Enterprise Safety Management: Implementing a Framework
August 2008
My September 2007 article,
Enterprise Safety Management: Creating an Injury-Free
Workplace, provided an overview of how to establish a truly safe construction
site. The January 2008 follow-up, Creating a Framework,
set the groundwork for enterprise safety management. Here, we examine aspects
of execution.
by Peter
G. Furst
Liberty Mutual Group
Any organizational initiative must rest on a foundation that will allow it
to be implemented successfully, function effectively as well as flourish. The
culture of the organization is the framework within which the people of the
organization cope and function. Edgar Schein, an MIT professor (who termed "corporate
culture"), maintains that many organizational initiative's failures can be traced
to not fully understanding the organizational culture. So, to create an effective
enterprise wide safety framework, it is imperative to understand the organizational
culture.
So what is organizational culture? There is no simple or single definition.
In general terms, it is a set of basic common understandings learned, shared,
and used by the members of an organization to manage internal processes as well
as function effectively in the internal and external environment. Culture has
three levels. The visible or highest level is the behaviors of its members and
the artifacts of the organization. At the next level are the organization's
shared values. Values to a large extent determine the membership's behaviors.
At the deepest level are the assumptions and beliefs of the people within that
organization. These are entrenched and difficult to pinpoint and change.
A positive strong and vibrant organizational culture is important to effectively
manage. Such a culture will attract and retain capable talent. It engages, energizes
and creates momentum. It creates synergy and a positive outlook on work as well
as win-win, cooperative thinking. Such a culture enables enhances, empowers,
and breeds success.
To effectively initiate change, one must understand all the complexities
of culture. Therefore, understanding the three levels of culture is important
to the design and implementation of any change initiative. The culture shapes
the people and the people shape the culture. More importantly, the leadership
of an organization plays a pivotal role in shaping the culture.
It is also important to understand the vision of the organization's senior
leadership as it relates to safety. The vision is a "picture" of the future
state. The vision must be clearly articulated to the organization. The vision
sets the parameters for the creation of the infrastructure as well as the framework
which, when appropriately designed and effectively implemented results in an
injury free workplace.
Leadership and Management
Both leadership and management are necessary and critical to creating and
sustaining a value-based culture as well as creating processes and procedures
that foster excellence. Principle-centered leadership involves ethical behavior,
causal thinking, inspiring a shared vision, as well as enabling and empowering
everyone. It is all about modeling the way, challenging the process, and encouraging
others to carry on. Management, on the other hand, is the process of obtaining,
deploying, and utilizing a variety of essential resources, especially people,
to effectively and efficiently contribute to an organization's success. Managers
spend much of their time planning, organizing, controlling, staffing, etc. to
achieve the organization's goals.
The critical elements of leadership are the following.
Ethical behavior means leading by strong
principles. It involves behaving fairly, ethically, and with integrity. It demonstrates
concern for others as well as sharing of control, conducting meaningful communication,
and providing relevant information. It also involves empowering others to act
and giving credit where it is due.
Causal thinking involves creative, strategic,
and transformational thinking. Creative thinking involves coming up with new
ideas, anticipating the future, improvement, etc. Strategic thinking is all
about connecting creativity with value, and transformational thinking results
in the ability to take radically new ideas and make them work.
Inspiring a shared vision is all about
getting others to believe in and act on the organizational vision. It's breathing
life into other people's hopes and dreams, and forging a unity of purpose to
ignite a flame of passion.
Enabling and empowering implies removing
barriers so as to assure the success of others. It does this by supporting and
involving the individual, encouraging group collaboration and teamwork, and
sharing information and power. Leadership is a relationship founded on trust
and confidence.
Modeling is about setting the example.
It's all about genuinely paying attention by actively listening, understanding,
and then showing compassion. Modeling includes working on small wins while thinking
win-win in all cases, acting with a sense of urgency, being empathic, and caring
about others.
Challenging the process is about confronting
and changing the status quo. Doing so means recognizing and removing constraints,
being open to taking calculated risks, and pushing the envelope. It is all about
being a change agent and early adopter, looking for and creating opportunities
for learning and growth in others, and recognizing good ideas or ways.
Encouraging perseverance means genuinely
caring about people. It is uplifting and fosters trust and loyalty. Showing
a person that they can win is a powerful attribute of leadership. It involves
building people's self-confidence by always being positive and helpful, and
encouraging and celebrating accomplishments.
