As safety pros return to work this week from the annual ASSP conference last week, their excitement and enthusiasm will either blossom or bottom out. So many new techniques are being pushed in the safety arena these days, and many safety pros and management personnel are grasping for whatever it takes to turn their safety performance around. So with all these ground-breaking techniques and how we can do “safety differently,” why is safety so difficult to manage? I can sum up the answer in a single word… EMPATHY.
Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
The funny thing about empathy is that it can not be taught or obtained via training. This means safety is all about the “hearts and minds” of all that is involved in the safety process of an organization. In my career, this was the single trait that all my bosses had – they cared about the men and women who were tasked with dirty and dangerous work. They did not hire me for OSHA compliance or to be a safety cheerleader – they hired me for my skills as a safety engineer, and they not only allowed me to utilize those skills, they expected that of me daily. They were the heart, and the safety team was the mind of the “hearts and minds” approach to safety management! And we were very successful in all my facilities, some more so than others, and the difference was the LEVEL of EMPATHY present in the management team.
In those facilities where the majority of managers and, more importantly, the front-line supers and supervisors possed and displayed their EMPATHY for the workers, we made huge swings in both performance and culture. It is amazing what something like EMPATHY can do for a workplace – once workers know/believe that management truly cares about their well-being, it paves the way for almost any business initiative to take hold.
But EMPATHY is not a learned trait. We can not train or educate someone to be empathetic. However, executive leadership can make it an expectation for how the business will be managed, thus forcing management to consider the workers, even when they have a different attitude when making decisions that will impact safety and the workers.
EMPATHY is the “heart” of the “hearts and minds” approach to safety management. To be successful in safety, we MUST address BOTH the hearts and minds of the workforce; this is where so many run off course. Safety is NOT a gimmick or game. We can’t buy our way to world-class safety. But the safety model is quite simple…
Management’s role is to set the stage and to lead with EMPATHY so that the safety professionals can lead the efforts to implement an SMS that will become the platform for all things safety-related. When management cares about the workers, and I mean everyone, including truck drivers, contractors, etc., they remove the barriers that often prevent the safety professionals from utilizing their skills to improve safety. When this desire to care for the workers is driven by EMPATHY rather than some type of competition to achieve some numerical goal, then this is a REAL safety movement, and everyone can recognize (and feel) it for what it really is.
Trust me when I say the men and women who do the dirty and dangerous work can sniff out fraud in safety in a very short time. Always know this, most of them are non-believers as they have heard the cheerleading for far too long and have become masters at identifying the fraudsters who sound like a broken record. They see the unabated hazards daily, the pencil-whipping of the safe work permits, and yet they hear daily how important safety is. They will compare the safety to a shell game or cat/mouse game of sorts. What they hear about the importance of safety does not match what they see, which creates tremendous doubts and conflict within the facility. After all, if safety really is the most important thing to the business and these men and women believe that safety is nothing more than a “parade” and lies, then all the other efforts must be just as bad or worse.
Which takes us back to EMPATHY. When safety is managed WITH EMPATHY, the men and women doing the dirty and dangerous work will have a sense of belonging and ownership around THEIR safety. We can then use our minds and science to build a management system that drives BOTH performance and culture. But this is all very technical and requires the proper education/training/experience. But without EMPATHY being the driving force for the desire to be world-class in safety, science does not stand a chance to overtake the heart. So all of these new approaches to safety will fail in a very culturally damaging manner, as well as a very costly manner if the desire is based solely on reducing an injury rate. Without EMPATHY being CORE to all we do, there is no program/technique that will overcome the lack of caring for one another.
