TRANSIT SAFETY CULTURE: "WHAT GETS MEASURED, GETS MANAGED"

TRANSIT SAFETY CULTURE: “WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS MANAGED”

BY

?

LEVERN MCELVEEN

Introduction

As an enthusiastic transit safety professional, I have read the multiple media accounts of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) recent derailment and the removal of 748 of the 7000-series cars from service. I have also had conversations with safety and transit professionals across the industry on this topic. We collectively agreed that the problem with the 7000-series is systemic in nature, and leadership should be responsible for these safety failures. The ongoing and excessive safety failures at WMATA and throughout the transit industry are related directly to transit leadership's failure to develop and implement a sustainable transit safety culture. As a veteran of the transit industry, I have argued for years the need for developing and implementing a sustainable safety culture in the transit industry.

?In the absence of a sustainable transit safety culture, transit leaders mask safety problems into a single-causal explanation. The defect with the 7000-series cars at WMATA is not a single-casual failure, and the safety wickedness is for transit leaders to believe and define this problem as an isolated safety problem. The hallmark of a wicked safety problem is that the 7000-series failures cannot be determined nor reduced to a single-causal explanation. Transit safety professionals know this for a fact. The safety problems at WMATA are systemic and complex. We have all been told that correlation does not imply causation. Yet, transit leaders, elected officials, and media outlets make causal claims based on misleading correlations. These claims are too often unscrutinized, amplified, and mistakenly used to guide decisions.

Transit leaders need a wide range of safety measures to understand what is going on and what matters as they define individual safety incidents. For example, absenteeism is a significant issue in the transit workplace environment. Yet, transit leaders believe that the problem is due to the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA); instead, investigate employees' safety values, behaviors, norms, attitudes, workplace environment, and other safety-related impacts, such as 50-year-old schedules. Transit leaders at WMATA and throughout the industry will now be required post Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic to measure environmental factors, social factors, governance, engagement, performance, and other safety measures to get to the real cause of the 7000-series failure and develop new strategies to address the safety problems. Creating strategies is about setting direction. A set of measures is just a control system that helps leaders understand whether they are heading in the right direction. If transit leaders let individual safety events drive their strategy, they may end up mistaking their safety targets for their strategy. The trap is compounded when transit leaders are trying to manage according to individual targets.

Michael Luca's article (2021) Leaders: Stop Confusing Correlation with Causation cites, A large body of research in behavioral economics and psychology has highlighted systematic mistakes leaders make when looking at data. Leaders tend to seek evidence that confirms their preconceived notions and ignore data that might go against other hypotheses. Leaders neglect essential aspects of the way that data is generated. More broadly, it is easy to focus on the data before you, even when the most critical information is missing. As Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman has said, it can be as if "what you see is all there is."?This can lead to mistakes and avoidable disasters, whether an individual, a company or a government making the decision. The world is increasingly filled with data, and we are regularly bombarded with facts and figures. We must learn to analyze data and assess causal claims — a skill that is increasingly important for business and government leaders.

?Michael Luca further cites, the development of the causal inference toolkit has been remarkable, and the work of the Nobel recipients is genuinely inspiring. But you do not need to be a Ph.D. economist to think more carefully about causal claims. A good starting place is to take the time to understand the process that is generating the data you are looking at rather than assuming a correlation reflects causation (or that a lack of correlation demonstrates a lack of causation), ask yourself what different factors might be driving the correlation — and whether and how these might be biasing the relationship you are seeing. In some cases, you will come out feeling reassured that the relationship is likely causal. In others, you might decide not to trust the finding. If you are worried that a correlation might not be causal, experiments can be a good starting point. One way to accomplish this is by emphasizing the value of experiments in an organization. Companies such as Amazon and Booking.com put experiments at the heart of their decision-making process. But experiments are not always feasible. In these cases, you should think about — and seek out — other evidence that might shed light on the question you are asking. In some cases, you might even find an excellent natural experiment of your own.

