Do you have any A.C.E.S. in your hand?

By Ron Coons, Northeast Panel & Truss

When preparing to write this article, I had a hard time at first searching for a topic.
I thought about the tremendous amount of articles out there that focus on specific aspects of safety that are usually derived from OSHA standards. I figured the last thing that people would want to read was another article on lockout-tagout or PPE. I decided to concentrate my efforts on a topic that in my opinion is the most critical component of any successful program and without it, most all safety programs will plateau at best, in mediocrity. The one component you should spend the majority of your time working with is your employees.

Over the past year or so I have been using many techniques and styles of behavior based safety, and I am most drawn to Dr. Scott Geller and his philosophy of People Based Safety. I have revised some of his approaches over the past year because his methods are sometimes, from my experience not reality based. In the real world safety, human resource professionals, managers and business owners don’t have time to refer to his 300 page book to look up the “next step”. I have added my own approach and have put them into four simple and sound components that I have had great success with. I would like to share them with you very briefly in hopes that you can utilize some or hopefully all of it to increase the effectiveness of your safety programs. The acronym that I use is A.C.E.S. It stands for;

Attitude

Attitudes reflect how one feels about something. Attitudes are not the same as values but they are interrelated. There are three components of an attitude; cognition, affect, and behavior. The belief that “this safety stuff is nonsense” is a value statement. Such an opinion is the cognitive component of an attitude. It sets the stage for the more critical part of an attitude, its affective component. Affect is the emotional segment of an attitude and is reflected by saying something like; “I don’t like this company because they make us do this safety stuff”. Affect can and usually does lead to behavioral outcomes. The behavioral component of an attitude refers to an intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something. So the statement might be made; “I will not do this safety stuff because I don’t like this company forcing it upon us”.
Attitudes are generally shaped by each individual’s background and also company culture. An example of background influence may be exemplified in Mexican workers. In Mexico working conditions are horrible and that is an accepted part of life there. When they come to this country, hearing the word safety for the first time or being asked to learn how to work safer is new ground for them. Therefore there will be more chance for resistance because of their background and unwillingness to change their beliefs.
Company culture will most certainly dictate attitude towards safety as well. If I the worker am told to wear hearing protection for my own safety but the supervisors telling me to wear it are not wearing theirs, my attitude will be impacted negatively. If however management visibly supports safety efforts by wearing their own and using a positive attitude towards the safety effort, the workers will be more likely to follow the example and conform their attitudes to fit the company’s expectations.

Caring

Caring is the company implementing a safety program because they want to save money or because they really do care about their employees well being? How is safety promoted in your organization? I once worked in an organization that always displayed graphs and brought in their insurance representative to talk about how much money the company was saving because of the decrease in injuries. That was not actively caring about the employee. It was however actively caring about company profit.
Along with caring also comes the question of how your safety incentive program is structured because it is also a direct way of showing the companies true concerns. Is your incentive program based on injuries? “Whoever goes three months without an injury gets this” or “if we can decrease our injuries by 50% over last years, you will all receive this….”. It is easy for an employee to see that the real reason for the incentive is to save the company money and not to keep people safe. By having your incentive program structured like this you are really giving your employees the incentive NOT to report injuries. I made this mistake years ago and when an employee fell and hit his head on the ice, he clearly received a bad concussion but refused to go to the doctor because of the risk of breaking the “number of days without an injury” record and thus being the one to ruin the incentive reward for everyone else.
Caring is about catering to a very basic human need. Everyone wants to be liked, valued, and looked out for by his/her bosses and fellow employees. Everything that we as safety and human resource professionals, owners and business leaders do will most certainly be a reflection of our true meaning behind our actions. If you want your safety program to become more effective, start by truly and visibly caring about your employees.

Educating

I cringe every time I hear the words train or training. The code of federal regulations uses the words a thousand times over. We train dogs and should be educating our people. When I hear the word train, the word habit also comes to mind. We were all trained at a young age to respond to the word “no” or stop when we saw a red light or stop sign. These things were done automatically with little thought involved. But do we want our employees working without thinking? Habits are those actions that are done without thinking. I think our employees will be much safer if they think about every aspect of their job. Educating employees arms them with the knowledge they need to make conscious decisions which in turn promote safe behavior. By educating employees you will also create teachers within your organization that can pass along that knowledge.

Solidifying

I have seen over the years that human behavior is very seldom consistent. In order to bring out the good and safe behavior from your employees, you need to do what ever you can to make those behaviors sound and reliable. One of the best ways to solidify a safe behavior is to reward it instantly. Part of the problem with many incentive programs today is that they have time frames involved. Typically they are given out every three or six months. The problem with this is that at that point, do the employees really know what they were rewarded for? Behaviors need to be rewarded as they happen so that the meaning and importance is not lost.

How can this be done you ask? We use scratch off lottery tickets for example. All supervisors, as well as I am armed with a handful of tickets and each day we look for opportunities to reward the employees. Tickets are given out for various things such as reporting hazards, fixing hazards, reporting “near hits” and injuries as well. We will also give out tickets to employees that help and teach other, employees that are caught lifting properly, and employees that suggest new and safer ways of doing things. There are many different ways to reward other than lottery tickets; you can give out tokens that can be redeemed for various prizes and so on. But remember that unless behavior is reinforced at that moment in which it happens, its meaning will be lost and the golden opportunity to solidify that behavior in which you seek is also gone not likely to be seen again.

Another area that can help solidify safe behavior is disciplinary programs or I should say without disciplinary programs. In my opinion disciplinary programs are used far too much and are used incorrectly. Disciplinary programs should be used only as a “means to an end”. In other words if you are intending to get rid of an employee and want to accumulate a paper trail, a disciplinary program is what you need. But disciplinary programs are not a tool to modify behavior, at least not in a positive way. If for example an employee is found to be not wearing his/her PPE, calling them in “on the carpet” and formally reprimanding them with a written warning will only impact them negatively. But if you sit them down and talk to them, you may find out that the PPE is uncomfortable to them or it may be too cumbersome for the task they are performing or just re-emphasizing the importance of PPE to them may be all it takes. And sometimes all it really takes is someone to sit down and just “listen” to them and show that they are cared for.
Don’t get me wrong, if the same person is caught again not wearing their PPE then something a little more formal or a conversation a little more firm is in order. And if this is the case, this person is probably not going to work out in your culture and probably should have not been hired in the first place.

I was recently asked by a colleague “what motivates you to focus on the subject of safety”. I gave him a quick answer but when I went home that night I was thinking about his question intensely. My true answer to that question is that what motivates me in regards to safety and health is all the work that is left to be done.
Almost 100 years ago when the first idea about workers compensation came about, 18,000 to 21,000 workers were killed every year. Today with a code of federal regulations book that is almost two inches thick, we are still seeing almost 6,000 employees a year dying on the job. If you have noticed, this number hasn’t changed much over the last four years either.
In my opinion, if we continue to focus on only the standards handed down by OSHA and our safety and health manuals, we will never get the number of workplace fatalities any lower. If however we start focusing on our people, we can certainly achieve ZERO fatalities. After all, aren’t they worth the effort?