Does Zero Accidents Imply Safety Excellence? Part 1

A newly-hired Safety Officer in our company asked his supervisor what was expected of him, and the answer he got was “excellence.” When the new Safety Officer asked his boss for more elaboration, he replied, “When you get to zero accidents come back and see me so we can take it from there.”

It seemed in this instance that the term “excellence,” as it applies to safety is commonly misunderstood and poorly defined.

So, what is excellence in safety performance? Is it simply a vacuum in which there are no accidents? Is it a short-term success? How will employees in an organization recognize it when they see it? How can employers achieve it if they don’t understand what it truly is?

First, it is important to realize that “zero accidents” or any improvement in accident frequency or severity is a Lagging Indicator of safety.

It is a result and not the process that produces zero accidents. It can be achieved through excellent performance but it can also be achieved by luck and/or normal variation in accident occurrence. It can also be accomplished by suppressing reporting through intimidation or artificial stimuli such as bonus and incentive programs and other manipulations.

Also, since most organizations qualify the term to include a certain classification of accident such as “zero recordables” or “zero lost-time accidents,” it can be manipulated several other ways in reporting practices and post-accident management. Poor understanding of standards and regulations or wrong application/interpretation there-of can give the same signals as well.

There are three elements missing from many views of safety excellence that are absolutely critical to a true understanding and definition of the term and these are Strategy, Process indicators, and Culture.

Strategy – A definition of safety excellence that does not include the strategy to achieve it is a game without a game plan or a war without battle plans. It is efforts in futility.

Wanting to win is desirable but victory without strategy is extremely rare. Most organizations or establishments substitute goals or improvement targets for safety strategy. They define the desired results but not the process that will produce them. Some firms even lack short, medium and long term strategies. The truth is, most safety efforts are producing a high percentage of what they are ultimately capable of, and further improvement without better processes will be very limited.

Some establishments set improvement goals and buy off-the-shelf safety processes in hopes of achieving them. This can be an improvement over simply hoping to produce better results with no new processes. Eventually, they end up not being able to achieve their targets, get frustrated and begin to manipulate the process.

The most common problem with this approach goes back to lack of an overall safety strategy. Exactly how will a new program or process supplement the existing efforts? Will it fill in a gap or create redundancy? Will it clarify or confuse the average employee, like new safety officers, trying to use it to improve safety? If a new program does not fit well into the overall safety strategy, it is uncertain how, or if, it will produce further improvements. Many establishments also put too much faith or emphasis in a new program and feel they have purchased the magic solution to all their safety problems. Few new programs or processes are more than additional tools in the safety toolbox and disappoint those expecting magical results.

To continue next week