As much as we would like it, there is no single approach to a successful safety program. This we chat about the long list of programs that are out there.
As much as we would like it, there is no single approach to a successful safety program. This we chat about the long list of programs that are out there.
Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast where we discuss the technical and people's side of safety. Safety should be your primary leadership tool for discovering more about your people and culture. Your host is Dr. Mark French, also known as the safety dude. Mark is a credentialed, experienced and passionate professional with experience in automotive, food, chemical, nuclear, e commerce and energy sectors. He is going to share information and anecdotes from years of experience in the people side of safety based on industrial and organizational psychological theories. Safety is so much more than a technical skill. It is a motivational need that defines the culture of your organization. employee safety is a meaningful business practice that makes a direct impact on everyone through direct behavioral engagement. That is why your organization should be using safety as a key method to learn about your culture and lead your teams. Thanks for joining this episode as we talk through current issues and people management and how they impact our everyday workplace.
Mark French:And welcome to this episode of the leading and learning safety podcast. Hi, I am your host, Dr. Mark French. And I am so happy that you have once again joined me for this weekly chat about leadership in safety and how we develop our culture, beginning with safety. So as I said last week, I'd like to continue the conversation about the work that was done at the Tennessee safety conference. We had an amazing time there. Me and my younger safety dude was there helping me out and seeing the sides and learning more about safety. And a lot of things came to light. I think the first one was when people were talking to me about what I do. And when I believe in, I always come up with a conclusion that let me walk into a site. If I see poor safety, there's poor leadership, if I see good safety, like really engaging safety, there's good leadership almost all the time, almost every single time, I would think that statistically speaking, that's going to be even when I do research, I'm looking at other people's research, when you look at the things that say that's a good safety program, like it's a real safety program, and it's good versus you walk in, and then you see it just like on fire and people running around screaming and scared. Extreme. You see the difference in good and bad leadership immediately. So I always have used safety is that judgment? Some people will say, Well, let me show it, see your quality metrics, show me your finances, show me your delivery metrics. I'm like, No, show me your proactive safety processes. And I'll tell you where your leadership is at, you may have some of the other things that you're working on and trying to improve. But if you start with that basis of safety, if you've got your people engaged in caring, immediately, you're going to have more motivation, more engagement, and you're going to have a workforce who's ready to support you. Because their baseline behavioral needs are met, they're ready for that next step. They're fulfilled, and they're prepared for it. And that's exciting. When you think about it. And I time and time again, I judge leadership based on safety. And that is one of my fundamental indicators of functional and dysfunctional leadership. And there's a lot of supporting knowledge out there, a lot of books that would support it and some case studies that will continue to support that the performance of those companies for longevity. Now some of those companies can push for like they can get their quarter, they can show a great quarter. But can they sustain it year over year? With that safety. There's your indicator because it's people, your people make the difference. If you're supporting your people in the right way, you're going to get the results you need. Okay, let's dip off of that. So box. Let's get back to the tenancy safety conference, which I'm kind of hinting at here with what I'm talking about. One of the more interesting items that came up time and time again, from everybody. And when I read through, what are you doing? And I asked people, How are you doing? And what programs are you working on? Where would you need help? And where are you in your professional career and doing those things? It's amazing. And I'm sure you've encountered this to the alphabet soup of behavior based, or what I would call the silver bullet approach safety programs, that there are people out there selling our safety people when selling management. So they'll find that manager or that leader who maybe doesn't know a whole lot about safety, and they'll sell them on this silver bullet approach of how they've made leaps and bounds and safety through this one approach. And it has some really awesome acronyms, and it sells so beautifully. And then it's up to the safety person to implement it. Because they get sold on it. And this happens, it's almost like I would say the flavor of the week, because you get into it, you do it. And then you realize that oh man, there's no such thing. That one isn't the silver bullet, we expect it it's not fixing all of our problems, like we were told, we've already paid for it, it's already done, it kind of fades away. And then a little bit later, suddenly, there's