Safety is Bigger Than Your Number 1 Priority

Summary: 

To have a clear and sustainable safety program, safety must be treated as an uncompromising foundation to your business. Once your team is working safely, they can then focus on other priorities like productivity. This requires intentional standards for what safe work looks like and stopping the work if it becomes unsafe. I coach my team on the simple phrase “2 doors and a rocket”. You must first pass through the doors of working safely and working within the quality standards to be able to focus on productivity. Any perceived productivity gains by compromising either of those need to be treated as losses by leadership. This mentality minimizes uncertainty and builds confidence throughout the organization. 

Safety should not be the number 1 priority.

Safety needs to be the foundation of employee oriented businesses. The problem with the “number 1 priority” mentality is that priorities are compromised by other priorities, and this creates confusion for your team. 

Here is an example: It is easy to say your team prioritizes safety, but what happens when an employee asks about adding a requirement of safety shoes, or safety glasses? If you require cut resistant gloves, why are you not requiring kevlar gloves? If you answer (or worse, if you believe) that it is because of cost, you tell your team that you are compromising their safety for profits. This takes the whole team down an unhealthy and adversarial path.

To help describe the difference, let’s use a house shopping analogy. If your number one priority in house shopping is a big backyard, you will focus on homes with that requirement. But if you find another home with all the features that are your other priorities, big kitchen, good schools, etc, you may determine that the overall package is better than just getting your number one priority. Safety cannot work like that. Instead, safety is like a home’s foundation. I have never heard anyone walk into a home and say, Look at that foundation. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Our search is complete, this foundation is perfect. 

But, on the other hand, if the foundation of a house is bad, people will run from it no matter what the other features are. You cannot have a fancy enough kitchen to outweigh a bad foundation. This is how safety works best. Running a profitable business is your objective, but it must be built on an uncompromising foundation of safety.

How does Foundational Safety work in practice? 

You first must identify how to work safely. This becomes your set of safety standards. These must be simple enough for your team to understand and deep enough to include supporting background that can be explained. Do not take these standards lightly, nor make these extraneously difficult. If a person follows these standards, they will leave work ready to enjoy their time off and come back the next day. These standards must be inclusive of equipment, processes and margin. If your requirement is for a pedestrian to stay back 4 feet from a forklift when it is not moving, why is it 4 feet? A good answer is that an unexpected movement by the driver could jerk the equipment by 2 feet and you need to keep margin so that the pedestrian can react. 5 feet would be farther away but not necessarily safer since the margin is already built in. Not everyone will ask that question, but when they do your management team(or at least your safety team) needs to have that answer. This will build confidence in your team that your standards are created intentionally to keep them safe. 

Don’t let cracks grow in your foundation

People have inherent variation in their decision making, and we need to design margin in our standards to account for that. But when it goes beyond good faith variation, we cannot compromise on the standards. When your standards are intentional, you need to hold your team to them. If anyone sees their team violating these safety standards, the work must stop and corrective action be taken. Corrective action is a whole different topic, but it should be documented and focused on “correcting” future action. The work must stop as long as work is not being done safely. Stopping the work until the safe work begins again will demonstrate to your team that you will not compromise safety for productivity. Once the work can be done safely, work can resume. Normally this only takes a few moments of stoppage, but if something is broken or missing, have a backup plan to close the safety gap and keep going. If you compromise on this, you will lose your credibility and lose your team’s trust. 

This foundational mindset of intentional standards and uncompromising enforcement, applies to other parts of your operation as well. I have given my team this simple phrase to remember: 2 doors and a rocket. The first door is safety. You must be operating safely, or nothing else matters. The second door is quality/accuracy. If you are working safely, then you must be following the quality standards of your organization. This will ensure that you meet your customer requirements, preserve your inventory and financial accuracy and keep other aspects of your business stable. Once you are through those 2 doors and meeting those expectations, shoot for the stars on productivity. In doing so your team will generate sustainable innovation built on a foundation that can be repeated and replicated. 

It is important to note that any productivity wins that compromise your foundational principles, must be treated as losses. This will prevent a culture of shortcuts that generate manager praise. Secondly, your team will come up with new ideas that cause you to rethink your standards. Do not automatically turn these down. Your standards should be robust enough to handle a broad set of circumstances, but new technology or innovation can substantially change requiring an update to the standards. If that is the case, intentionally update your standard and hold yourself and your team to it.

When this culture change is complete, your team will integrate safety and quality into their daily work as the default, and they will be enabled to push for productivity gains that are built upon a firm foundation.