Unsafe working conditions and unsafe practices continue to pose a massive challenge, not only at WMATA but throughout the transit industry. Unless transit leaders develop and implement a sustainable safety culture, these hazardous working conditions and safety practices will continue despite any infusion of infrastructure funding from the Biden-Harris Administration. Improving workplace safety culture should become a core value, not a priority, for the transit industry, even as transit leaders struggle to balance safety with productivity. Developing and implementing a transit safety culture would create innovative approaches to workplace safety and improving frontline workers training by developing a learning-centric culture would also help. By developing and implementing a sustainable safety culture in the transit industry, transit leaders would understand why workers make unsafe choices and why dangerous conditions continue to go unreported.?The hope is that the human-centered ethos of safety culture could help reframe the safety problems in ways that regular process improvements alone could not. The transit industry must develop and implement a sustainable transit safety culture. I offer the followings steps transit leaders should understand and consider moving forward.

Understanding A Transit Safety Culture

Transit industry leaders must develop and implement a sustainable safety culture. First, as stated previously, every system has a safety culture, good, bad, or indifferent. However, a service excellence transit safety culture must be developed and implemented by leaders to achieve resilience and sustainability. A defined safety culture is one that adapts to the idea that safety is everything we do in a system, and everyone is responsible. During the 2017 America Public Transit Association (APTA), International Transit Study Mission, we toured a bus division in Singapore. Singapore operates a tremendous bus service due to land density and population. After the tour and during the Q&A, a participant asked the Singapore official what is your average downtime for your vehicles? The Singapore officials stated four hours. For clarification, or the participant did not believe the Singapore official, the participant follows up with a second question, do you mean four hours for minor repairs? Again, the Singapore official stated no, we average four hours for all repairs. After returning to our tour bus, the participant indicated that the average vehicle downtime in his system is four days for significant repairs. I shared this story to explain the difference in safety culture. In Asia, the transit industry has developed and implemented a sustainable safety culture; therefore, their vehicle downtime is four hours, and the transit industry is four days. Please understand how this example is related to effective and quality service delivery? In America, we have not developed a transit safety culture.

We visited a rail shop in Toyoko, Japan, during the study mission, and the participants followed and listened to the Asian officials explain processes and procedures for repairs to include preventive maintenance, ongoing repairs, and vehicle overhauls. The participants were speechless when the Asian officials informed us that a ten-car consist could be completely overhauled in ten days. This time, I asked a question, did this process include safety certification? The answer was yes. I know that in America, it takes over a year to overhaul a ten-car consist. Because most transit systems contract the vehicle overhaul out to a contractor, this is the difference between safety culture in Asia and safety culture in America. Safety culture is simply not confined to the maintenance side of transit; it is also lacking in the human capital environment of the transit industry.

McKinsey & Company offers this scenario: A manager asks a team member to prepare a presentation. The draft falls short of what is needed, so the manager expresses her disappointment, offers feedback via e-mail, and then waits for her colleague's second try. The next iteration still misses the mark; the manager pressed for time and, concerned that her team member will never get the presentation quite right, takes over and rewrites it herself. In the end, the presentation is completed, but both parties leave the experience frustrated and demoralized—and no one has better skills than they had before the effort began. Let define this situation as one in a system without a safety culture.

The scenario would look different in a system with a defined safety culture with mentorship, coaching, and role modeling. McKinsey & Company cites, let us see what our concept might look like in a practical setting. Imagine, after receiving the first disappointing draft, the manager realizes that she has asked the employee to complete a task beyond the employee's current skills. She details specific feedback on necessary changes, then connects directly with the employee to develop a new strategy for completing the work. "I'd like to help you become comfortable building this kind of presentation," she might say. "Let's look at some of the issues in the current draft, and then I'd like us to write the next draft together." As they work together on the new iteration, the manager does two things that are missing from the earlier example. First, she intentionally tries to build the employee's skills to achieve the ability to work independently. Second, the manager models her thinking as she does some of the work preparing the new draft.

When transit employees can share their ideas and bring up safety concerns and problems, transit systems are innovated and can perform better. But transit leaders do not always promote employees' ideas. Transit leaders actively disregard employees' concerns and act in ways that discourage employees from speaking up at all. As stated, transit leaders are frequently stuck in their ways of working and identify so strongly with the status quo that they are fearful of listening to contrary input from employees below them. Transit leaders fail to create speak-up cultures, perhaps not because they are self-focused or egotistical but because their Boards, Secretaries, Governors, and Mayors put them in impossible positions. They face two distinct hurdles: They are not empowered to act on input from below, and they feel compelled to adopt a short-term outlook to work (Sherf, Tangirala, Venkataramani, 2019). These are some fundamental differences between having a sustainable transit safety culture and the lack of a sustainable safety culture or a toxic culture.

