Creating Accountability for Safety Results

It almost doesn’t matter the industry we’re working in today. Week in and week out, we work with leaders who are focused on creating greater accountability for safety results. For some clients the focus is on “Patient Safety” and for others it’s “Food Safety.” For clients in the medical device industry it’s “Product Safety,” and in the manufacturing environment it’s “People Safety.” Within every client engagement, we find leaders working to create greater accountability for safety performance.

According to Liberty Mutual’s 2011 Workplace Safety Index, serious workplace injuries in 2009 cost US companies over $50 Billion in direct US workers compensation costs. Most annual workplace surveys don’t include the indirect costs of safety incidents to the overall operation. What about the cost, for example, to compensate and train a replacement employee? What about the costs to repair damaged goods or to implement a corrective action program? What about the cost of lower morale or schedule delays? These are the indirect costs that can financially drown an organization that doesn’t get it right when it comes to accountability for safety.

As one reads and listens to experts on workplace safety, though their words sometimes vary, many end up saying the same things. When boiled down, they often write and teach about the simple importance of employees TAKING accountability for safety. They talk about prevention. About the need for people to See the problem, Own the problem, facilitate the Solving of the problem, and then Doing something about the potential hazard.

Over the last year or so I’ve worked with Don Vinci, the Vice President of the Gas Distribution Business of the Entergy Corporation a Fortune 500 company located in New Orleans. This is a leader, whose team members will tell you, never confuses “supporting” with “leading.” Don understands that modeling what it looks like to “TAKE” accountability for results begins with him. He’s one who also knows that what he creates accountability for, he usually ends up delivering.

Over the last 12 months Don’s organization has made significant, measurable, improvement in the areas of organizational accountability and employee engagement, leading the business to improved performance on each of their Key Result Areas – Financial, Customer Service, and Reliability. Their key measure – Industrial Safety Performance – also improved significantly in 2011. The organization experienced Zero OSHA recordable injuries (except for one that occurred when a company vehicle was rear-ended while at a complete stop,) compared to 8 recordables in 2010. An improvement that is significantly impacting bottom line results.

Acknowledging that their increased performance, (across all result categories), wasn’t happening by chance, I recently asked Don to share with me how they were creating accountability for improving their Safety Results. Here’s what he shared with me:

• It started with my direct reports – they stepped up, took individual and collective ownership to achieve the results we agreed were important to the success of the business. We then went about the hard work of developing and implementing our plan to get there.
• Our improvement in results has been paralleled by a significant improvement in our safety culture. We now see employees taking accountability for near miss reporting as we more than doubled the number of near miss reports in 2011 over 2010. Employees are now being rewarded, rather than punished, for reporting near misses in an effort to address shortfalls and encourage learning.
• We implemented an ‘Invest in Supervisors’ initiative that focused on improving first line supervisor performance. This initiative included training on Accountability (The Oz Principle) and Culture Change (Change the Culture, Change the Game)
• We stepped up management and supervisor presence in the field to observe and coach employees while conducting work, emphasizing both appreciative and constructive feedback.
• We established a safety “Bright Spots” process that highlights employee work practices that go above and beyond expectations to ensure work is conducted safely.
• Regular supervisor forums were established to reinforce expectations and provide a forum for open communications and collective learning.
• We revised and clarified expectations regarding selected gas safety rules and identified clear consequences for failure to follow these rules, consistent with the severity of the infraction. Implementation was fair, firm, and consistent. We needed people to hold the belief that we were serious about our safety results.
• We held periodic face-to-face, all-hands meetings to keep employees informed on how we were performing on our Safety Results.
• Finally, we held regular small group employee meetings to hear employee concerns, provide feedback, and maintain open lines of communication.

Don’s multi-faceted approach to safety has brought about impressive results for Entergy Gas Distribution, yet there remains a unique humility to Don, as he genuinely deflects praise for improved performance back onto the individuals that he leads within his organization. He understands that the key to arriving at greater levels of ownership is to foster an environment where people are “Taking” greater individual accountability for the key results.