2) Stand tall — The job of the safety professional, in part, is to stand tall for safety. If you’re not getting much management pushback, the odds are overwhelming you’re not pushing hard enough. You’ve got to expect management pushback.
Now a corollary to that is you’ve got to have a code with your management for those times when they just can’t push back. It seems to me you’ve got to have a way of saying to management, “Look, we both understand that I push a whole lot more safety stuff than you’re prepared to do, and you want me to push more than you’re prepared to do. But this one you’ve got to do. If you don’t do this one, you’re in deep trouble and I’m on the edge of quitting. This one I’ll go to the mat for.” You need this code. You need an agreed upon signal that this has got to be one of the ones you win.

4) Ride the seesaw — Take advantage of the fairly high likelihood that the CEO is ambivalent about getting involved in safety.
That is, on the one hand, the CEO doesn’t think much of safety as an appropriate focus for a high ranking Harvard MBA. On the other hand, the CEO kind of realizes that a bad safety record can really damage the bottom line, can really damage reputation, really cost contracts, etc. So the CEO is simultaneously feeling both sides of the ambivalence. He’s on some kind of seesaw with respect to safety.

Well, whenever there is that kind of ambivalence, whichever side of that ambivalence, whichever seat on the seesaw you take, the person you’re talking to is very likely going to take the other seat.
So if you go to your CEO and you say, “Safety needs more of your attention,” the CEO is going to say, “I don’t do safety, I’m a CEO.”
So instead you go to the CEO and say, “Look, you’re much too busy for this stuff. I figure the most I can get out of you is ten minutes of your time to brief you on the very high-level stuff, because you’re the CEO and safety is not your main thing.” Odds are very good the CEO is going to say, “You’ve got that wrong, I need much more information than that. I want to give much more attention to safety than that.”

5) Offer absolution — How does the safety person get around a CEO’s sense of guilt about safety — “Prior accidents can’t be my fault” — and ease that sense of guilt? Offer your management some kind of absolution. Say to a manager, “You know, there’s no way we could have known five years ago what we know now about how we could do A or B or C. It’s not like we’ve been systematically blind and ignoring things our peer companies were paying attention to.”
If it’s credible, you can make this case. If the company is behind, the company is behind. But if the company is not behind and the technology has just changed, or the knowledge base has changed, or industry norms have changed, then I think you can offer a kind of absolution. You can do this without accusing the manager of feeling guilty.

7) Go one-on-one — Safety is about one-to-one interactions, supervisors to managers, supervisors to workers, managers to workers. Safety is about these interactions happening every day. It’s people every day looking out for each other. That’s how safety is achieved. Not by writing down audit protocol. Pieces of paper don’t save lives.

8) Shoot straight — A client brought me in and asked, “Why are our employees ignoring our demands, our messages that they’ve got to work safer?” One of the things the company was aggressively saying was, “Safety is our number one priority.” I started talking to employees and asked, “Why is management’s safety campaign failing so badly?” Many employees said to me, “Well, they don’t really mean it.”
What management did, and it helped, was to change their message to employees. They stopped saying “Safety is our number one priority.” What they started saying was something like this: “Look, as you all know, our number one priority is return on investment. Profitability and productivity are the things our shareholders judge us by. Those are the things we live or die by. At the moment, one of the most powerful barriers to profitability is our poor safety record, which is costing us a fortune. Now it is also costing our employees far too many accidents, so that employees’ lives are damaged and sometimes ruined.
That message worked. Employees said, “OK, we get it,” and they started working safer.

9) If it’s stupid, say so — Frankly, sometimes safety rules are stupid. When a safety rule is stupid, but you have to do it because otherwise you’re in trouble with the regulator, the right thing to say to employees is, “Look, I don’t think this is a serious risk either. But they passed a regulation, and let me tell you about the risk that is serious. If we get caught ignoring this regulation we’re going to be in deep trouble. If you’re the one who gets us into deep trouble, you’re going to be in deep trouble. Do I think the regulation is important? No. Do I think it’s important to obey the regulation? Yes. For these extrinsic reasons.”
When you say a stupid rule isn’t stupid, you don’t persuade anybody. You also undermine your credibility about the rules that aren’t stupid.