Transit Purpose

Let us be patently clear, the transit industry does not have a defined transit purpose that leaders and employees understand, and I believe this is a contributing factor to the 7000-series problems at WMATA. Ask 50 transit leaders to define the transit industry purpose and it is likely that one would get 50 different answers. Then, ask 1,000 transit frontline workers to define the transit industry purpose, and one is expected to get 1,000 different answers. The lack of purpose can be defined as one of the significant safety failures at WMATA and throughout the transit industry. Transit leaders must first develop a transit purpose. Ask anyone that has traveled on a Federal Transit Administration (FTA) International Transit Study Mission or an APTA International Transit Study Mission did they observed purpose in the transit systems? The answers would be overwhelming yes. The international transit systems’ purpose is written and demonstrated through mass signages located system-wide, clearly defining the system purpose.

McKinsey & Company (2021) cites, "It’s purpose! Purpose answer the question, "What would the world lose if your Company disappeared? It defines a company's core reason for being and its resulting positive impact on the world. Winning companies are driven by purpose, reach higher for it, and achieve more because of it. Companies with a genuine lived purpose radiate authenticity and do well by doing good. Customers, suppliers, partners, and investors recognize the value proposition. Senior leaders allocate capital and resources with purpose in mind. And employees think about purpose all the way, making it a part of their decision-making as a matter of course. Building those dynamics doesn't come easily. It requires leaders to embed purpose throughout the organization."

People and culture are at the forefront of purpose. McKinsey & Company cites the second lever for embedding purpose could, just as plausibly, be considered the first: people and culture. Purpose begins with human beings. Your employees, indeed, all of your stakeholders, are your sources of strength and a hard check against inauthenticity. That is why employee sentiment is often the single greatest force undermining insincere claims of purposefulness. The quest for meaning is part of the human condition and is embraced, not squelched, by purposeful organizations. Our research shows that employees at purpose-driven companies are four times more engaged at work—a powerful source of competitive advantage.

The purpose is directly tied to recruitment and hiring. Ron Carucci (2021) cites, Employees' connection to the organization's purpose is as unique as the employee themselves. Acknowledging when someone personally embodies the organizational purpose provides excellent reinforcement and reminds others to be intentional about doing the same. The transit industry recruitment is, at best, a forest. It is a major contributing factor behind safety events in the transit industry because frontline employees and middle managers/managers in the middle do not see employment pathways to leadership roles and positions. Recruitment and hiring are severe issues in the transit workplace. It is based on political and systemic racism

A purpose statement has a positive effect on engagement when one considers the impact of engagement on performance. McKinsey & Company found that performance can be seen as a function of Talent and Engagement. That means that assuming that talent is present, higher engagement will result in a better performance. The purpose is essential because it gives employees a reason to wake up in the morning. It makes life easier to live knowing that you have a purpose and can achieve that purpose. Having a purpose will make employees feel like they are living their best lives. That is why having a purpose is so important.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The transit industry must address diversity, equity, and inclusion in the transit industry. The transit industry still has systemic racism issues that transit leaders are not addressing. By design, frontline employees at most transit systems in the industry are African Americans and people of color. According to Dr. Frank Douglas, "Racism is a virus that replicates and integrates prejudices into the host's mindset. In this manner, racism becomes systemic or institutional and directs the host to practice behaviors and actions, consciously or unconsciously, that make the intended recipient defenseless against the enslavement of spirit and deed. One can either attack systemic racism in the host or enable the victim to defend against the attacks.” Transit leaders must address both to develop and implement a sustainable safety culture.

Structural racism in America is a public health issue. Many efforts to combat systemic racism focus on obvious manifestations, such as the structural and institutional barriers to educational, health, and leadership opportunities. Systemic racism is ingrained in white America, and as a result, it will require a consistent and persistent effort to reduce and ultimately eradicate its presence in the body politic. While this is necessary, it is not sufficient because it potentially leaves many African Americans and people of color languishing in entry and middle-level positions in America (Douglas 2020).

