Podcast: Safety is more than paperwork and PPE — How manufacturers can build a better safety culture
Shawn Galloway is the CEO of ProAct Safety, a global consultancy firm that works with hundreds of clients across all major industries. He is also a professional speaker and author of several bestselling books on strategy, culture, leadership and employee engagement. Over the course of his career, Shawn has contributed to over 700 podcasts, 200 articles, and 100 videos. Shawn recently spoke with Anna Townshend, managing editor of Plant Services, about some concerning trends he’s seeing in safety cultures and practices.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
PS: I think sometimes it's easy to talk about safety in a vacuum, or only in that context. In many cases, we're really talking about life and death issues, so that's often the main focus and should be. But I would like to have you talk a little bit about the ways in which safety does affect other parts of the business. How might poor safety performance lead manufacturers to quality, reliability, or efficiency issues?
SG: If you look at the triad of things that come together, that produce incidents, illnesses, events, there's really three areas. There's conditions, behaviors and judgments, and I forgot who it was that originated that theory decades ago, to give credit to them, but it's something a lot of us tend to look at. And if you look at how those things come together, very often what I find, more often than not, however you want to say it, that safety is a symptom in an organization. So if you have a business, a location, a group of people, that can produce injury free outcomes for years and years and years, that means they're able to manage the complexity of where behavior meets conditions, and judgment drives all of that successfully, which typically yields good quality goods, meeting schedule and all that, because we could manage the complexity of all different types of risk.
Now, conversely, it’s very often I find that if we're having safety issues, injuries, events occurring, continuous breakdown in equipment, that is often a symptom of larger things that are existing within the organization. So you're going to see that represented in quality defects, the inability to continuously meet schedule production demands, all of that. So when we look at undesirable outcomes, and that's what an injury, an illness, an event, it's an undesirable outcome. We have a deviation from how we thought work was going to go as planned, and very often, we don't find out about those deviations until that event occurs, which, of course, is reactive. But when you look at managing risk, there always has to be two sides to this, and it's prevention and it's recovery. If we have equipment that goes down, and if we don't have redundancy or backup parts, and we saw that during COVID with supply chain issues, that definitely affects the business.
If we have an individual that tragically loses their life on the job that absolutely affects business continuity, the right to even operate within a community, if you're known as a terrible place to work. So you have to look at these things holistically and all together, and when you have a very immature organization that views safety as something that's managed by a person, then this absolutely affects how successful the organization is going to be in all those other areas as well. And this is that old argument, is safety a priority or is it a value, which is pretty cliche, but it has to be both. It has to be a priority, and it has to be the way we do things. And this is where I've seen for a couple of decades now how safety professionals are perceived, and that's the professionals that understand the technical aspects of the equipment and how that could harm humans, all the way to those that look at occupational health, etc, that safety evolves from being perceived as a grunt to a guardian to a guru. So the grunt is managed by Anna, managed by Shawn. Just take care of it, fill out the reports, etc. Guardian is we're starting to have oversight. We're managing systems. We're managing the administrative side of safety, and we're getting it to become operationalized in the organization, and a guru is that true subject matter expert like general counsel that advises an organization. They don't run the business, they don't make the day-to-day decisions, but they're making sure they're protecting the decisions that are being made and still nudging people in the right direction. But as you look at it and how I framed it here. This isn't something that's managed. This is really how we manage the interface between the judgments that people make, how they perform, their actions at work, and where they're performing and what they're performing with that is much more complex than just being managed by a single individual or a single function within the organization, at least, if you have matured your thinking like what we're talking about here today.
PS: Okay, I like the outline of safety professionals that you gave and the idea that safety is a symptom. I think this next question is somewhat related to what you were just talking about. But bad safety performance can be a symptom of other organizational problems. So in the work that you do, how do you see safety as an organizational problem?
SG: I look at it in building capacity and the three most important capacities that an organization has to have to safely operate are system capacity, leadership capacity and cultural capacity. None of those three can be managed by one person. Now, a safety function can work to put the hierarchy of controls in place, and that's where we asked, if you're looking at the standard five levels, can we eliminate that task or that interface of equipment? Can we substitute it with something else? Can we put some engineering controls, administrative controls, and then personal protective equipment? A person, a function can make those decisions, but that function will never have the bandwidth to provide oversight to see, are people following what we've put in place?
Safety is really three things. It's knowing the risks. And there's two types. I used to call them big risks. Now in the industry, we call them serious injury, fatality types of risks. Those are the high probability, high severity risk exposure. But then there's other risks that are common to the tasks, and that's typically low probability risk.
The second piece is, do they know the precautions? So do we know the risks? Do we know the precautions? Now, there are two types of precautions here. There are required, and most of the developed world, we don't say pretty please de-energize that piece of equipment before working on it. Lock out, tag out is a mandate. So those are required. Other stuff when it comes to the low probability are at the discretion of the individual. So they are desired, like make sure you look before you move any body part. And the behavioral terms we call that ‘eyes on path.’ So that's at the discretion of an individual. It’d be really hard to write a rule that says, thou shalt look where you're going. Or at least it'd be hard to enforce it.
And then the third part of safety is, are we regularly taking those precautions? So we have to have oversight that ensures we have consistent adherence to the rules. A company called Koch Industries calls it 10,000% compliance, and that's 100% compliance, 100% of the time. So what are our systems to ensure that? And then on the low probability risks that are at the discretion, what are we doing to coach and influence that? That is not a department's job. Now the safety department or professionals can work to build that capacity, the hierarchy of controls, and make sure we're doing more engineering than putting paperwork and PPE on people, which is a constant problem. But then we also have to have recovery mechanisms. What happens if things don't go as planned?
