STRATEGIC SAFETY GOALS Creating Proactive Objectives Based on Leading Indicators ( Part 1)

IF YOU THINK A SAFETY GOAL such as “reduce the OSHA recordable rate 5% by the end of the calendar year” is effective, think again. Setting such safety goals can have powerful side effects that can undermine an organization’s efforts to build a solid, vibrant safety culture. My former employer learned this the hard way.

The old advice to “define your goals” is applicable to both one’s personal life and to the occupational world. This axiom usually gets head nods from those who hear it. Many books and articles have been written throughout the years that support this advice. Goals are necessary for anyone who is trying to be successful in life or any business function striving for high performance, regardless of the industry or size of company. Michalewicz (2014) claims that “success = goal achievement” (p. 17). Focused, well-defined and challenging goals create alignment, clarity, job satisfaction and enhanced productivity (Locke & Latham, 2002; 2006). OSH is no different.

According to Janicak (2010), “the most commonly found goals in any safety and health program include lost-time injury rate, lost workdays, recordable injury rate and total injury rates” (p. 13). If you ask an OSH professional to state their safety goals for the year, you may likely receive answers such as:

?reducing the OSHA recordable rate 5% by the end of the calendar year,

?reducing the lost time rate 5% by the end of the calendar year, or

?reducing workers’ compensation costs 10% by the end of the year.

These answers are given when the OSH professional is focused on the outcomes based on commonly accepted lagging indicators. Many times, these safety goals are communicated to all levels of the organization at the beginning of each year. For some OSH professionals, focusing on the outcomes is not surprising. First, such goals are considered “well-constructed safety goals” (Janicak, 2010, p. 14). We also live in an outcome-focused society.

From a young age we have been conditioned to use numerical targets. In primary school, we are told that getting 8 of 10 test questions correct is necessary to pass. This continues into secondary school with requirements such as needing a B average or better to be accepted into a university. When entering the work environment, the focus on numerical goals continues and is heightened. In production, it is throughput; in quality, it is defect rates and customer complaints; and in marketing, it is the number of sales. Achieving these numerical goals are often connected to bonuses.

Setting safety goals based on lagging indicators is not all bad. The potential positive aspect is that they are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. They provide clear, concise, unambiguous and objective means for evaluating organizational safety performance. However, these benefits belie the fact that setting safety goals this way contains some harmful side effects. As surprising as this may sound, safety goals based on lagging indicators inadvertently hinder efforts to create a safe workplace.

First, this article briefly discusses leading and lagging indicators. Next, it highlights specific pitfalls when using lagging indicators to set safety goals. It describes how the use of safety goals that are based on lagging indicators can hinder an organization’s efforts in building a solid and vibrant safety culture by: appearing unintelligible to frontline workers; unintentionally sending the wrong message that the company cares more about numbers than it cares about its people; luring frontline supervisors into unproductive, uncaring, uncollaborative and unempathetic behaviors when handling a workplace incident; inhibiting learning; and reducing intrinsic motivation because production floor workers have a hard time understanding and remembering them.

Finally, I will suggest an approach that OSH professionals can use to write safety goals that proactively fuel a safety program. A filter is offered to guide when goals are being written for production floor workers. Specific questions OSH professionals should ask are identified. The article concludes with a key action that OSH professionals should take after setting safety goals.

Leading Indicators

Leading indicators are a part of an organization’s OSH system. They are measures of proactive efforts designed to minimize losses and prevent incidents (Janicak, 2010). Leading indicators (unlike lagging indicators) measure the presence of safety not the absence thereof. In other words, they measure the positives, what employees are doing right on a regular basis to prevent injuries. Leading indicators allow workers to see small improvements in performance, either daily or weekly. They make safety success a far more regular occurrence (daily or weekly), not a yearly outcome or occurrence. Leading indicators help workers enjoy the process of building a safe workplace each day in a way that reinforces safe behaviors. Some examples of leading indicators include number of employees adequately trained in hazard identification, percentage of employees actively participating in behavior-based safety and number of certified trainers in safety

?Lagging Indicators

Like leading indicators, lagging indicators are also a part of an organization’s OSH system. Although these indicators look at broad data (e.g., first aids, incidents, injury and illness costs, workers’ compensation costs) to help measure improvements or changes from past performance, they do not communicate why specific levels of performance are occurring. Lagging indicators describe performance over time, but they do not prescribe. In sports parlance, they tell the score at the end of the game, but they do not help players and coaches understand the strengths and weaknesses of their performance as the game progresses. They do not measure safety activities that lead to a safer work environment. They look backward in time and do not allow for forecasting. Many organizations tend to focus and rely on lagging indicator data to make OSH improvements because the data is easy to identify, collect and analyze.

What’s Wrong With Setting Safety Goals Based on Lagging Indicators?

When I joined the safety and health department of my former employer, I knew the company was facing some tough challenges but did not know the real magnitude. To say that the employer was besieged with serious and deep trouble is an understatement. Only a few days after my arrival at the manufacturing plant, the signs of trouble were too many to miss.