Angela Neal-Barnett cites, “At its core, racial trauma is racism. Racism takes three forms, each of which is a chronic stressor. System racism is when ideologies, institutions, and policies operate to produce racial and ethnic inequality. Interpersonal racism involves two or more people and can manifest through bigotry, bias, prejudice, and microaggressions. Internalized racism is the acceptance of negative stereotypes and societal beliefs about one's racial group.”

Alexandra Kalev and Frank Dobbin cite, "Systemic racism often hides behind neutral, seemingly color-blind management routines. Addressing systemic racism means recruiting at historically Black colleges, not just majority-white colleges. It means creating formal programs to ensure that every employee is offered a mentor rather than supporting a "natural" mentoring relationship, typically leaving people of color out in the cold. It means inviting all employees to sign up for skill and management training rather than letting bosses hand-pick their favorite workers. It means getting line managers involved in looking deeply at the problem of equity, brainstorming for a solution, and putting those solutions into action, rather than leaving the issue to outside consultants who have no authority to change things".

While many organizations have sought to improve diversity and inclusion because of systemic racism, authentic safety culture of health and well-being cannot be achieved without focusing on equity. A culture of equity and well-being requires systems to provide the necessary tools and education for preventing or managing the chronic conditions that disproportionately impact African Americans and people of color. This process improvement can go a long way in protecting the current and future health of the workforce (Maybank, 2020).

Transit leadership failure to develop and implement a sustainable safety culture is embedded in the transit industry's historical past. The transit industry safety problems are at the micro-level; however, these safety problems are associated with the macro levers, which is the big lie that America refuses to face. Until the transit industry faces the lie, despite any amount of funding from Biden's-Harris “Infrastructure Bill,” the transit problem will continue to exist. I believe that the transit industry is worse today than when I started my career in late 1970. I shared the recent safety problem and challenges at WMATA regarding the 7000-series cars, but please know that these problems and challenges exist across the transit industry.

I have shared this transit story in other articles; however, it is worth repeating for readers' clarity of the major safety problem and its historical past. As a former bus operator in late 1970, transit systems had an upward mobility policy in place, and this is how it works. The policy requires a bus operator to serve in place three years before becoming a bus supervisor. The procedure requires a bus supervisor to function in place three years to become an Assistant Superintendent. The policy requires an Assistant Superintendent to function in place for three years to become a Superintendent. The upward mobility policy allows rank and file employees to enter the rank of senior leadership over time. Let me remind readers that the frontline population was predominately white at that time.

The upward mobility policy had an advantage for the transit system because it included management and senior leadership with operational experience, producing better-than-average leaders due to their unique transit experience. A United Kingdom (U.K.) research study shows that when a disadvantaged group is well represented among the corporate managers, the disadvantaged group receives more effective advocacy. This suggests a trickle-down policy theory. In this case, the policy theory argues that if transit systems had more managers and senior leaders from the rank and file of frontline workers, employees and customers alike could and would receive more outstanding advocacy, effective service quality, and leaders would have more engagement with middle managers and frontline workers.

However, at that time, senior leadership did not care because the policy action was vital to promote systemic racism and white supremacy in the transit industry. In the mid and late 1980, frontline employees became predominately African Americans and people of color. As a result, the upward mobility policy was changed by senior leadership, which left frontline employees disappointed, devastated, and angry because the policy action denied them the same privilege given to white employees. Conscientiously or unconscientiously, the policy action further created a disadvantaged social class origin, and the policy no longer works on behalf of the current and future frontline workers. As a result, transit solidarity was a loss, and new leaders without operational experience came aboard.

Many transit leaders do not know that transit systems are tightly coupled with technologically complex parts. These systems consist of multiple sub-systems that are interdependent and yet interrelated. The synergy, interdependence, and interrelationships needed between systems and sub-systems and the organizational culture, and the many different sub-cultures are things that transit leaders should understand) to develop and implement sustainable safety culture. Transit leaders that cannot comprehend complex systems are at a loss for leading them (McElveen, 2012).

