You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure
By Jeffrey Cassell, Avatar Management Services
All too often, the safety practices of an organization receive little attention and become ineffective. Many companies lack the ability to measure the safety process. This can lead to not knowing how to manage safety.
In interviews, managers are often unable to define the word safety. Their answers vary greatly and are surprisingly incorrect. Do you know the true definition of safety? Since many companies lack proper training or education on the matter, managers are often unaware of how to bring about the safest operations possible. Many managers think that accidents just come with the job, that there is not much they can do. Boy, are they ever wrong!
An accident is an unplanned event that involves people, disrupts activity, and is caused. The last factor is critical, because if we focus on removing the causes, accidents will not happen. It is the job of risk management to know what these causes are and to remove them.
Everyone wants to reduce accidents and injuries; this saves considerable cost and is the right thing to do. So, to get better results, companies need to do something different. The question is, What?
The place to start is with the information in your risk management information system (RMIS). Risk and safety leaders must study the data to decide the most effective actions to take. The need for accurate claims data is paramount to help manage your objective. If you do not know what is happening, how can you take actions to improve performance?
For more than 20 years, I used RSG systems to analyze, understand, and help manage safety practices in order to achieve the lowest number of accidents and injuries. By studying accident/injury causations across the company, region, and branch entities, we were able to identify differences from norms and take appropriate actions. Once we knew the leading accident/injury causations, we focused our attention on creating programs and processes to reduce or remove these causations. Continual monitoring of the data indicated what worked best and what did not.
As part of our causation elimination process, we brought in Avatar Management Services, a specialist in creating the processes and training programs required for the operational changes we needed. If the analysis showed unsafe conditions were involved, we took the approach that these could be engineered away. In the majority of cases, we found unsafe behaviors to be the cause.
The doctrine of 300:29:1 states that for every catastrophe (the “1”), there are 29 minor accidents, and for each of these there are 300 unsafe acts. If you can remove or reduce the 300 unsafe acts, the 29 accidents can be reduced or eliminated, and the one catastrophe may never happen. By analyzing the information available in RSG”s Sigma EncoreSM RMIS, we knew what the 300 unsafe acts were, and we reacted accordingly.
Once you have identified the behaviors that require changing, you can consider five strategies to positively impact the needed changes.
- Recruitment and Selection: Hire the right people for the job.
- Orientation: Right from the start, the company must set the expectations and safety standards required from new employees.
- Education and Training: Only if employees know exactly what is required will they perform that way.
- Leadership: Managers need to know what safety is and what they can do to achieve the safest operations possible. They must know what an accident is and how to lead employees in order to avoid the unsafe acts that cause accidents.
- Support Processes: Continual reinforcement of safe behaviors is essential. If it matters to management, it will matter to employees: Always walk the talk.
Your RSG RMIS can show you where to focus your risk reduction efforts. With that knowledge at hand, you can decide on the five strategies above that will best achieve the required changes. Now you are in a position to manage what you can measure.
Remember: Safety is freedom from risk. As the doctrine of 300:29:1 demonstrates, risk comes from unsafe acts. In order avoid catastrophe, remove unsafe behaviors and unsafe conditions. It really is that simple!
|