a new alphabet, a new series of letters that promise the greatness of safety again. And there it goes, we do it again, for a few years management changes over leadership turns over, it kind of fades away. And then we find a new one. And I hear that story heard quite a bit actually, from a few different people I was talking to, they were just rattling off all the acronyms and the alphabet of things that they had seen in their organization, not that they had been the one to implement it, or the one that shows it. But they were the ones who you know, the organization, the bigger corporate organization or whatever, had made decisions to do this program at this time, and then swapped to another program at another time. And I've seen it too in my career where that happens. It's always that new letters, new methods. And sometimes it's the same program with a whole different name. You just kind of like shuffle the deck and put the same cards back out and go, Well, it's brand new, it's brand new, they're in a different order, this time, that also frustrates me. And no one likes to hear it. And even when I speak and I'm doing talks and people are they're wanting to get knowledge of something I may have done well or something I've researched Well, I always try to remember to say early on. And I give it away early to say you know, this is not a one stop approach. This is one piece. This is one tool in the tool belt that you need to have success with safety. There's no silver bullet. And I used to think there could be I used to believe in those programs. And if we just did this one program, this would make it this would do it. And then I ultimately learn longer and longer time that I did it. But there's not that single level approach. There's not one program that's going to make it successful. And you know why? Because you can think of Six Sigma with quality, you can think of lean manufacturing for productivity. You can think of different financial processes that will get you where you need to go. And you think about safety and you'll Why can't there be a simpler approach. And I'll go back to the idea that is the most people based, the most complex item that we have in our organization is a human being. And that's good and bad. It's good because we think we do things we improve, we naturally instinct to do the work in a new and better way. We're thinking and innovating. And that's what makes it great. But on the other side, we're complex, we bring things from the outside, we bring our history, we bring our biases, we bring that experience in, whether it be something that upset us or something happy or something sad or anything in between, we bring that with us when we come we're the most complex. Therefore the processes that engages the processes that lead us the processes we learn from have to be equally complex. Not to say it's impossible. It's not. There is some it can be as simple as you want it to be when you baseline it but it all comes back and I know I'm talking back and forth. It's hard but it's easy. It's hard, but it's easy. I'll explain that when we come back at the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast.
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Mark French:And welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So right before we took that little break, I am sure you were thinking, Mark, you're talking in opposites, you're saying it's easy, but you're saying it's complex? Yeah, it is complex. But there's also some processes that we can take that make it easier on us to implement it, it doesn't have to be impossible. It doesn't have to be painful. It can be a process that works. And that's where we talk about safety systems. And this is where I believe in what I do is first, we we remember that our people, our people, they're not a spreadsheet data point. They're not just a thing on a map. They're not just taking up space, they're not just wasting our money. There are people, and they're doing things that help us as an organization. And fundamentally, that's the thing is that yeah, we think about the 2%, the one person or people that we spend so much time on that we just like oh my gosh, so negative, so painful. We forget about the ones who are out there, doing it, right, doing it consistently, and keeping it going. And that's where our real advantages when we start to empower and engage that group. So when we talk about that alphabet soup of that one thing, we just do the one thing, this one program is going to work? No, it has to be a full, systemic approach. So let's begin with just the simple idea of the hierarchy of controls, begin there with a safety program. And this is just the first piece of like, how do we avoid the risk, we get rid of it, we substituted we engineer it. And then finally we get into like processes and PPE. Okay, hazards, we're looking at hazards, and we're reducing them. The next part we have to get into, okay, now that we've done that piece of it, how do we educate the team on what's left. So here's the whole education part and Adult Education in the way that we learn in different stages of our life, from anywhere from an 18 year old to 70 plus year old that can be in the workforce right now. Very different. And so we need to approach that learning by helping the best we can, getting them involved in that process. And then we need to listen, there has to be a feedback loop. And that's what I love about people. If you ask the question, you'll generally get the answer. And it may be ugly, it may be something you're like, yep. I don't know what to