In her book "Engineering a Safer World," Dr. Nancy Levinson cites, "Systems are broken into distinct parts so that the parts can be examined separately." Transit leaders must know how to examine systems and sub-systems independently to ensure synergy because they work independently and in conjunction. When sub-systems operate in sync with one another, it is the result of many factors at work. Patterns of safety behavior are influenced by cultural change and processes in place.

The impact of synergy is an operating system that works at or near-optimal efficiency levels, even during a crisis. Therefore, operating systems with synergy will change employees' safety behavior and attitude and improve service performance. When systems and sub-systems are in alignment, the result is a safer transit system. Safe transit systems reflect how well safety has been ingrained into the structures' fabric and multiple sub-systems. When transit systems are not properly aligned, these systems and sub-systems will reach their safety limits, leading to catastrophic events.

These structure problems that stem from the Jim Crow era still live in the transit system today. As a result, frontline workers are faced with many challenges regarding safety from operational safety, personal safety, physical safety, and pandemic safety. For example, multiple media reports about thousands of transit workers exposed to the COVID-19 virus and fell ill, and several hundred have died. The COVID-19 compounds the chronic stressors with a unique set of acute stressors amplified by the violate, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous nature of the pandemic.

These stressors include personal exposure to the virus, as well as the potential to expose family members; the shortage or delay in engineering controls; the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE); and the problem associated with social distancing; job uncertainty, layoffs, physical and verbal assaults, extended or shortened hours and disruption of work schedules. Transit leaders did not envision how this adverse policy would eventually return and haunt transit leaders 40 years later. So, what does this all mean? It means that the advocacy for safety leadership, effective and quality service was displaced years ago. It also means a transit workforce with little to no engagement and employees that do not feel a sense of psychological safety and belonging.

?Psychological Safety and Belonging

?Transit leaders must develop a psychologically safe and belonging workplace environment. Imagine a transit workplace environment where all employees felt a genuine sense of psychological safety, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. It is doubtful that you will find such a transit system in the transit industry that offers this type of safety culture today. Perhaps, this could be one of the rationales that no U.S. transit system met the resilience and sustainability categories in the McKinsey & Company study of 25 cities worldwide on resilience and sustainability. No U.S. transit system met the standard in the study. However, it is patently clear that transit leaders are being made aware of the need to make safety culture a reality. Transit safety culture can and will only be developed and implemented when transit leaders and political leaders understand that transit is at the forefront of sustainable communities (purpose).

?Amy Edmondson (2021) cites psychological safety?– an environment in which people believe that they can speak up candidly with ideas, questions, concerns, and even mistakes – is vital to leveraging the benefits of diversity, equity, belonging because it can help make inclusion a reality. In brief, psychological safety is about enabling?candor. Inclusion is necessary for mutual learning – and mutual understanding is needed to progress in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Extensive academic literature on psychological safety has demonstrated its influential association with learning and performance in teams and organizations.

?Amy Edmondson further cites, today we know that although diversity can be created through deliberate hiring practices,?inclusion does not automatically follow. To begin with, everyone hired may not find themselves included in meaningful discussions and decisions. Going deeper, having a diverse workforce certainly does not guarantee that everyone in the transit system feels a sense of belonging. In particular, when no one at the top of the system looks like you, it makes it harder to feel you belong.

?According to Amy Edmonson, In general, the research shows that the higher the?uncertainty and need for learning in a given set of tasks, the more psychological safety is vital to achieving those tasks. Therefore, psychological safety is a significant factor in predicting teams' performance in healthcare delivery, high-tech, and other cognitively and emotionally challenging and uncertain endeavors and is a significant factor in a transit workplace environment. Few goals could involve more emotionally difficult and rocky paths to achievement than building equitable, engaged, inclusive workplaces, where people feel they belong regardless of their race, gender,?sexual orientation, or cultural heritage. Thus, psychological safety is characteristic of inclusive organizations and needs to design and implement the necessary changes to get there.

?Measurement of success in achieving diversity and inclusion goals is another issue affected by psychological safety. When an organizational goal is more subjective than objective (meaning it can best be measured by assessing subjective perceptions), psychological safety is more necessary in achieving – and measuring – it. For instance, there is no way to know if you are achieving the goal, of say belonging, without broad and candid input from people in diverse groups.

