Managing Worker Health & Safety

Safety and trust go hand in hand. What is safety? It is to preserve life. If you are preserving or helping to save someone's life there has to be a high trust relationship. It means that we care about their lives and make sure people get home safely. Trust is vital to a healthy safety culture.

~ Fred Barlow ~ CFO

Top Safety Leaders create a safety culture that shifts from a minimum requirement of compliance to a workforce where employees are committed to working safely. When I spoke with three top safety leaders they all agreed that safety starts and ends with the people.?It’s not about the confusing jargon, acronyms, abbreviations, and piles and piles of paperwork. It’s about the deep trust that exists between the company and the workers.

All of my leaders agreed that compliance is important. ?Compliance is the rules, regulations, and laws that are necessary for a safe workplace. I wanted to understand how you moved from understanding and knowing the rules and regulations to being committed to operating safely always. It all comes down to trust!

Trust is your ability to be open, vulnerable, and courageous based on positive expectations. It’s based on 5 tenets of trust. Caring, commitment, consistency, competence, and communication. - Lea Brovedani -

Caring – Genuine and demonstrate able care of others

Commitment – Keeping your word or not stopping until your work or task is completed

Consistency – Words and actions are aligned. The rules apply to everyone

Competence – A skill or knowledge that aligns with the task

Communication – Being able to listen and verbalize for complete understanding

They all work together and perfect trust is when all of the tenets align.

It’s not surprising that the top companies are leading the shift and making a big difference in Health and Safety. Each of these safety leaders has a genuine concern for their people. It showed up consistently in all of the interviews. Of course as “The Trust Architect” I wanted to know how to design and create a trusted safety culture.

J.R. Earnest Glasscock Junior is the Director of Corporate Safety at The Lane Construction Corporation. He spoke candidly about trust in the construction business.

There is a big difference between compliance and culture. Every company out there has a safety culture. To build a solid culture and commitment you need to get every part of the organization involved. That is key to safety success.

First, you have to ask yourself why the employees work safely on the job. Every employee needs to take responsibility for their own individual safety. They need to know the purpose behind why they are actually working safely.

Why they want to work safely is the difference between compliance versus culture. Compliance is I have to do this. Culture means I want to do this. That to me is the key. While purpose is important, it obviously goes deeper than that.

The second point is you have to live by the core value of 'care for people’. That is a core value of our company. When a company genuinely cares for employees it sets the stage for that cultural commitment that every company strives for. When employees feel that the company really cares for them it is reciprocated. It really is a full circle.

I think that companies need to ditch that safety is our number one priority approach. It's one of those buzzwords but I would much rather hear a company talk about ‘Safety Always’. What I mean by that is priorities can change. Even if it's your number one priority there is the potential that the safety priority could be pushed if you're behind schedule. So instead of a priority, it needs to be a value. Values are unwavering. They don't change. It's something that you live each and every day. I'll also say that most companies have values. However for a value to be trusted it has to be lived. It's tangible when you see it lived out in the field each and every day. That’s what solidifies a world-class safety culture.

J.R. and I talked about how trust and safety are closely aligned. He shared that trust is aligned with these three core principles:

1: You have to care for the individual?

2. You have to see value in the person and add value to the person

3. Your words and actions must align.

Reliance Electric is a nationwide Electrical contractor. I met Fred Barlow who, at that time, was CSO, and Nephi Allred, President and CEO when I spoke at a safety conference in Austin, Texas in 2016. Since that time, I’ve seen firsthand their commitment to the value of trust in their people and in their services. Fred and I spoke at length about the trust and safety at Reliance. He is now working as the CFO of Native Son Construction and carries his commitment to safety to the new company.

Workers willingly go into a construction site, which by itself is an inherently dangerous process. You can threaten people with penalties all day and it's a short-lived pressure on them. Moving from compliance to a commitment is a behavioral emotional change.

A commitment requires that something change in the heart. You have to change something on the inside. There has to be a desire planted. That is what we are focused on because compliance becomes easy once they have the desire to comply. We tie it back to their home and their personal lives. No one wants to be hurt at the end of the day. Compliance has to be tied to a commitment that is not work-related. You tie it back to principles like integrity and trust and caring and respect. People do it because they are adhering to their character. When they stand by their character, compliance becomes a lot easier.

I tell people when I see a challenge in trust and respect in the workplace. When I started safety there was a lack of trust between some people. When there is a challenge in trust and respect you fix it the same way you fix the challenge at home. You have to put your ego and your position aside and genuinely care about each other. You have to do it consistently. Your spouse your kids, they're gonna trust you when you care not only with what you say but with what you do consistently day after day and how they feel when they are around you. I think that's the same way around the business. Upper management has to be very consistent in their message of safety and caring.

I've never seen a worker just truly want to be unsafe. They don’t say or think, “I’m going to go mutilate my arm today”.

So when I see a worker not following the safety rule that they're trained in I have to ask myself, “Why are they ignoring that safety role?” It's not because they want to get hurt. I dig into the cause. Sometimes it's because someone they are working with doesn't share the same value on safety. They’re feeling peer pressure to do something that is out of their comfort zone, and they feel compelled to do it. Getting the proper training and getting the proper equipment takes time. On a job site, on a construction site, time is money.

We can't control everyone our employees work with. Because it is such an ever-changing worksite we have to have their personal commitment that we talked about.

It isn’t a surprise to me that the leaders I interviewed are highly trusted. ?To lead the shift from mere compliance to commitment and evolve and improve worker health and safety, trust must be there. What was consistent with all of them was their belief that you hire and train workers and respect their ability to do the right thing. You show them that the rules and regulations are there because you care for them and it’s not just a CYS (Cover Your Assets) ?I heard it again and again, “No one wants to get hurt or killed on the job”.?Make it easy for them to live and work safely.