Safety Committee Apex Meetings-An increasingly meaningless ritual or a strategic intervention?
Rituals are important for building cultural artefacts in an organization. Yet, over time they can become a problem too. All manufacturing organizations, for example, have the ritual of a monthly Safety Apex meeting at the top level, typically attended by the CEO. (If you are not having one, then you have a different type of problem!).
Typically, these meetings are initiated with great gusto. And the momentum carries it through for a few months, even years. The agenda of these meetings is typically 1) review of past action items 2) review of metrics-incidents, frequency of injuries, training, etc, 3) Specific Actions such as projects or incident investigations 4) departmental updates.
Do these meeting at the top have limited impact? Do they truly impact the behavior of the lowest end of the chain that is at the greatest risk? Do we ever step back to evaluate whether the conversations in these meetings are making people safer?
Most such meetings have all the right intent in place. Over time, however, they struggle with the intensity required to create change. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, similar to rituals in other areas, these meetings tend to flag off over a period of time till an incident jolts the group back. Some causes are simple and are related to meeting discipline. For example, slides are not sent earlier or if sent, then most don’t read the slides before the meeting, etc and therefore a lot of time gets spent going over material that did not require a meeting. Members attendance dips over a period of time or engagement during the meetings is faked because the topics are not engaging or limited to the technical departments. Over time, this tends to be a ritual without adequate meaning. Concentration dips. Too much is expected of the CEO in the meetings.
A great opportunity is being lost in such meetings but for Safety, this is a death sentence because these meetings can allow the Safety culture of an organization to drift.
The purpose of the Safety Apex Committee of a top industrial house is given below:
Can’t find fault in the above. Most charters of Safety Committee meetings at the Apex level would probably be similar but the devil is in the details.
In my view, the purpose of the meetings, at a fundamental level is two-fold:
A)????Understand the work of the lowest end of the chain and the hazards, decision choices that the make that affect their safety
B)????Design Interventions that impact the people at the ground level, change their attitudes and behavior.
All discussions must lead to the above two outcomes through the various interventions that get discussed. When I first started working in the area of safety, I was surprised that the daily work routines of contract workers were assumed but deeper study showed that as managers moved up the hierarchy, the understanding and the nuances were being lost. In our attempt to make organization wide interventions, we were often missing out the various moments of truth in the daily work routines of the employees. Sometimes, the way we draft and write a charter for a Committee, makes us miss the woods for the trees.
In my view, the following should be an essential part of the Safety Apex meetings:
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1)What work or How much work was stopped by a Manager because he saw a safety problem? We know that unless the employee has the power to stop work, safety will tend to be a mirage. It is a fundamental aspect of Safety culture.
This number should be encouraged to be honestly reported and this number should go up, we should worry about it but encourage it. As we start encouraging resolving the design issues, this number should come down. This is difficult to do but tests our commitment to the principle that Safety is more important that production.
2) A lot more discussion on the qualitative aspects of incidents and stoppage of work. Is the pattern reflective of an upstream error or downstream error? Are design issues on how we work being reflected enough to incorporate safety?
3) Discussions on each employee’s safety attitudes. Are we limited in our imagination on how to impact that? Is there a way of measuring attitudes and interventions to improve that attitude at the blue-collar level?
4) Quality of safety training. Much of Safety training is facts based, appealing to the cognitive part of our selves. However, for attitudes to change, the feeling and emotional aspect. Does the nature of our training reflect that? What should be the content of these programs? Rarely does that discussion happen at an apex in a deep, insightful way.
5) Is there a consistent understanding of the nature of work of the contract workers, employees and the first line manager, where the accidents happen? Why are we in these meetings, confident that we know the first level manager’s or the employee’s work routines very well? Every apex meeting should have a 20-30 minute section with a presentation from a first level manager covering the nature of their work, the type of safety problems they face, how do they solve it, do they stop work, do they feel empowered to stop work?
A Safety Apex Committee meeting is not a review meeting of performance but an introspective, reflexive meetings. Rituals become routine and routines are not reflexive in nature.
We need to get the mojo back in these meetings!
Let me know what you think.