?Mental Health and Wellness Culture

The transit industry leaders must address mental health and wellness. A silent and invisible dilemma in the workplace is the presence of mental health issues experienced by employees, pre-pandemic, and post-pandemic. With the advent of Coronavirus (COVID-19), this matter has been exacerbated and has become an additional stressor. A global study conducted by Ryan Smith of over 2,700 employees across more than ten industries during March and April 2020 cites that since the outbreak of the pandemic, 75% of survey participants say they feel more socially isolated, 67% report higher stress, 57% experience more significant anxiety and 53% feel emotionally exhausted (Smith, 2020).

?According to the 2016 data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, mental health issues are both familiar and long-lasting in the workplace and have direct effects on productivity and the bottom line. In any given year, about 18 percent of the US adult population (44.7 million, or nearly 1 in 5) has a mental illness. A 2014 study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine suggested that depression is associated with an increased risk of injury among workers. Similarly, studies published in March 2015, March 2016, and October 2017 issues of the journal found links between occupational injury and psychosocial hazards in the workplace, such as job insecurity, work-family imbalance, and a hostile work environment (Vargas 2018).

?Mental health issues in the transit workplace have become an added crisis stemming from Coronavirus (COVID-19) and will be with the transit industry for some time to come. According to Smith's study, noted above, who conducted a global study of over 2,700 employees across more than ten industries during March and April 2020), the data cites that since the outbreak of the pandemic, 75% of survey participants say they feel more socially isolated, 67% of participants report higher stress, 57% are feeling greater anxiety and 53% say they feel emotionally exhausted. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed deep-seated inequities in health care for communities of color and amplifies social and economic factors that contribute to poor health outcomes that can be tied directly to the workplace.

The COVID-19 pandemic has focused the nation's attention on the essential role essential workers to include transit workers, play in families and communities’ lives and exposed the severe racial inequalities and inequities that continue to plague the transit industry frontline workers. While mental health issues have existed in the transit workplace for a long time, these issues have been exacerbated due to COVID-19. For example, over 100 transit employees died, and over 6,000 contracted COVID-19 at the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority because of leadership failure to promptly distribute Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) (N.Y. Times, 2020).

?Mental health issues can affect a worker's safety, even if no actual illness is diagnosed. Why? Because the mind drives the activity of the body. Larry Masotti, director of strategic relationships for Workplace Safety & Prevention Services, cites, "We've seemed movements all around the world on mindfulness-people being aware of what they're doing and present in the moment. To work safely, people need to be mindful of what they are doing, part of mental health conversation.

Learning Centric Culture

The transit industry must develop a learning-centric culture. What is learner-centered culture? A learner-centered culture is a critical component of a sustainable safety culture that creates an environment where employees can thrive. The core of a learner-centered culture is to focus on what each employee is learning rather than what the teacher is teaching. A learner-centered approach views learners as the active agent. They bring their knowledge, past experiences, education, and ideas – and this impacts how they take on brand added information and learn. A learning culture supports employees in designing their career paths, allowing them to establish feelings of connectedness and engage in meaningful work. Leaders understand that effective learning is immersive and contextual. They are embedding immersive learning experiences into critical moments in life, work, and career.

?The transit industry lacks a learning-centric culture where employees can develop career paths to grow and achieve long-term career objectives because training and development pathways do not exist. A lack of knowledge is very costly to the transit industry, and accidents and incidents are directly tied to the lack of a learning-centric culture. Yet, the transit industry spends millions of dollars on industry training. Jaffer?and?Mourshed (2017) cite, According to the?Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, spending on programs. in the U.S. for those not going to four-year colleges — everything from federal and state jobs initiatives to on-the-job training, certifications, community college, and employer training — is at least $300 billion a year. But according to the?World Bank, only 30% of youth employment programs are successful, with many of those offering only marginal benefit. And most programs have no positive effect at all.

?Yet transit workplace training is more necessary now than ever, as technology and globalization continue to change the available types of jobs. In a dynamic economy, workers are expected to adapt, change jobs and careers, and pick up new skills when necessary. That requires successful training programs, which means we need to know which one’s work. Most existing training programs do try to assess their effectiveness, such as cost per student. Some measure job placement rates. These metrics are helpful but miss the big picture, in part because they mistake a program's cost for its value.

