Workplace Safety Best Practices

How many of the workplace safety best practices on this page do your work teams use to work injury-free daily?

In one of my current roles, I serve as a contract virtual TapRooT® root cause analysis and investigation process trainer, facilitator, and coach. This role gives me the chance each year to work with over 500 safety professionals from 30 or more organizations.

Over four decades, this level of exposure, coupled with my own personal experience in safety work system design and implementation, has taught me a lot.

For example, I now know what it takes to achieve and sustain very low incident rates. The work system changes one needs to make a shift from a reactive safety focus to a proactive safety focus are clear. I have found some great workplace safety best practices.

One of my biggest learnings over this time is simple, but not practiced by that many organizations. Each work team leader must demonstrate daily responsibility for the safety of their people.

As with process improvement, quality, or team development, you can't expect a department (such as the HSE or Engineering group) to keep your customers happy or your people safe. It must be a team effort. Safety is something that every leader is responsible, and held accountable for, every day.

As a virtual and onsite trainer for the TapRooT® investigation and root cause analysis process, I get the opportunity to meet and talk with safety professionals from around the world. These people represent companies that are at different places on the safety performance spectrum.

Some have gone months, if not years, without a lost time accident. They rarely have OSHA reportable incidents, even though other companies still experience fatalities.

As a performance improvement coach, there is one main question I continue to ask. Why is there such a difference in safety performance across these companies? You might think that the companies with the relatively weak safety records work in more hazardous environments. That is not always the case.

Some of our TapRooT® customers work in very hazardous work environments, such as offshore oil rigs or deep tunnel mines. Even so, their lost time and OSHA reportable rates are low, even in comparison to relatively safer industries.

Why does this performance difference exist? The answer is simple. These organizations use safety work system best practices.

There is a measurable daily potential for human error that comes with any type of work people do. In order to optimize the use of necessary safe work practices, this error potential must be recognized by both the leaders and the team.

As a Plant Manager, Production Manager, Director of Quality, and Industrial Engineer, I know that a system gives you what you design it to give you. These companies have great safety records because they design their safety systems to produce better safety results. The companies that struggle to improve their safety records have relatively weak workplace safety systems and practices in place.

They may preach safety and have a safety professional on staff. People attend the required safety training each month. However, their safety work system lacks key design features.

Look at my "Top Ten" list of workplace safety system design flaws. Do any of the ten weaknesses sound familiar to you? If so, how many of them hold back your efforts to pursue safety process excellence?

Personally, I think personal safety is one of the easier performance areas to improve in. The other areas that I consider to be more of a challenge are cost, quality, and morale.

Do you struggle to attain better than average safety numbers? If so, you also probably have trouble with the quality of your products or services, the morale of your people, and your profit margins.

Why do I think safety is the easiest performance area to improve in? The answer is simple. You can more clearly see whether you have safety issues! Quality problems are typically more difficult to spot. Morale challenges are even more difficult to identify.

When I say this, you might think that I mean you can see work area hazards, so you ought to be able to eliminate them. While this is true, I am speaking much more about unsafe acts than I am about unsafe conditions.

Most safety professionals know that most accidents are a result of unsafe acts, versus unsafe conditions. The great thing about safety is that we can also see unsafe acts, just as easily as we can see unsafe conditions.

The problem is that we don’t have systematic approaches in place to (1) regularly identify unsafe acts and (2) consistently address these unsafe acts when we see them IN AN EFFECTIVE MANNER. A sound near-miss program or behavior-based safety program should do this. Unfortunately, far too few organizations have such approaches in place.

When they do, these approaches are often poorly designed and even more poorly executed. However, the problems are still easy to spot.

This is the biggest challenge that faces those companies who struggle to improve their safety records. In these companies, safety improvement is seen as the responsibility of the safety professional, the safety department, or someone else other than the work team leader (the process owner).

In these organizations, EACH work team leader (manager, supervisor, or lead person) IS NOT required to identify and correct the safety concerns that exist in their area on a consistent basis. Such work is left up to the safety professional.

Work team leaders might have safety measures in their performance expectations. Unfortunately, we rarely expect these people to demonstrate HOW they change their work systems to make the numbers improve.

They count on the safety people or the engineers (or threats and fear tactics) to make them look good at the annual review. This is not a sustainable, or recommended, approach.

The need for safety improvement may show up as a sentence or two in a work team leader job description, but how do they approach their jobs each day? Look at how they spend their time. Listen to the types of things they say when they talk with their people.

How much of a safety focus do you see? Such behavior is a cultural problem. However, it is also the leverage point where significant safety gains can be made.

The “Safety System Star” contains five key components - measures, recognition, procedures, improvement processes, and workgroup meetings. These five components should be part of any well-rounded safety system.

Some safety systems contain additional components. If you can find a way to at least build the approaches that are shown here into your safety system over time, you will find that it will produce better, and more sustainable, results.

My experience shows me that of the four areas, companies tend to be the weakest in the ‘Measures’, ‘Recognition’, and ‘Improvement Processes’ areas. In such cases, meetings and training regularly occur. However, these practices are often much less effective than they could be.

Don’t just take my word for it though. Review the safety star yourself. Where do you currently have approaches in place that work well and where you don’t? How effectively do you use safety system best practices?