The 350-person manufacturing plant specializing in motor vehicle components faced several challenges. The round-the clock plant operated at an anemic 49% efficiency (corporate management expected a minimum of 85%), had a total case incidence rate (TCIR) of 12.6 (3.5 points higher than the industry average), high worker turnover, high workers’ compensation costs and a strained relationship with Michigan OSHA (MIOSHA). Several years of ineffective safety management (e.g., honest mistakes were viewed as crimes; performance reviews focused on productivity and did not value safety-related actions; lack of consistency existed between stated intentions and actions by management) had fostered a culture of mistrust and disrespect that was so deeply rooted in the plant’s DNA that it was pathological.

Hourly workers voiced persistent criticism of virtually every aspect of the plant, particularly of safety and health. No matter what plant management did, it could not shake the perception that it was indifferent to employees’ safety and welfare. In addition, several OSHA citations originating from employee complaints led MIOSHA to put the plant on its radar. The CEO figuratively sounded the panic alarm and, in an attempt to reverse the trend at this plant, I was hired to manage the safety program.

To determine the underlying causes of these challenges, the plant was put under a microscope. All the facets of the safety program, employees’ practices and beliefs were closely examined at all angles with a critical, non-complacent eye. The assessment included walk-throughs, observations, document review, and interviews with labor and management, followed by focus group discussions, to identify and explore factors shaping attitudes and behaviors. The results of the assessment were used to craft an aggressive improvement strategy and action plan whose implementation set in motion long-term safety success.

The interviews and focus group discussions around the company’s safety goals made it clear that part of the challenges stemmed from the way safety goals were framed and communicated throughout the plant. Safety goals that were communicated to everyone during the first plant-wide meeting of each year were based on lagging indicators. Answers to questions such as “What is safety currently focused on?” “What comes to mind first when you read or hear the plant’s safety goals?” and “Can you describe the kind of environment the company’s current safety goals create?” were quite revealing.

From the hourly employees’ perspective, the safety goals were framed in such a way that employees felt that to management, people were only numbers or job functions, such as crane operators, machine operators, millwrights and electricians. They felt the company did not care about them as human beings. Employees told me that these beliefs were reinforced each time a work-related incident or injury occurred. Frontline supervisors’ nonverbal communication (e.g., facial expression, the look in their eyes, gestures, body language, tone of voice) combined with their actions were the soil from which these beliefs and perceptions grew. When responding to workplace injuries, frontline supervisors and previous safety leaders were reported to have had an attitude that was generally uncaring, uncollaborative and unempathetic— in short, less attentive to the injured employee’s safety and welfare. Injured employees were not put first. Frontline supervisors were perceived by employees to be judgmental and quick to blame the injured employee. Also, actions taken by frontline supervisors lacked minimum care and compassion for the injured employee. After the immediate crisis was over, the situation was closed for them. They did not touch base later with the injured employee, regardless of where the individual may have been (e.g., at home, at work on restricted duty) to see how the person was doing.

Instead of seeing these unfortunate workplace injuries as teaching or learning moments, management often viewed them only as being detrimental to the company’s safety goals. Several golden opportunities to show how much management cares about its employees were missed because of the unproductive ways these events were handled. In the author’s experience, these kinds of approaches not only inhibit learning, but also reduce intrinsic motivation because when employees do not feel cared about or believe they do not matter, it is very hard for them to be motivated and embrace the desired safety behaviors, let alone other organizational core values. Interviews with frontline supervisors revealed that resources, energy and time were focused on injuries that had already occurred, rather than trying to find their root causes and developing preventive measures. The recordability of some cases was debated for hours, sometime days. Frontline supervisors chased down doctors to try to change the status of injuries that had already occurred and were deemed recordable or lost time.

For some hourly employees and frontline supervisors, these counterproductive attitudes were due in part to a lack of proper training as well as the way safety goals were framed. In other words, safety goals based on lagging indicators lured frontline supervisors into unproductive, uncaring, uncollaborative and unempathetic behaviors when handling a workplace incident. The main issue was the fact that hourly employees and some frontline supervisors did not remember the specific goals, let alone understand what they meant. They found safety goals based on lagging indicators difficult to grasp. What does it mean to reduce the OSHA recordable rate by 5%? If an individual does not remember or understand a goal, it is difficult to work toward its achievement.

Indirectly, safety goals based on lagging indicators nudged or encouraged part of management to unconsciously create an environment of stress, cover up, fear and frustration—an atmosphere that the author termed a SCoFF environment. People did not feel cared for or appreciated.

Knowing that successful change is almost always a series of steps and not a big jump, reframing the way the plant wrote safety goals was, after the crafting of a compelling, inspirational and aspirational safety vision, the first step to creating a safer, healthier working environment that returns everyone home safe and well each day. The second step was to conduct periodic plant-wide progress meetings.

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