my opinion. We will discuss discipline in its application to safety excellence and business excellence later in this document. In 2012 McChesney, Covey and Huling published a business text The 4 Disciplines of Execution. The book subtitle is Achieving your wildly important goals. Most safety professionals would agree that safety goals although not necessarily considered wild are achievable. In fact in working with many organizations over forty years my observation is that safety goals are many times identical and possibly a little wild. The most frequent statement regarding goals has typically been something like our goal is Zero accidents. The question many safety professionals ask to this goal or should ask Is this achievable? or Is this reasonable. The safety director for a manufacturer of carbon filter material established a goal of 1.0 for an OSHA (occupational Safety and Health) Recordable Incident Rate each year. This rate equated to seven employees on a year over year basis. When asked why not reduce this to zero or three, the safety director replied it has always been 1.0 because we will have seven injuries on average. Is this a case of complacency or the lack of a disciplined approach to move the needle or establish a stretch goal, a wildly important goal? Having a focus is critical to attain excellence in OSH. The focus of this paper will include but not be limited to the following: 1. How a four step disciplined approach can minimize injuries and illnesses in the workplace and drive safety excellence 2. The importance of management and employee engagement to move the needle on safety and health forward 3. The use of both safety management and risk management standards are critical to changing the safety profession from compliance to a business partner methodology. 4. The need to align safety and health with all key performance indicators to gain management buy in.

2 Maybe we as safety professionals should consider a step change to meet wildly important goals. We should strongly focus on reducing risk versus injuries. In fact a presentation on the subject of risk management found on the internet provides two statements that may cause the professional to pause. 1. Current observations tend to support the contention that the Safety Professional s standing is declining and falling into disrepute primarily due the profession s inability to validate that which they profess. Employers are seeking risk management professionals that can not only address simple regulatory compliance issues, but issues requiring enterprise risk management, cost/benefit analysis, conforming risk assessments, hazard quantifications, liability minimization, crisis management, loss projections, etc 2. Safety is a subset of risk management where the consequence component of the decisions specifically involves threats to life, health and related assets. Because of the subjective and multifaceted nature of these consequences, safety decisions cannot be scientifically assessed or quantifiably measured. This in turn has created a significant misunderstanding of what safety actually represents! The first statement would agree for the need for a step change. The American Society of safety Engineers has established a Risk Assessment Institute to move from compliance based to risk based initiatives to impact injuries, illnesses, and property damage. This approach is long overdue. The second statement focuses on the science of safety or relates to the consequences of decisions that impact safety. This is material for another paper or article. The 4 disciplines of execution are: 1. Focus on the wildly important 2. Act on the lead measures 3. Keep a compelling scorecard 4. Create a cadence of accountability The authors of The Four Disciplines of Execution cite two examples of safety improvement by organizations studied in the text. A construction company was experiencing a high rate of employee injuries. They decided to focus on basic safety compliance in an apparent highly disciplined fashion. This approach included wearing hard hats, gloves, boots, and eyewear, as well as using scaffold and roof braces to minimize falls. These efforts were measured on job sites and were considered to be predictive and influenceable in reducing accidents. The second example in the book of a large coal company reduced lost work day cases form seven hundred per year to sixty in a seven year period using the four disciplines noted above. Many safety professionals have had limited success with compliance or regulatory initiatives. Safety training and efforts directed toward regulatory compliance will frequently need a supplemental push from a behavior based or employee involvement effort to move to a higher level of injury reduction. These approaches have a life cycle and unless they are refreshed on a periodic basis they become somewhat stale or less effective. With the recent movement toward more substantive safety management and risk management there is a need for the OSH profession to use all of the tools available to align safety, health and environmental