10) Get it on the table — Take people seriously when they say this won’t affect me. Ask them what they mean. “Do you mean that you think nobody is really at risk? Do you mean, well yes, this might affect other people, but there are reasons why you in particular are invulnerable?”
That one’s pretty common. It’s pretty common for people to think, “Jack may get hurt and Susan may get hurt but I won’t get hurt.” If that’s what they think, it’s very, very useful to get that on the table, because it usually doesn’t hold water as a conscious belief. It only holds water as an unconscious belief. So make it conscious.

11) Go ahead, scare ’em — The most straightforward, the most obvious way of dealing with people who are apathetic about a risk is to scare them. Scaring people has had a bad press. There is a myth among safety people that fear doesn’t work. And it’s not true. Fear works fine. Excessive fear is another thing.
Fear is a “U” curve. In general, if I’m insufficiently afraid I won’t take precautions, and if I’m excessively afraid I also won’t take precautions. So you just don’t want to use fear appeals across the board. Fear appeals will worsen denial. But for people who are genuinely apathetic, fear appeals are terrific.

12) Harness horseplay — There’s a lot to be said for making safety not an individual responsibility, but rather a group responsibility. If you say to employees they’re accountable for their teammates, they are jointly accountable, it seems to me you bring esprit de corps and morale issues to bear on the side of safety. If you have groups that work closely together and are fond of each other, if you have them be accountable to each other and have them work to accumulate a group safety record, then I think resistance to accountability is much easier to cope with. You’re harnessing morale on your side. You’re harnessing altruism on your side. You’re harnessing even horseplay and teasing and peer pressure to be on your side.

13) Be a better parent — We tend to imagine people’s response to safety is mostly a response to the risk. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it is mostly a response to the precaution.
Look at our history. We go through several decades of what feels to us like overprotective parenting. And then we get to the job, we’re adults now, and the safety person is very likely to come on to us in a way that makes us think, “Son of a gun, it’s mommy all over again.”
Instead of coming on like a parent, you come on like a better parent. Give control wherever you can, using group norms rather than individual norms. Give choices among ways of meeting the performance spec rather than the tech spec. These are ways of sharing control.
Try to make the precautions less onerous. Also, acknowledge the ways in which the precautions are onerous. One of the worst things parents do is say, “The medicine doesn’t taste bad,” when the medicine does taste bad.
Once you realize outrage about the precaution is very common and very real, use your parenting skills to be more gentle and more understanding and more compassionate and more gracious about safety.

15) Don’t be insane — When you say safety is a value, and we’re doing safety for reasons that are not dollars and cents, you can stereotype that to mean the cost per life saved by safety innovation should not be relevant to the decision whether or not to make that innovation. That’s an insane argument. The safest factory shuts down.
No one wants to optimize safety by shutting down. No one wants to drive two miles an hour on the highway. No one really means to say, “Do things the safest possible way regardless of what that does to productivity.” No one means that. And since productivity is measured in financial terms, you simply can’t make safety a value that is not conditioned by money. You can’t.

16) Own the temptation — A safety professional doesn’t have to pretend to be more interested in profitability than in safety. But you do have to acknowledge that profitability runs the company, and that profitability should run the company. It would be very self-defeating, I think, to refuse to make a profitability-based case for safety improvements that really are profitable.
The safety person can own the temptation and then forswear it. They can say to management, “I’m tempted to say to you that this is about saving people’s lives, and it’s more important than the economic argument. I’m tempted to say that, but I’m not going to say that. I want to say something that is a little different than that. What I want to say to you is the economic case for safety is subtler than the economic case for marketing. It is an economic case, but it’s more indirect and subtler. And I’m going to need some time to make it to you.”