?Recently, I read a blog where the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) provided millions of dollars to a learning center to develop a transit industry apprenticeship program. McKinsey & Company cites, at its core, apprenticeship is a relationship-driven learning model, based on actual day-to-day work, in which a novice gains hands-on knowledge from an expert to grow skills and act with increasing independence. In the classical one-on-one model of apprenticeship, the learning happens because of physical proximity and observation. Experience has historically been equated with longevity, putting the responsibility to become the teachers on those with more seniority. The iterative learning approach allowed novices to learn through close observation, practice, feedback, and coaching, which effectively builds deep expertise and skill proficiency.

McKinsey & Company further cites, The model is difficult to scale, and it does not work well as roles quickly evolve, teams become more far-flung and diverse, and learning needs continue to differ among employees. In today's transit workplace environment, based on safety culture development and implementation, one senior worker cannot provide an employee with the skills and tools needed to succeed in the transit workplace. Transit leaders must provide and equip the employees with multiple tools and skillsets to be successful by creating clear pathways to career opportunities. Developing a transit learning-centric culture would give an employee the tools and skills needed.

Transit Relationship to Disparities

Transit leaders must understand transit purpose and the role of transit in addressing racial disparities. We have read in media accounts how the many racial disparities were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic in health care, housing, education, job opportunities, and social harmony. Transit is at the intersections of these disparities. For example, when one looks at the current problem at WMATA, please ask yourself which population is affected the most by the removal of 748 railcars from service? Transit leaders must understand and address that transit service delivery is at the intersections of all the racial disparities. Yet, many transit systems have not changed their route structures in years or conducted travel studies to understand the mobility challenges of citizens. The Harvard University study titled “Where is the Land of Opportunities” ranked Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the top 20 fastest growing cities in America, dead last in a study of 50 cities.

Raj Chetty’s landmark study used administrative records on the income of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. His methodology is one of several promising methods. For example, “The probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4% in Charlotte”- Chetty et al. If you are poor and live in the Charlotte area, it is better to be in Stanly County than in Mecklenburg County. Children who move earlier are less likely to become single parents, more likely to go to college, and more likely to earn more.

The transportation industry culture must prioritize humanity to move toward racial equity. People need to work with the dignity of having their histories acknowledged and their life experiences valued. Only then will the transportation systems recruit and retain the thriving, diverse workforce that leaders and customers want — in the next decade and beyond.

To achieve service quality, transit leaders must develop teams that understand the purpose, committed to the transit mission, vision, and core value, feel a sense of belonging and must be allowed to speak freely about safety conditions psychologically. It is critically vital that transit leaders have teams with diverse skills and backgrounds (learning-centric culture) and must work together effectively to accomplish these challenging goals, and one consistent finding from the research is that psychological safety plays a central role in the success.

Summary

The hallmark of a wicked safety accidents and incidents cannot be reduced to a single-cause explanation, even though transit leaders make every effort to reduce transit safety failures to a single cause, like the 7000 series. The WMATA 7000 series is just the symptom, not the problem. Transit leaders live in a world where multivariate and non-linear causal connections hide below the surface of their immediate perceptions and diverge to different interpretations. Let us be honest on behalf of employees, passengers, and stakeholders; the transit industry has failed to create a transit industry purpose that guides leaders, employees, and stakeholders. Transit purpose is the system's ultimate goal, the fundamental reason transit exists, and how it contributes to the greater good of the community. A real question is how well transit meets the needs of the communities they are serving? A second question to ask is, are transit employees enthusiastic and passionate about their work and the service they deliver?

Transit leaders must ask themselves, why is vehicle downtime in Singapore 4 hours compared to 4 days in the U.S. transit industry, and what is the relationship to effective service quality? The transit industry safety culture lacks diversity, equity, inclusion. The industry lacks engagement, mentoring, and role modeling. The transit industry lacks a psychologically safe environment where employees can speak openly, and their voices are heard. The transit industry lacks a mental health and wellness culture where the stigma of mental health can be addressed, allowing employees to admit their challenges.