3 with business goals and objectives. Using a disciplined methodology to accomplish this goal is imperative. A Safety/Risk Management Approach to the Four Disciplines Today we are seeing emphasis placed on aligning safety with other business metrics. A SQDC or safety, quality, delivery and cost is frequently seen in organizations trying to place safety on the same plane as other key performance initiatives or indicators. This will work if the organization truly understands that safety is an operational accountability similar to the other three indicators. In so many words it is not the safety person s responsibility to make the work environment safe. Frequently the organizations using SQDC and other acronyms are striving to be better than they have in the past or possibly best in class. The four disciplines can be transformed for the successful implementation of a best in class occupational safety, and health system should include the following: 1. Focus on important goals to minimize injuries and illnesses. Site specific performance goals should be established, and performance metrics in place, and reviewed quarterly. Continuous improvements are measured to ensure that the focus is appropriate and the goals are being met or exceeded. Many believe that zero accidents should always be the goal for safety. No one would disagree with that premise. If that is achieveable then an organization should focus on impactful efforts to meet that goal. The author works with too many companies both large and small that rarely achieve zero. A plastics manufacturer four years ago embarked on a safety journey to achieve injury reduction with goals of 50% reduction each year. The peaked at ten lost work day cases in 2011 with slightly over one hundred employees. Their corporate OSH adopted a safety and risk management practice to assist in these efforts. In 2014 they had two lost work day cases while adding a 50,000 square feet addition and increasing the work forces by 15%. They continue to improve each year and have embraced safety from the General Manager to all of the shop employees. 2. Actions taken to identify and impact leading measures or indicators. A risk assessment process is required for this aspect of execution to be effective. The risk assessment process must be formalized with a management process (identification, evaluation & control of hazards) and include defined responsibilities. This will allow for not only the identification of the measures that are impacting injuries and illnesses to be identified but also to be measured with priority for correction. The plastics manufacturer has taken risk assessment to the next level. They have used a process similar to the one shown below.

4 This is only the first step but as noted it captures the basics of injury prevention. This second step takes the hazards and assesses the risks identified in Step 1.

5 Finally an action plan is developed based on the results of step A scorecard that shows on-going results and achievements Keeping score of progress is inherent in our society. A scorecard promotes interest in where we are and where we need to go to win. Short term wins provide impetus toward our long term goals of injury and illness reduction. This same company measures safety on an annual basis both with an audit score and a reduction in Incident rates similar to the one shown below. 4. Creating a system of operational accountability. When management has skin in the game actions will be taken toward safety engagement and involvement. Executive management must exhibit visible leadership. Examples include employee meetings, plant tours, safety committees, staff meetings, and awards and celebrations of accomplishments. Operations Management accountability for safety performance should be integral in the performance review process. What gets measured usually gets done. These should not be new to the safety practitioner. The fact that each must be properly executed is the challenge to achieve safety excellence. Wild, Not Wildly Important A fellow traveler at a battery charging station in an airport was overheard on the phone stating the following: There are no hoods for the chemical experiments. The eye wash stations are not plumbed. Fire extinguishers are non-existent. The management does not care about employee safety. She was talking about a U.S. company not a third-world facility. While this may appear to be pretty scary it is not completely a surprise. She concluded by saying she plans to call OSHA if she is successful in changing jobs. Sounds like a case study in safety ethics. It was a real story. She said to me that the employees have repeatedly brought these items to management s attention but to no avail. Is this a lack of

6 management commitment or failure to execute or a blatant lack of care for the safety and health of the employees at this organization? From Good to Great Jim Collins the noted author of the #1 Best Seller Good to Great defines a Hedgehog Concept as a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of the following: 1. What you can be the best in the world at? 2. What drives your economic engine? 3. What are you deeply passionate about? While he proposes these to business managers it would be easy to identify these with OSH. He discusses not safety culture as such but instead a culture of discipline. He stares that a culture of discipline is not just about action. It is about getting disciplined people to engage in disciplined thought and who then take disciplined action. Should we as safety professional do the same thing? Collins begins his book with the statement Good is the enemy of Great. Many organizations believe they are good. This gets in the way of being great. An Executive Scorecard for safety management Here is an example of an executive scorecard used by several world class organizations to measure audit scores against results based on TRIR or Total Recordable Injury Rates. The above is the first year of a three year improvement project. After three years of applying a disciplined approach to safety and risk management principles they had the following results:

7 These results translated into a cost of risk saving in excess of $3 million. The cost of the project had a ROI of 12 to 1. Money well spent. Conclusion This article was an attempt to show how disciplined efforts on the part of organizations can translate into management sponsored change. The safety practioner must look for ways to move from hazard based to risk based approaches combined with enlightened management to not only safe money but lives and prevent injuries and illness in the work place. Change is not easily embraced but on through change can we move the needle to make the world a safer place to live, work and play. References The 4 Disciplines of Execution, McChesney, Covey, Huling, Free Press 2012 Good to Great, Collins, Harper Collins Publishing 2001 Intro to Risk Management PowerPoint Presentation found on Internet, November 2014 (author unknown)