Essay

������������

������������ ��������������� �� ���

—continued on page 11—

—continued on page 13—

IOMAIOMAIOMAIOMAIOMA’’’’’SSSSS

Are You Spending Too Much on Drug Prevention Efforts? ........... 2

Worker drug use rose for most of 2001, but your program to prevent it could be hurting your overall safety effort.

Yes, Behavioral Strategies Work for Managers, Too ..................... 5

Here’s how to take behavior-based programs beyond the shop floor and into the supervisor’s office.

Tackling Workplace Stress Before Your Company Is Ready ........... 7

Not ready for a comprehensive stress reduction initiative? There are interim steps to take.

SADR News Briefs ............................ 8 � Military report warns

against over-hydration � Ninety-three percent of U.S.

companies now offer some level of health promotion

� Smoke-free workplaces encourage smokers to quit or to reduce consumption

� Is workplace safety an organizational value at your workplace?

� Internal workplace violence fatalities unchanged since Sept. 11

� Bill would set standards for safety professionals who handle mold issues

� And more...

SADR Calendar ................................ 15

Two Alternatives to Using Recordables to Measure Performance It’s one thing to acknowledge the limitation of injury statis-tics for measuring and driving safety performance. It’s quite another to find viable alternatives. Below is an overview of two measurement systems from the oil and gas exploration industry profiled at recent safety conferences. These case studies provide valuable insight into how two companies are going about scoring and improving their safety performance and that of their contractors.

Alternative #1: Measure the positives. We’ve previous- ly detailed in SADR why companies need to replace lost time

Creating a Safety Culture In a Low-Risk Environment Run-of-the-mill business offices aren’t exactly hotbeds ofworkplace risk, but they do have their unique challenges. For one thing, when worker injuries are exceedingly rare, it’s awfully tough for workplace “hazards” to garner attention, much less act as a catalyst for a strong safety “culture.” One option? Eliminate top-down safety programs. Instead, within broad guidelines, let each business location examine its own safety culture, define its own priorities, and implement its own safety culture improvement strategies.

A worthy model? This “grassroots” approach is current-

�

����� ��� �������� ���� ������� ��������������

��

� Companies should input ... any “incident” that wasn’t planned and either causes—or could have caused—harm and/or damage.

� Part I is ... to evaluate each corrective action you or a contractor takes and place it into one of four categories (see the sidebar, “Four Types of Corrective Actions—Definitions and Examples”).

� Part II is ... to apply a score to each type of corrective action. Design a scoring system to fit your facility, but the general idea is universal—give more weight to corrective actions farther down the table. For example: Multiply the number of “Type 0” corrective actions times zero; multiply the number of Type 1s times one; the number of Type 2s times two; and the number of Type 3s times 3. In this scoring scenario: A department that last month had four type 0 corrective actions; two Type 1 corrective actions; two Type 2 corrective actions; and three Type 3 corrective actions, would have an total weighted corrective action plan- ning score of 15. In this way, scores improve when you’re more aggressive and effective in your response to accidents and near-misses.

� The benefit to calculating such scores includes ... being able to see what direction safety is heading. For example, if your company’s corrective action planning score is increasing month after month, you can expect to eventually see these higher scores reflected in fewer injuries and incident reports. On the other hand, a company that is making only Type 0 or Type 1 correc- tions can’t expect to see injury rates fall.

Another benefit: Once a company has a system such as this in place and is comfortable that it is a good measure of safety performance, you can use it to com- pare performance among contractors, departments, and locations. Finally, when you measure corrective ac- tions, you are measuring something positive, and so there is no incentive to hide safety incidents. When you measure supervisor, department, or contractor perfor- mance solely on number of incidents, everyone has an acute incentive to hide them. But when you measure contractors or departments on what they do about the incidents, they have an incentive both to report inci- dents and to make better corrections.

� One thing you can’t forget is ... to measure whether the corrective actions you plan actually get put into place. Your score or a contractor’s score improves with more Type 3 corrective actions. But your scoring system should subtract points if you or a contractor does not enact these big corrective plans.

Creating a Safety Culture In a Low-Risk Environment —continued from page 1—

ly driving safety success at CNA Insurance (Chica- go; 312-822-5000; www.cna.com), a financial ser- vices company, Chief Safety Officer William Phil- lips told colleagues at the recent American Society of Safety Engineers’ annual safety conference. While the company’s approach is not entirely unique—it resembles efforts to use a strong safety committee to drive safety—we think there are a few system specifics that may be helpful to consider.

