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Changing safety attitudes through a quality process
How one company stopped blaming employees and living by regs
By Thomas A. Smith
Much has been written about the connection between quality and safety. My experience as a consultant has been that many companies learn the competitive advantages of quality concepts, yet continue to apply traditional methods to safety.
I’d like to relay a story to show you how a quality process, statistical process control in particular, changed attitudes about safety for one management team.
This occurred at a large
The requirements set criteria for safety inspections, accident investigations, and audits. This company’s management knew from its own experience with quality that all of these safety activities were reactive. The problem was most of the audit criteria perpetuated the traditional approach to safety.
But they did see some safety requirements that interested them. A few questions on the application asked how they used statistical process control charts in their safety efforts. Although these managers applied SPC to their manufacturing process, they hadn’t thought at all about how the thinking and tools of SPC could apply to safety. They decided to find out.
It was clear that management at this company did not feel that traditional safety activities were worth their effort. The admitted that safety inspections were mandated and that was the only reason they were done. Job Safety Analysis (JSA) had been performed and posted throughout the department, but no one really paid any attention to them. When an employee was assigned to a new job they admitted they seldom or never took time to read JSA’s.
These managers were also under the false impression that most of the injuries were not real. They were convinced that workers went to the clinic to “just take some time off.” One supervisor was even certain that almost all of his department’s injuries were “headaches, not work-related stuff.”
What we had here was a failure to connect quality with safety theory. In management’s eyes, quality and safety were completely different animals. If there was a safety problem, they called in the safety department supervisor to make it his problem. Despite this lack of understanding, the company sincerely wanted to improve safety. And management was convinced the traditional methods would not result in continual improvement.
Breaking away
How do you begin moving away from traditional reactive safety? In this case, the key was to get managers to see that safety presents the same improvement challenges as quality. Then they could use similar solutions.
Safety is produced by the overall organizational system (culture), just like quality. Managers had learned how to use control charts to improve quality. A simple control chart would also help them understand and improve safety.
There was plenty of data about injuries on hand. It was decided to construct a simple control chart (c-chart) using the total number of first reports of injuries to the company clinic. The company had compiled this information on a monthly basis but didn’t evaluate it over time. If the numbers were down from the previous month management assumed safety had improved.
The control chart would tell management of the variation was occurring due to something unusual (special cause) or if it was happening as a result of chance causes (common causes) built into the system.
In less than a day, the c-chart was complied by recording the first-time visits to the clinic for each of the previous 20 weeks. Upper and lower control limits were set. The 50 first reports during the 20 weeks; using a calculation, the upper control limit was determined to be 7.24. The lower control limit was ignored because there cannot be less then zero visits.
The c-chart showed management the safety outcomes of the operations varied only due to common causes in the system. The chart revealed no special causes. No points were above the upper control limit and there were no unusual runs.
With the chart, managers could see that visits to the clinic consistently averaged 2.5 per week. Three weeks resulted in zero visits – two of these occurred when the plant was shut down and only a skeleton crew worked those weeks. Previously, managers thought if employees could get through one week without an accident, they should be able to do it every week. This simple chart helped management stop blaming employees for the safety problems.
Customer focus
Now it was time to introduce another quality concept. Up to this point the only reason the managers paid attention to safety was because it was mandated. They worried more about receiving a fine from OSHA than anything else. Yet when asked to draw a customer map (another quality tool), they all agreed the primary customer of safety was the employee doing the job!
So it became a matter of changing management’s focus away from merely complying with safety specifications to taking care of their real safety customers. Charting the safety outcomes identified the common causes that were “in the system” – hourly workers couldn’t solve them by themselves. Clearly, management’s system was not satisfying its customers. About this time, the department manager stood up in a meeting and said that just complying with safety rules was no longer good enough.
To turn the situation around, employees were trained to review their areas and look for “common causes” and “special causes” of safety problems. Special causes were issues that could be fixed on the spot by employees themselves without the help of management.
At first managers were skeptical, especially in the maintenance area. They believed employees would use the surveys to lodge complaints or just point fingers at minor safety issues. But the maintenance manager did know that ultimately this work would reduce maintenance and safety problems.
It’s the system
The surveys confirmed the theory that most safety problems are in the system. Less than 15 per cent of the problems were a result of special causes. The rest were common causes, system problems that maintenance and supervisors had to work on. Maintenance already had a very good preventive maintenance system. The took care of all the system problems within 60 days!
Without the tools, techniques and thinking of SPC it’s unlikely this improvement would have happened. Using SPC set up a process in which managers and hourly employees talked the same language for working out safety problems. The charts showed management and employees that to improve safety they had to change the system, not the employees. Armed with this important knowledge, they have now started to break down the barriers and work on improving safety together.