Management is all about getting things done. Managers link goals to effort.
They plan for converting resource into outputs. Managers must have a balanced
concern for production as well as people. Managers must motivate the workforce.
Managers play a key role in providing the employees with meaningful work and
job satisfaction. Managers must treat the workforce with respect, show fairness,
and provide recognition. An empowered workforce is involved, effective, and
productive. Management is necessary but leadership is essential.
Communication and Metrics
Communication is defined as the process of passing information and understanding.
Communication and the flow of information are critical to effective management.
People need information to make meaningful decisions; therefore, the availability,
accuracy, and timeliness of information is vital. Stephen Covey, in his book
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,
lists empathic communication as one of the seven habits (seek first to understand,
then to be understood) of successful people.
Communication and information create the link between plans and actions.
Neither leadership nor motivation can bring about action without communication.
Effective communication is three dimensional: it must flow up and down the chain
of command; it must flow across various departments (horizontally); and it must
flow in and out of the organizations. Information comes from processed data.
Therefore, the collection and analysis of data is important to management and
decision making.
To meet the organization's goals and objectives, management must manage performance.
To effectively manage performance and drive the desirable organizational behavior,
management needs metrics and should create standards, objectives, and targets.
These metrics become the basis for an ongoing process of communicating expectations,
providing coaching and feedback, so as to reinforce the desired employee action
and behaviors.
Employees must clearly know the organizations expectations and must be empowered
and enabled to achieve the goal. So, workers and all levels of management must
have clearly established expectations and must be held accountable for them.
Of course, it is understood that the organization must provide the resources,
the knowledge, the information, the tools, and the equipment to enable the employees
to be successful.
Organizational Systems
Another area that needs to be scrutinized is the organizations systems. These
establish how things get done. These processes and procedures play a role in
supporting or undermining the injury-free goal of the organization. This requires
an in-depth study of how and why things are done the way they are both at the
operational level, the business practices level and the organizational structure
and systems level. It is the role of leadership to challenge the accepted means
and methods to identify barriers to accomplishing an injury-free workplace.
An injury-free workplace can only be achieved by looking at the organization
holistically. Safety must be integrated into the very fabric of the organization
and must be aligned with the organization's business goals. To accomplish this
we need a framework of excellence that rests on a solid foundation of safety
best practices. This includes all the state-of-the-art safety policies and procedures
utilized by the best-in-class organizations in managing their safety performance.
These practices must be in harmony with the organization's culture, climate,
values, and vision. This is then enhanced by the following six keys to achieve
an injury-free workplace:
- Planning and risk assessment
- Resource management
- Behavioral and human dynamics
- Performance management and metrics
- Systems analysis and continuous improvement
- Innovation, learning and change management
These key elements, along with proactive leadership, create a culture that
supports an injury-free workplace.
Alignment and Execution
Growth and profit are ultimately the result of alignment between people,
strategy, process, and customers. Alignment gives mangers at every level of
the organization the ability to:
- Deploy strategy
- Focus on the customer (stakeholder)
- Effectively develop people
- Continuously improve internal systems
System integration and alignment establishes a culture that results in stellar
levels of employee involvement and satisfaction, customer loyalty, and superior
financial results. Alignment and system integration magnify and intensify the
efforts and outcomes of the four cornerstones and create an injury free work
environment.
Click here for the
Enterprise Safety Model.
It takes the right kind of culture, climate, and leadership to engage and
involve people. Managers who focus on managing exclusively somewhat miss the
mark, for one manages things and leads people! Execution is about people making
things happen and engaging in the "right" organizational behaviors.
Better execution is an area that most organizations need to also focus on
in order to improve performance. Many organizations focus on strategy, leadership,
metrics, the processes, the systems, and other aspects of the business but take
execution for granted. It is, after all, what managers do everyday. A fundamental
aspect of executions is to take ownership and initiative in achieving any goal.
An organization with a culture of execution performs well, fulfills its promises,
and meets its goals.
Productive Injury-Free Workplace
Excellence in safety can only be achieved through an integrated, strategy-driven,
performance-based safety management process. Enterprise safety management creates
the integrated and aligned framework for the organization with which to create
an injury-free workplace. Obviously, we need to approach the process holistically.
Safety should be fully integrated into the organization's operations, and safety
outcomes should be aligned with business goals. Therefore, the safety process
will become woven into the very fabric of the organization and achieving an
injury-free workplace will naturally flow from the operation.
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