18) Reinforce the resolve — Every owner has to realize that accidents can be avoided. Senior management needs to have the resolve that we can fix safety problems. We can establish a process to fix this and have a safe workplace. Then pull together the right people from the organization, convince them of the same idea — every injury is avoidable, it is not something that just happens.
The good companies, the ones that are built to last, have got this kind of culture, this kind of understanding. Injuries and illnesses can be avoided and should be avoided. Management is committed to avoiding them, and everyone insists that this must happen.
Once you get this belief, once you get people committed, then you just need to get people engaged and working on the issues and solving the problems.

19) Study “what ifs” — Look at near misses, look at first aid cases. Good companies who are really showing good results around value-added safety and health are doing near-miss investigations. When they see something that could have been an accident, where just by luck somebody was not hurt, they study the incident to see how they can avoid a more serious problem.
Being proactive is where the real productivity and quality gains come into play. When you’re proactive you convey to your employees that they are valuable assets, just like the machines they maintain on a regular basis. You’re maintaining the employees. You’re maintaining the operating system. You’re maintaining the attitudes and the culture.
All this produces a better quality product in the end. Your employees focus on getting the job done, as opposed to just putting in the time. They participate in the process, they participate in the organization. They are a player in the organization, as opposed to just a pawn of the organization. This is how to get the job done not only safely, but quicker, more efficiently, and at a higher quality.

21) Don’t rush to judge —The easy answer is, “Whoever took the action caused the incident.” That obviously is too easy of an answer. The reality is there are a lot of variables that led up to that incident. The employee had to be encouraged by a supervisor. Or a supervisor may have ignored an unsafe circumstance that could’ve grown over time to create the incident.
It’s the attitude of the supervisor, the way the supervisor, manager, or CEO communicates; it’s what they stress, what they focus on. It’s what the employees feel are the real issues at the facility. If they don’t believe that senior management believes in safety and health, then no matter what managers say, no matter what policies they have in place, the employee is going to say, “No, what really matters is something else.”
The employee possibly is the direct cause in some cases. But the cause of the incident goes all throughout the organization. It may be management systems. It may be attitudes, culture, commitment. It may be engineering defects. It may be a lot of different things.

22) Outline the outcomes — Part of the problem with safety is we tend to have very rigid safety rules, so our specs for safety performance are tech specs (technical specifications) rather than performance specs.
People are always much happier implementing performance specs than tech specs because they are then making decisions about how to achieve the performance goal. Whether it’s on the individual level or the group level, rather than saying, “Here are the 15 things you must do, you’re accountable for doing them,” you’re much better off saying, “Here are outcomes that need to be achieved. Here are some ways of achieving them. You’re accountable for figuring out which ways you can use, and for making sure that you use them.”

23) Scrutinize the numbers — Clearly, from my business experience, as you focus on numbers, you also have to establish quality assurance measures. The accuracy of injury and illness reporting is worrisome to me.
Get your employees engaged in recordkeeping and you have less opportunity for gaming or underreporting or inappropriate reporting because you have too many eyes watching you. You have too many eyes scrutinizing everything in the process.
Recognize that when you use incentive programs you put pressure on the numbers to the point where you could get fictitious numbers or inaccurate numbers. So you’ve got to be very careful with that.

25) Pay attention to morale — Employees for very good reasons hide their outrage. In times of layoffs, the evidence is overwhelming, employees who were complaining a lot are much more likely to get laid off than employees who were not complaining a lot. So the main reason you don’t see employee outrage is because employees don’t want you to see it.
What happens is that outrage goes underground in the workforce, until it becomes extremely high. What should you do? We know a very high percentage of people who “go postal” have precursors. And the precursors are ignored. What is the safety professional doing about the precursors? Is low morale on the safety person’s agenda? If it isn’t, then he’s ignoring a piece of the safety problem that is a bigger piece than it was.

Copyright 2003 by Business News Publishing Co.

Peter M. Sandman 59 Ridgeview Rd. Princeton NJ 08540-7601	Phone: 1-609-683-4073 Fax: 1-609-683-0566 Email: peter@psandman.com
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