The combination of corporate support, front-line practicalities, safety culture reality and effective solution techniques delivers rapid workable solutions that include functional safety accountabilities.
Mike Williamsen, Ph.D., CSP
A different kind of corporate safety guidance is delivering a strategy and results beyond what the traditional compliance-based corporate group has typically been able to achieve. A corporate level safety steering team with a focus on safety culture strengths and weaknesses brings together front-line practical personnel, safety professionals and upper management. The safety steering team process engages corporate and front-line leadership, safety culture survey data, continuous improvement teams and emerging safety needs. The combination of corporate support, front-line practicalities, safety culture reality and effective solution techniques delivers rapid workable solutions that include functional safety accountabilities. The resultant zero-incident safety culture intensity spreads and takes hold site by site across an organization.
Strategic Initiatives
This corporate level safety steering team approach has a focus on strategic initiatives rather than reacting to the latest injuries. The team itself is also very different from the norm. There are corporate leaders at the VP level and a corporate safety resource. However, the rest of the team is comprised of front-line personnel who volunteer to assist in proactively eliminating the cause of injuries no matter where or why they might occur. The team also has observers and resource personnel like communications support, which is necessary to get consistent, timely safety improvement messaging to the various workgroups throughout the organization. There is usually a mid-level line/operations manager as well as a couple of front-line supervisors and a couple front-line hourly employees. In other words, more than 50 percent of the team’s membership is direct from the front line, which ensures the day-to-day practicalities are a part of every improvement initiative. Front-line employee engagement is also critical in breaking down barriers, and potential trust deficits, that exist between management and production labor.
The team meets monthly, usually at a corporate headquarters. Here they briefly review the state of the company and the state of its safety culture. In doing so, front-line personnel on the team are updated with respect to what is going on at a corporate level. In this way they are looked on and sought out by their peers back in the field as credible, up-to-date resources for information about the company.
The safety steering team then moves on to what is being done by continuous improvement teams they have sponsored and launched. Their chartered teams always include a steering team member or two, which makes the progress briefing current and crisp. The monthly agenda also includes safety training that provides in-depth knowledge on foundational safety material, such as incident investigation, near-miss reporting, effective front-line safety communication, how to lead safety continuous improvement teams, etc. In this way the steering team members become viable, knowledgeable safety champions during their one-year tenure on the steering team. In turn, as they rotate back out into the field they greatly increase knowledgeable safety leadership beyond the usual safety resource personnel. This results in a noticeable increase in engaged front-line safety commitment.
It is important for the steering team to meet on a monthly basis. This creates consistent pressure to analyze, focus and execute ongoing safety improvement activities and keeps the effort from dying on the vine. The meetings are moved to field locations once or twice a year so that upper management support of safety is visible in the field. This kind of safety steering team strategy provides guidance, resources, noticeable upper-management support and active front-line participation. The result is a highly visible, active and relentless pursuit of a zero-incident safety culture.
Rapid Improvement Workshop Teams
However, the real work is done by the Rapid Improvement Workshop (RIW) teams that the safety steering team oversees. The RIW teams are made up of volunteers who come from across the organization and from all of its levels. On the first day of the workshop, the seven to nine members of each team learn the differences between traditional approaches to safety management and those that deliver world-class results, discovering along the way that successful organizations manage safety the same way they manage every other important business initiative. Over the next three days the team is guided through an intense engagement journey to the final solution by a safety professional who is a trained facilitator in the RIW process. The team agrees on the purpose, the deliverables and the approach that will be used to achieve a solution. They are then trained to use solution tools which include flow diagrams, Pareto charts, and cause and effect diagrams. They learn how to turn problems into goals, along with a number of other practical team engagement and solution-delivering techniques.
At the end of the three to four-day workshop, the team has an outline of a viable solution for the issues they have been asked to resolve. In addition, they have an action item matrix that lists all the remaining tasks, indicates who will work on the tasks and includes a timeline for accomplishing each line item. The entire plan should be achieved within a 90-day time period. Armed with a solution and the personnel and means to deliver it, the RIW team presents its solution to the safety steering team at a two-hour briefing on the final day of the workshop. The safety steering team reviews the plan and gives feedback as to scope, timing, personnel engagement and viability.
With a plan agreed upon, the RIW team meets regularly to deliver a final solution which includes necessary training, safety accountabilities across the organization, communication, auditing and other needs required to achieve a practical, workable solution. Each month, an RIW representative presents the solution process progress to the safety steering team for guidance and feedback. The ongoing task completion and progress review continues for up to 90 days. The proposed solution then goes into a pilot phase in which it is implemented at a target work group to shake out any remaining details. The pilot progress is also reviewed by the safety steering team, as is the ensuing solution for rollout to the entire corporation.
Practical resource realities limit an organization to about three significant RIW team solutions with their associated pilots and rollouts per year. This ongoing solution development, piloting, roll-out and field viability monitoring keeps the safety steering team busy, with members focused on proactively delivering needed solutions to safety issues rather than just reacting to injuries.
Delivering a Better Safety Performance
Achieving cultural transformation also requires significant expense. It takes both financial and personnel resource commitments to change what an organization is doing in order to improve. However, time and again this approach has rapidly and effectively delivered safety performance beyond that of classical approaches that are focused on reacting to injuries and events. Organizations investing in this focused safety steering team and Rapid Improvement Workshop approach receive a definite return on investment which includes:
- Fewer injuries with their incurred direct and indirect expenses
- Multiple knowledgeable safety champions at all levels of the organization
- Improved working relationships and morale between hourly and salaried employees
- Elimination of high- and low-risk issues which can lead to injuries
- A culture of safety accountability that proactively eliminates the possibility of injuries
The bottom line? This safety steering team and RIW approach delivers a safety culture that continually error-proofs safety processes, conditions and activities in the relentless pursuit of a zero-incident safety culture, both on and off the job.
Mike Williamsen, Ph.D.,CSP, is a Senior Safety Consultant with Caterpillar. To reach Mike, or to learn more about the continuous improvement process Caterpillar customers leverage to drive zero-incident performance, email [email protected].