Aligning of Lean Principles with Safety

In a highly-competitive global marketplace, almost everyone is looking for competitive advantages. Lean is not just about “less,” it is about efficiency. It does not seek to do as well with fewer resources; it seeks to produce excellence by focusing resources on highly effective activities and eliminating the activities that do not add value. The basic premises of lean offer some potential opportunities to further improve safety as well.

No leader wants employees to get injured at work, but sadly and quite often, the cost of safety (e.g., additional time and capital spent for material and equipment) gets in the way of making good decisions. When the cost of safety becomes a burden to the organization, the safety approach begins to suffer.

Customer orientation – Many safety professionals view their customer as upper management, board of directors and/or stockholders. Others don’t think of their safety process as having a customer at all; it is simply an aspect of management and a service to the organization.

Lean thinking would point to the worker as the customer of the safety process. Many organizations actually view the worker as the “problem,” rather than the customer. Organizations traditionally spend a lot of resources on marketing research to find out what their customers value and making sure that their products and services have those features. In safety, we tend to focus on what the organization wants and ignore the wants and needs of the customer. Certainly, if you view the worker as the problem rather than the customer, this makes sense. As such, the process should seek to better understand and meet the needs of the worker rather than seek to install safety programs through command and control. It is assumed that safety is a duty of an employee and that compliance, rather than excellence, is the goal. Safety becomes an elimination of accidents rather than a strategy for excellence. The goal is not so much to succeed, as it is not to fail.

However, viewing the worker as the customer opens a whole new avenue to determining the most effective way to design safety products and services. How many workers would be willing to pay to attend safety meetings or training sessions put on by their employer? How many would choose another type of PPE or tools or equipment to do their jobs if their input was sought before making those choices? If the safety department had to sell these to the workers rather than force them, would they take another approach?

Efficiency through elimination of wastes – In Safety practices and designs become customary and remain in use long after the reason for them changes. The most prominent of these is Muda (an activity that is wasteful and doesn’t add value or is unproductive). Unfortunately, many of these antiquated practices still used worker time and effort while adding little or no value to the process.

Muri (overburdens such as too many or fatigue ). Companies should redesign processes to maximise flow and even out the burden placed on workers by the design of their jobs.

In safety, we often have traditional activities that take up time but fail to add value. We have our workers attend repetitive and boring training, but does not make us safe. Our accident investigations tend to fix the blame, but not fix the problem. Traditional approaches to behaviour-based safety can include massive over-training, resource-intensive overuse of observations, data analysis by employee teams with no statistical training and checklists with so many behaviours that they overburden workers rather than empower them to progressively change a few habits at a time.

Safety management practices must evolve from command and control to worker engagement. Safety focus must be evolved from conditions to behaviours to influences on behaviour, and from compliance to culture. Safety practices and theories can’t just make sense, they have to prove themselves and demonstrate that they can work in the real world.

Specific examples integrating Lean concept include:

• Include Energy Isolation (LOTO) process in work instruction. This creates a more efficient and integrated work process where workers are less likely to forget the requisite safety measures.
• How many of your supervisors hate to prepare a job Safety analysis (JSA)? because it's perceived as “extra.” Perceptions of extra work, time, paperwork, etc., contribute to poor decision-making. Integrating the JSA expectations into operational standard work will make safety and the work process more effective and efficient
• Whenever possible integrate safety training into work process training. For example, if your organization conducts job/task-specific training (and refresher training), then include the required Hazard Communication elements in that training rather than making everyone attend a “generic” hazard communication training session.
• Make the process the shortcut. Use your expert “shortcut takers” to design the process. It is human nature to shortcut. We’ve all on occasion cut diagonally across the grass lawn instead of following the longer route defined by the walkways. When safety are perceived as extra and employees decide to omit a step or create a work-around, the results can be tragic. Short-cutting, such as skipping safety steps or using the wrong tool for the job is often found in the chain of causes for injuries and fatalities.

When these shortcuts are discovered, it’s imperative that operational leaders ensure that the root reasons are identified and included the process design and redesign initiatives.