Safety: STP
Improving the Odds for a Zero Injury Workplace
By Carl Potter
Workplace safety has many different facets. I’ve found in my work with companies across the country that the focus on safety is often directly correlated with an individual’s responsibilities. Three facets are directly related to the business of safety: Strategic, Tactical, and Personal (STP). Executives and senior managers are often concerned about the strategy, or big picture, of how safety fits into the overall business. Tactical activities are more hands-on and tend to get the attention of managers, supervisors, and front-line leaders. The personal focus on safety often lies with the individual contributors, or front-line workers, in the organization.
I like to think about these three as interdependent parts of the whole. If a focus on one is missing, or amiss, then the other two facets will be in trouble. For example, in one company I’ve worked with, the executives are focused solely on compliance – doing only what they have to do to stay out of trouble with OSHA. This is their strategy. As a result, required safety compliance training is all that is funded in the budget. Therefore, the tactical approach used by managers and supervisors is to do very little in the way of work practice training. When new equipment or tools are acquired, the workers have to do their best to figure out how to do adjust their work. Workers get disheartened when they don’t get the training they need to do their jobs safely and are only receiving compliance training to cover the company’s butt. The personal approach often becomes one of doing just enough to get by. Granted, this approach can work for awhile. But, if the overall strategy doesn’t change, the safety culture suffers and the results show up as injuries, lost time, fatalities, lost productivity, and even lost business.
What’s the answer? It takes work to keep strategic, tactical, and personal approaches to safety aligned. At times, it’s even difficult to determine if there’s a disconnect. Ask these questions to learn more about what’s going on in your organization:
1. How are we actively seeking current information about safety at all levels (executive, management, supervision, front-line worker)?
2. How do we train people to communicate about safety in ways that are meaningful in the organization?
3. What do we do across the organization when something goes wrong (near miss, injury, fatality)?
4. What do we do throughout the organization when we get new ideas for improving safety?
These questions are just a starting point. Once you get some answers, you’ll probably have more questions. Stay with it. Sometimes it even takes an outside third party to help you to take a deeper, and objective, look so the organization can make improvements.
Take the time this week to ask these questions at your safety meeting. Set up a meeting with your boss and ask the questions listed above. You’ll be on your way to learning a lot more about what’s going on in your organization so everyone can go home every day without an injury.
"Carl Potter spoke to our Foreman's Conference, delivering his Supervising for Safety presentation. His remarks were right on target!"
- XcelEnergy