do about that you're gonna get some kind of answer. Sometimes you have to tailor it a little different. You always hear the horror stories of like, well, we just need to tear this place down and rebuild it. That's not real. And that's not helpful. And you can say that, hey, we're not going to do that. But what can I do tomorrow? What can I do in one week? What can I do at the end of the month to make it better, because I'm not going to tear it down and rebuild it, what's something I can do, that we can do together, that I can help with? In right there? We're already in I've only spoken about just three simple things. And that's risk management, and engineering, education, and communication. There's so many more. I mean, if you think about the processes that go into your safety program every day, that makes it function, there's so much more than one thing, ultimately, what I'm trying to say here is that my frustration in the safety world is that that approach of I've come up with this silver bullet, this one single item approach, and that's the way it's going to fix your life. And if you'll just buy my program, you're good, and you just implement it, and things will be great. No, there's not that one stop shop. It has to be multifaceted. It has to be engaging in so many different levels. And that's where I've met some really amazing consultants out there, that some of their work requires like two years, like you're gonna sign up for a two year thing to where we're hand holding you through all the phases of the strategy. It's not just I hand you some training, and we do some, some different styles of audits and we train your people. And we keep auditing and getting data and see what happens. It's systemic and as long term and it's a partnership. And those are the ones that gender Really speaking, I don't see at conferences like setting up their booths and selling their stuff. They're the ones that are there educating, learning, and really trying to push the envelope of what safety is going to be and should be when it engages with people. So I think that's really cool to think about that idea. And I hate that. There are times where the safety people and again, I've been there, I felt that pain of hey, we've got a new safety system. It's based on this behavioral process, and it's got some cool letters behind it, and you're going to implement it, you're going to, even though we haven't fixed three things that our team has brought up, that's broken, we're going to force the system and in generally speaking, it's behind that behavioral safety, you're hearing that term of oh, let's change the behaviors. And yeah, behaviors have a lot to do with it. And what is that behavior will hopefully we want to get the behavior where we report a hazard. But that only works if we fix the hazard. And I think that's the broken piece of most of those systems, is the expectation of fixing things goes away. And the expectation of, hey, just WorkSafe comes into play. That being in the moment, and just that one, just can't really buy into that. As much as I used to. I used to, I used to really think that was a great process until I realized that the other part of that social contract of fixing things sometimes didn't come like it should. And we have to fix those things. We can't just sit back and expect to change just behaviors. And again, that's why I started with a hierarchy of controls. Anyway. So as we're wrapping up this episode, I want to go back to there is like significant, long term heat waves, like coming through kind of the Midwest and South. I hope you're taking care of yourself. I hope you're taking care of your people. Last week, we did talk about heat stress some because it just continues on in I've been watching the news and reading more and more news about hey, protect your workers is getting super hot, we got to think about the environment that we're working in. It blows my mind every single time that they act like this is shocking. And this is unbelievable. And oh my goodness, I can't believe that. It's this. Yeah, the extreme is pretty different, like this stretch of like three, four days, where we're seeing heat indexes of where I live, about, like 110. Yeah, day after day after day. That's a little weird, because normally, it's a day here a day there. It's still hot. Regardless, it's August in the south, it's hot. This is something systemically that we've got to protect our team. So I hope you're checking up on your team that's out there in the field, take time to check in on them. Everybody is going to react to this just a little bit differently. And so it's important that we treat again, we got to treat everybody like an individual. And everybody's going to have a little bit different acclamation used to it. Some people will deny that they're having any trouble at all that they're they're doing great in this kind of heat. I would believe that we've got to make sure we're preparing that we've got rest areas, we've got lots of hydration, we got lots of time to sit down and get some air because man it is rough right now from a temperature standpoint, and guess what happens every summer. So hopefully we're prepared for it. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Again, so happy that you've picked my podcast, and until next time we chat stay safe
Voiceover:thanks for listening to the leading and learning to safety podcast. Join the online conversation at WWW dot mark a french.com. All opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice. This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast