How to Identify Safety Culture Performance Measurements!
Safety Culture Measurements
In this video I want to provide a brief discussion on "How to" Identify Safety Culture Performance Measurements. Accountability is nothing if you can not measure what you have established. To hold someone accountable, you must know if they are performing their job functions correctly. To understand these accomplishments we must measure their performance. Without measurement, accountability becomes an empty, meaningless, and unenforceable concept. Starting with what we propose as the single most important factor in getting good true management accountability we find that we are really talking about ways to measure management better. Measurement has been a major downfall in safety for many years, because many managers do not understand the intended measurements and how to apply them to safety activities.
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Six Basic Steps for Conducting Your Own Safety Perception Survey
This week I thought that I would share another view on Safety. This video produced by International safety coach Shawn M. Galloway discusses how to conduct your own Safety Perception Survey. This is a great start to define your safety culture.
Some of the following are the reason that you should conduct safety perception survey:
- Identify problem areas
- Identify gaps between different levels in the organization employee, supervision, top management, etc.
- Helps to prioritize an action plan
- Increases employee involvement and awareness
- Provides a baseline safety performance measure for future comparison
We offer a sample Perception Survey Corresponding Questions to Survey by Category in Appendix G, of “Developing An Effective Safety Culture: A Leadership Approach.” This Sample was Reprinted with Permission by the late Petersen, Dan, “The Challenge of Change, Creating a New Safety Culture, Implementation Guide,” CoreMedia, Development, Inc., 1993, Table 4-1, The Perception Survey Questions, pp. 21-22. If you want a copy, all you have to do is sign up for my email list at Safety Culture Plus and down the copy.
How To Develop an Effective Safety Culture Video Page
I would like to introduce an on-line source where I am providing videos from my YouTube channel, offering my opinions and suggestions on Developing a Safety Culture. All videos are based on my book "How to Develop and Effective Safety Culture: A Leadership Approach."
You can review these video by clicking on the “Safety Culture News” Tab and then “Safety Culture Videos.” Fell free to review my other newsletters also listed under this tab. You Feedback is welcome!! You can leave comments below this post.
What to Expect When Developing a New Safety Culture!
Developing a New Safety Culture
As the management system in a new safety culture is being developed and all employee acquire new skills and start to change their behavior patterns, there should be minimal or no consequences for poor performance. In this case, use positive reinforcement during the initial phase of performance evaluation. This will encourage employee’s natural desire to do what is right and to be recognized.
The goal of any Safety Culture is to help develop a sense of employee accountability for their actions. However, everyone must understand that there can still be negative consequences for poor performance even in the development of a safety culture . Consequences reinforce the importance of meeting stated objectives. The key is to ensure that each manager and supervisor understands when and how any consequence will occur. There should be no surprises to anyone.
However, it is important that consequences are appropriate to the situation. For example, termination of a supervisor for the first poorly conducted incident investigation is an obvious example of overreacting to a problem. Gradually the consequences of poor performance should be increased to some specified maximum severity.
The Other Side of Safety Culture Accountability
Accountability is nothing if you can not measure what you have established. To hold someone accountable, you must know if they are performing their job functions correctly. To understand these accomplishments we must measure their performance. Without measurement, accountability becomes an empty, meaningless, and unenforceable concept.
Starting with what we propose as the single most important factor in getting good true management accountability we find that we are really talking about ways to measure management better. Measurement has been a major downfall in safety for many years, because many managers do not understand the intended measurements and how to apply them to safety activities.
According to Dan Petersen, "For the line manager, to measure is to motivate." Although this statement might have sounded a little ridiculous 20 years ago, Petersen believes that it expresses a profound truth, at least in terms of the safety performance of top management. Managers react to the measures used by the “boss”; they perceive a task to be important only when the boss thinks it is worth measuring." This is typical in any organization.
Once you understand the importance of performance measurement in obtaining good performance, we then hit our biggest snag. The questions we should ask: “What shall we measure?” “Should we measure our failures as demonstrated by incidents that have occurred in the past?" Known as the OSHA incident rate (OIR). If this is a good measurement, as has historically been believed (for that is what we usually measure), then what level of failure should be measured? We can measure the level of failure we call "fatalities”. Fatalities are used to measure our national highway traffic safety endeavors. Is this measurement of fatalities, a "good" measure? Fatalities could be a good measure if we are assessing the national traffic safety picture, but it would be a little ridiculous in the case of a supervisor. Some supervisors may never do anything to promote safety and never experience a fatality in his/her workplace. In this case, measuring fatalities would makes no sense.
While this may sound a little ridiculous, it accurately describes what is going on in many safety programs today. A supervisor can do nothing related to safety for a year and attain a zero frequency rate with a small bit of luck. By measuring and recognizing any part of supervision using the OSHA incident rate (OIR), we are reinforcing nonperformance in safety.
What would be a good measure for supervisory safety performance? More important, what set of criteria’s can we developed for measuring supervisory safety performance? Or the safety performance of the corporation? Or our national traffic safety performance? Alternatively, anything else related to safety?
Taking a look at the issues of measurement shows us that we need different measurements for different levels of an organization, for different functions, and for different types of management style. What is a good measurement for one supervisor of ten employees may not be a good measure for another, much less for a plant manager of one plant or the general manager of seven plants and 10,000 people.
How to Establish Clear Goals and Assign Responsibilities in Your Safety Process
Establishing Clear Goals and Assigning Responsibilities in Your Safety Culture
The bottom line is that before you can hold anyone accountable for their actions, you must make sure that they know what is expected. They must have goals set for their performance. Employee goals for safety stem from the overall company goal and objectives. You need to understand these guidelines, before you can establish your safety goal, the objectives leading to the specific goal, and a set of job descriptions that clearly define safety responsibilities.