The transit industry lacks a learning-centric culture where employees not only learn the “how” and “why” but see clear pathways available for achievement, build interpersonal competencies to set themselves up for career success. The transit industry leaders lack understanding and conviction, confidence and skill-building, role modeling, and reinforcement mechanisms (engagement) to nudge employees to do the right things and provide positive reinforcement with data sets to keep employees informed to feel a sense of psychological safety and belonging. These are the barriers to developing and implementing a transit safety culture and the cause of accidents and incidents. The casualties and incidents will continue unless transit leaders address transit safety culture.

It is a given that transit leaders cannot fix what they do not understand. I am a personal witness to the systemic songs and dances of transit failures that have played out repeatedly throughout the years. To stem this tide, transit leaders, board members, and elected officials must understand and address transit deficits. If the past 18 months have taught transit leaders anything, that is, employees crave investment in the human aspect of work. Transit employees are tired, burnout, and many are grieving. Transit employees want a renewed and a revised sense of purpose. Transit employees wish for transit leaders to trust and that will accept responsibility and vulnerability rather than play the blame game every time something happens in their system.

Unless Congress, Secretary of Transportation, FTA, Governors, and Transit Boards demand transit CEO develop and implement a transit safety culture, the transit industry will continue to operate with the old Jim Crow principles and no real purpose to provide quality service delivery. The workforce has changed. Instead of being blamed for transit system failures, employees are looking for something more meaningful out of work. When transit leaders begin to offer it to them, transit systems could then reap tremendous gains.

REFERENCES

Carucci, R. (2021), To Retain Employees, Give Them a Sense of Purpose and Community, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org.

?Chetty, Raj, (2015), Where is the Land of Opportunity, Harvard University

?Christensen, L. Gittleson, J. Smith, M. and Stefanski, H. McKinsey & Company, (2021), Reviving the art of apprenticeship to unlock continuous skill development.

Dustin, G., (2021), Two Metro cars with known defects continued operating until safety inspectors alerted the agency, officials say; the details raise questions about the urgency, awareness, and response of Metro toward wheel assembly failures.

Douglas, F. (2020), https://www.Safe Haven Dialogues.com

Edmondson, A. (2021), The Role of Psychological Safety in Diversity and Inclusion, Without it, true DIB is even more of a challenge, LinkedIn

Kalev, A., Dobbin, F. (2020) Companies Need to Think Bigger Than Diversity Training, www.hbr.org.

Jaffer, A., and Mourshed, M., (2017), A Better Metric for the Value of a Worker Training Program, Harvard Business Review, https://www.hbr.org

Levinson, N. (2004), Engineering a Safer World, Systems Thinking Applied to Safety,

?MIT Press

?Luca, M., (2021), Leaders: Stop Confusing Correlation with Causation, Harvard Business Review, https://www.hbr.org

?Masotti, L. Workplace Safety & Prevention, https://safestemployers.com/methodology/judging-panel/9-winners-2018/223-nita-chhinzer

?Maybank, A. (2020), The Intersection of Wellbeing and Diversity in the Workplace, Virgin Pulse

?McElveen, L. (2020), Understanding the Complexity of Transit Safety, Metro.org

?Neal-Barnett, A. (2020) How Organizations Can Support the Mental Health of Black Employees, Harvard Business Review, June 10, 2020, www.hbr.org??

Sebastian,L., Jinchen, L., Zou,?O. L., Nuttall, R.,?Stone, M, and Simpson. B., (2021), McKinsey & Company, (2021), More Than a Mission Statement: How the 5Ps embedded Purpose to Deliver value

?Smith, R. (2020) How CEOs Can Support Employee Mental Health in a Crisis, May 1, 2020, www.hbr.org?

Sherf, E. N., Tangirala. S., and Venkataramani. V. (2019), Research: Why Managers Ignore Employees’ Ideas, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org

?Vargas, S. (2018) Mental health in the workplace. What role should safety pros play in workers' mental well-being? National Safety Council

Washington Post, (2021) Metro-Officials: Metro cars with known defects continued operating until inspectors alerted the agency, https://mail.aol.com/webmail-std/en-us/