Some years ago, a colleague asked me to help coach a management team at one of her locations that was trying hard in safety, but she feared they were going down a path that we had experienced decades earlier when we worked together; her as a Chem Ops unit manager and me as the site safety manager. In those days, leading indicators were just becoming a thing, and the old traditional “safety incentive” programs were all the rage in safety. We were deep into the traditional approach and loving the “numbers” until we had a sad yet eye-opening experience. In her new role as a company director, she was worried about one of her facilities making the same mistakes we had made and asked if the SAFTENG team could “assess” their “state of safety.” We did, and this is the story…
The facility was one of the largest producers in the company but was only about two-thirds the size of the other facilities. However, they had about twice the injury rate as the other facilities. From the surface, one would imagine that production reigned over safety, and you would be CORRECT. So, some pressure was put on the management group to “fix safety.” No specifics were given, or a plan was developed; just the order from above to “fix safety.”
I have to step back in time to give this story some perspective. About five years before my colleague’s arrival, this facility had a full-time safety professional developing, implementing, and managing the facility’s first-ever formal safety program. It was a good program for the first evolution; strictly compliance-based programs, but well written with some excellent training packages. The safety pro knew what he was doing; clearly, the quality of their work was more than adequate at this stage of the safety program. But they lasted just over 2.5 years. Their exit interview was exactly what we would have expected… they left because “management stopped supporting the safety program.” Their evidence was clear: management ended the annual training, audits/inspections, etc.
After the safety professionals’ exit, management decided that, with the written program in place, they no longer needed a safety professional. Instead, the facility manager would assign the responsibilities to other managers on his staff for a period of time. This was intended to “drive ownership” by the staff.
A few years later, the company did a company-wide culture survey that included safety. This facility received awful feedback from all levels of the organization on this rotating-safety-role approach. So, the new facility manager, who adopted the approach from the previous facility manager, ended it. All this time, the facility saw increased injury and property damage accidents, but they could stay within the “incident goals.” This new facility manager had come from a business where safety was driven by an “incentive program,” he raved about the results at his former employer. He, too, was worried about the increasing accident frequency and the increased severity. So, with little guidance from anyone, he used the formula from his previous employer and calculated that if the facility could cut its # of injuries in half (not the rate, the total number of injuries), the facility could save $200,000 in direct injury/property damage costs; which he promised to share up to $1,000 per employee who was not involved in an incident.
The average annual wage for the line workers at this plant was just over $30,000. So this $1,000 was 2 weeks in pay, quite the incentive to “work safely.”
And “it worked” the first year; this facility cut its injuries from 22 to 10. The following year, they had only five reported injuries. So, the numbers were exactly what the management needed. But my colleague was worried, as she visited this facility two times a year and never got real answers to her inquiry about how they were achieving these crazy numbers. She learned they were not doing any of the activities spelled out in the compliance programs. There was no safety presence in the facility, no training, no audits/inspections, no mention of safety activities in management meetings, no root cause analysis from the few reported accidents, etc. Then she learned about the new “incentive program” from an employee working on the line and how she had just had the best Christmas holiday with the $1,000 she had received for not getting injured.
My colleague was unhappy as this went against every value the company tried to instill in managing safety. But it did answer her question of “how?” these numbers were obtained.
We got asked to evaluate the “state of safety,” which was ugly. Ultimately, the facility manager was fired for “ethics,” but unfortunately, it was too late. Later that month, a 19-year-old worker in their 1st month of employment died in a lack of LOTO accident. As you can imagine, OSHA had a field day with this facility for just about everything they could find. The inspection eventually was expanded to cover just about everything under the sun. Whenever OSHA looked for something or looked at something the facility had, there were glaring issues of not following OSHA and not following their own written programs. But even before OSHA could finish its investigation/inspection, there was yet another serious accident in which three contractors were overcome by a hazardous atmosphere inside a space that had been evaluated and determined to be a PRCS. Yet it never got labeled, and none of the managers in charge had ever received any CS/PRCS training, nor had the contractor company employees.
Two serious accidents happening within 30 days of each other? Bad luck or something else?
As we continued our assessment, it became evident that employees were hiding their injuries. Some admitted to doing so in the ethics investigation around the facility manager. It was simply a matter of basic finance. $1,000 would easily pay the medical deductible with plenty left over, so handling the injuries as personal injuries made perfect sense. We established that the number of incidents was increasing; in some departments, there was a dramatic increase in injuries, property damage, spills/releases, etc. However, because of the incentive, employees purposely did not report them; this included front-line supervisors not reporting incidents. Even a couple of managers were knowledgeable of these incidents and failed to report them, knowing they could lose out on the incentive. They all claimed the same excuse… “report and lose my $, and nothing would be done anyway.”
The biggest miss in this debacle was that management was being fed the numbers they wanted, and this caused them to have no curiosity as to how these numbers were possible. Four of the previous managers were deposed in the civil suit brought by a former facility manager, and they admitted they knew what was happening and had voiced serious concerns to the facility manager. One had even raised the flag to the Corporate HR director during a site visit. Nothing was done, and to make matters worse, this facility won a ‘”company safety award” for the most improved facility. Most improved in safety, yet they lost $, and their quality #’s went to hell. So bad that the QC manager was one of the managers who left and was deposed in the lawsuit. She clarified that the safety incentive program caused everything terrible to be pushed underground, so everything suffered. Like safety, management was not responsible for not following the QA/QC sampling and testing protocols. Only when a customer complained would QA get addressed. She claimed that in her last year, customer complaints increased from 6 the year before to nearly 40, and these were the reasons for failing to make a profit. Yet, management never attempted to fix the management system problems that led to these complaints.
Today, this facility is closed. Shutdown about two years after all this came to light. Production was moved to other facilities, and everyone was laid off. Maybe a couple of managers were offered roles at other locations, but everyone else was laid off. After the facility was shut down, the company tried to sell the facility, only to learn of some serious pollution concerns (ground and water). After all, the company had cut its waste cost by 50% as well, and now we know how!
