We hear the phrase “safety culture” being tossed around in today’s management like it is some measurable object or goal. This, in its own right, shows the vast lack of understanding of what a safety culture is. My first boss, who I will always praise, was all about his employees. He wanted the very best for them when it came to safety and it did not end at the gate! He knew that if one of the employees was injured at home, they would suffer the consequences, as too would the business (in-direct cost of injuries). So Claude was always reminding me to work on getting the employees to want to work safely for their benefit – NOT for OSHA. This man hated OSHA and all it took was for me to mention “we can’t do X because it violates 1910.XXX”. This was the kindest and gentlest soul and man would he get a case of “red a_ _” towards me. He had one of the simplest ways to determine if we have a “safety culture” or just an “amazingly obedient workforce”.
Those of you reading this and have been reading my ramblings for near 30 years now may remember my seatbelt story; but for those who have not, let me set the foundation…
One day Claude stopped by my office with a wad of $1 bills. $200 worth to be exact. He knew one of my safety pet peeves was the use of seatbelts at all times. He took me out to the gate at shift change and said to give every driver leaving the plant who has on his/her seatbelt a thank you and $1. At the end of the exercise, you should be out of $ if all your newsletters and reminders in your training sessions to “BUCKLE UP” made a difference. It was also an indication of our “safety culture”.
When we have a workers’ attention for 12-hours a day and 4-6 days a week, we have a tremendous influence on them and their behaviors. We REQUIRED seatbelts to be used while in/on any vehicle on company property. This included your personal vehicle which was allowed on site. [Note: this was in rural LA in 1993!). When Westvaco rolled out their Company Policy on the use of seatbelts, they actually indicated that they did not care what happened off-site, but when you are on-site you must use a seatbelt and ALL vehicles, even golf carts and gators had to have belts. This was not enough for Claude so he wanted his employees to understand the advantages of Buckling Up – not because of some company policy. He had observed employees coming and leaving work in their personal vehicles and they were NOT using their seatbelts, common in SW LA. He knew the results of his experiment were not going to be what I had hoped for and thus why he wanted me to be the one to witness it first hand. As I was very much a believer that people wanted to be safe – they just needed to be trained in how best to do it. Was I young and dumb or what?!?!?!?
After the company policy was put in place, we did the experiment again, and we had much better results. So the question poses to me was:
Did we improve the culture or do we just have amazingly obedient employees?
In other words, without the company policy being enforced, would our 2nd experiment have given us the better results?
A safety culture is when we have employees who CHOOSE to work safely when in fact they could have done the work unsafely and gotten away with it.
A safety culture is also one where co-workers INTERVENE in unsafe practices with co-workers because they CARE.
