A Key Ingredient of Safety Excellence

Jim Hopwood, Training and Communications Coordinator

Everybody believes in safety. Huge effort goes into devising training programmes and incentive schemes. And yet people still get hurt far too often and most managements feel powerless to do anything about it. Perhaps a new approach is needed.

At Exxon Chemical safety has been a top priority for many years. Every employee and contractor gets safety training before starting work followed by regular refresher training and attends frequent short safety meetings. Performance improved significantly during the 70s and 80s but seemed to reach a plateau in the early 90s. If anything it had started to get worse. We were better than most companies but not as good as the best. Senior management called for a new effort and set an ambitious 5 year target.

With so much training going on it is difficult to make it fresh and interesting. Everything has been tried; films, videos, photographs of actual accident victims, demonstrations of the effect of acid on pigs eyes or a dropped weight on a safety helmet, talks by safety experts, surgeons from the local casualty hospital etc.etc. And yet to the average employee safety training is one big yawn. A typical response might be "Heard it all before, wildly exaggerated, most of it's not relevant to me anyway".

The brief was to devise a replacement for two, one day courses for first line supervisors aimed at helping them improve safety in the workplace. We also wanted to extend them to cover health and environment.

When we talked to potential trainees we realised that their scepticism was justified. They had heard it all before, several times. In a well intentioned attempt to generate interest, managers had often exaggerated the risks. Incidents from other plants, even on the same site, did seem irrelevant to someone who worked in a different area with different people and different equipment.

Some years before the CBA consultancy had helped us with a shop floor culture change and empowerment programme and I felt we needed something similar again. Also I had been impressed by their willingness to develop in house trainers and slowly back themselves out. This makes economic sense, but more importantly it greatly increases the effectiveness of the training. Line managers and supervisors selected as facilitators become shop floor change agents and get extended individual coaching.

Together we set up a small task force of HSE specialists and trainers and started with a clean sheet of paper. It quickly became apparent that it was simply not possible to cover such a wide range in any depth but that there were a few key themes that linked all three areas. These were developed into a simple quality tool which can be used to systematically reduce the risk in any situation .

Figure1. Ideas for Improvement

However it was apparent that the main need was to develop people's sense of self worth, change their priorities and encourage them to use the skills and knowledge they already had. Often the people who got hurt were our "best" workers. They were not ignorant or stupid. They just did not give safety top priority, mainly because they did not believe we did.

We took a completely new approach, based on the following assumptions:-

The solution was to set up a programme combining offsite workshops with onsite mentoring and support, aimed at improving leadership skills in safety, health and environment. This takes people through a process of collecting data on their own work team and situation, analysing it, developing plans for improvement, implementing the plans, reviewing progress, revising the plans and so on, with the aim of consolidating a real change in performance. At the same time they identify and practice the key leadership skills of listening, supporting and encouraging. Each group leaves with a specific safety improvement plan and each individual leaves with a personal plan to strengthen their leadership.

This design allows people to learn about and develop "soft" interpersonal skills and explore their personal values and blocks while working on a "hard" practical safety improvement task.

At each stage trainees are provided with appropriate tools (proformas, analysis techniques etc.) and models (nature of hazards and risks, human behaviour, communications) to help them but the data on which their conclusions are based comes from their own experience. Most time at the workshop is spent in small groups working on the individual's own issues and plans. Each group of 3 or 4 supervisors has a facilitator, often a colleague who attended a previous workshop. The facilitators are supported by an experienced developer and a safety specialist. These two provide most of the large group inputs.

With so many good tools and models available we initially fell for the temptation to put too much in. Attendees on the pilot workshop soon put us right, asking for less technical input and more time to work the issues raised. The revised version got rave reviews from experienced and new supervisors alike. These continue after 3 years and eleven workshops.

Total Recordable Injury Rate at the site has decreased significantly (Fig. 2). This is generally attributed to the Safety Excellence Programme, of which the Leading for Safety training has been a major component.

Figure 2. Safety Performance at the Site.

The Safety Excellence Programme was launched in July 1995. Average workforce 500.

Tables 1 and 2 show some typical responses to two of the workshop exercises. These more than justified our assumption that experienced supervisors know what needs to be done and want to do it. After the workshop they were better able to go out and actually do it.

Table 1. What a supervisor does that really makes a difference to safety.

Table 2. What a good leader does.

Our larger sister company, Esso Petroleum, adopted the course and ran 21 sessions to cover all refinery supervisors. They are now planning versions for distribution terminals and retail operations.

Special versions have been run for the management teams of large construction projects and and for the laboratory staff at our technology centre.

CBA are now running the programme, suitably adapted, for the North Sea operations of another oil company and plan to offer an open programme in 1999.

Advantages of the approach can be summarised as:

We only found two disadvantages:

But the last word should go to the participants who played our game so willingly and taught us so much. The table shows some typical responses to the question " What was good about the course?"