One difference in the CNA model is that it empowers safety teams to measure the specific safety culture at their locations and devise their own strategies for improving things. Most safety committees—while they secure participation from all organizational levels—don’t grant workers this scope of responsibility.

Where it can work. For the purposes of control, compliance, and risk reduction, individual safety programs are unavoidable in workplaces with significant hazards. Companies need to im- plement a uniform and specific hazardous waste or confined space program, for example. But for CNA, starting a safety process from scratch, “pro- grams” handed down from the corporate safety team seemed like a bad way to go about it. For one thing, such a “top heavy” method ran counter to how the company did everything else, explained Phillips. For another, since most workers didn’t perceive their workplace as even having hazards, proscriptive programs seemed poised to fall flat.

An alternative in such a scenario is to use grassroots teams to develop a safety culture at the same time they install a general set of safety guidelines, according to Steven Simon, Ph.D., pres- ident of Culture Change Consultants, Inc. (Larch- mont, N.Y.; 914-834-7686; www.grassrootssafety. com). Typically, top-down organizations should adopt top-down culture change strategies and more lateral organizations should adopt grassroots strat- egies, says Simon, who helped CNA implement its initiative. Teams seemed like a good idea to CNA because it was an approach they were comfortable with. “Management understood the team-based

�

����� ��� �������� ���� ������� ��������������

��

stuff already,” said Phillips.

Can it work for you? The jury is still out on CNA’s experiment. It’s only two years old, and while safety teams are currently going strong, you can’t take the real measure of a safety culture improvement initiative until the five-year mark. Nonetheless, we think they’ve hit on a few ele- ments that other companies might want to emulate in their goals of raising safety’s profile in the minds of employees in low-risk office environments.

How it works. The central element to the CNA model is its safety teams in place at each business unit. “The idea of setting up teams at each location is to give them one to two pages of guidelines, say for ergonomics or life safety, and ask them, ‘How will you get this done at your place?’” said Simon. According to Phillips: “We let them build the how into the safety operation, we just give them the why.” The team breakdown:

� Senior manager safety team. Even grassroots efforts need support from the top. They don’t need to play an active role in the team initiative, but they should view themselves as the “team sponsor”; that is, they need to be willing to provide the resources the teams need to do their work.

� Central safety team (CST). The safety profes- sionals at CNA develop the general guidelines that the business units need to implement and secure the neces- sary resources, provide assistance when needed; act as a motivator; and monitor the system’s implementation at all the different locations.

� Guidance team (GT). There is one GT at each location, comprised of one representative from each business unit or corporate function at the location. To use a baseball analogy, said Phillips, this group acts as the team “manager”; keeping the teams on track, mak- ing sure everyone knows his or her job, and reporting back to the CST.

� High-performance safety team (HPST). At each location, there is one HPST for each business unit or corporate function. Members are volunteers, serve one to two years, and participation becomes part of their jobs and is included in their annual performance re- views. This is the group that actually “does the work,” says Phillips.

Each member of a CST, GT, and HPST went

through two days of training to clarify their roles and responsibilities and to attain skills in assessing and changing safety culture. In forming the team, CNA went out of its way to pick people without safety expertise. Although the company’s ranks include plenty of loss-control professionals, these workers don’t participate on the HPSTs. “We want- ed to keep it team-driven, not run by people who already know this stuff,” Phillips noted.

In practice. HPSTs receive general guide- lines from the central safety office and then figure out the best way to integrate them into their specific office environment.

For example, the CST might hand teams gen- eral emergency preparation guidelines, but it’s up to the different HPSTs to figure out the best way to make them work at their locations. This acknowl- edges that—even within the same company—dif- ferent cultures exist in different work locations. An HPST at one location may survey its workers and discover that poor fire drill compliance results from workers thinking that completing a phone call with a client is more important. At another location, however, fire drill compliance may be high, but the method of accounting for evacuated employees may be poor.

Using HPSTs as the primary tool for imple- mentation—rather than a program and instruction handed down from corporate safety—can address such differences. The team system can successful- ly tailor the guidelines, leadership, structure, and culture building to each facility, says Simon.

Conclusion. As we noted, this strategy is not entirely unique and resembles efforts several com- panies already employ. However, as a case study, it reiterates the critical point that companies whose workers face fewer risks should be more aggres- sive in using stakeholders to deliver the safety process. It’s a higher risk strategy—because it hinges on workers taking nearly complete owner- ship of safety—but low-risk office environments afford the opportunity to take such risks.

Furthermore, if successful, such a system can develop a thriving safety culture in an environment where safety is typically an afterthought.