Alive and Well at the End of the Day: The Supervisor's Guide to Managing Safety in Operations

By Paul D. Balmert

Proven strategies and tactics that you can use to lead workers to safety

Industrial facilities supervisors, from front-line managers to CEOs, can depend on Alive and Well at the End of the Day for tested and proven management and leadership practices that ensure the safety of their workers. With more than thirty years of hands-on experience in the chemical industry, including front-line management, author Paul Balmert understands the challenges facing supervisors in industrial facilities. His advice, based on firsthand experience, shows you how to identify and correct flaws in industrial practices. Moreover, he shows you how to lead by example, overcoming all obstacles that interfere with safety.

Rather than focus on theory, this book offers concrete strategies and tactics that enable you to:

• Recognize and capitalize on the moments when workers are most receptive to learning safety

• Discover what's really going on when you tour and inspect plant operations

• Engage in a helpful discussion with someone who is not following safety guidelines

• Understand the various types of risk involved in an industrial operation

• Implement a comprehensive strategy to manage and minimize risk

Throughout the book, plenty of case studies and examples illustrate key challenges alongside step-by-step solutions. You'll also learn how to understand and leverage the psychology and motivations of your staff in order to fully implement safety practices and procedures. In short, with this book as your guide, you will be equipped and ready to lead your staff to safety.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781118211359

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

A GUIDE TO THE GUIDE: GETTING THE MOST OUT OF THIS BOOK

Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.

— Thomas Berger

YOUR TOUGH SAFETY CHALLENGES

If you picked up this book, chances are that you’re a leader out in operations, searching for answers to the challenges that go along with seeing to it that the people you’re responsible for go home safe. Every day. During my 13 years as a line manager in a chemical plant, responsible for the safety of hundreds of people in operations and maintenance, I faced similar challenges. Over the last decade, serving as a management consultant, I’ve had the opportunity to work with your peers, leaders like you in all kinds of industries: from mining gold to hauling chemicals on the high seas. If you think seeing to it that everyone goes home safe at the end of every work day is a critical responsibility, I can assure you that you’re in good company: more than twenty thousand of your peers in industries all over the world are looking for answers to the same challenges you face in managing safety performance.

How do I know that? Because I’ve asked. One of my favorite questions to ask a leader like you is: As a leader, what are the top 10 toughest safety challenges you face—every day?

Over the span of nearly a decade, I’ve heard from twenty thousand of your industrial peers, a big majority of whom are front-line supervisors. No matter what the industry—oil and gas exploration, production and refining, mining, construction, chemicals, maintenance, power generation and distribution, pipelines, trucking and transportation—or where in the world we happen to be standing when asking the question—from northern Alberta to southern Argentina; from California to Indonesia—the answers to this question are always fundamentally the same.

Narrow the challenges down to 10, and the list looks like this:

1. Compliance: getting people to all the follow the rules—all the time.

2. Complacency: convincing people that they can get hurt doing the work they’re assigned.

3. Attitude: getting people to buy into the idea that safety is that important.

4. Change: dealing with changing rules, policies, and procedures.

5. Recognizing hazards: getting people to recognize what can hurt them.

6. The boss: leaders—and customers—who don’t always walk the talk on safety.

7. Experience: green hands who don’t have enough of it, and senior people who have more than enough—and the bad habits to prove it.

8. Near misses: finding out about them, and doing the right thing before it’s too late.

9. Production: getting the work done and getting it done safely.

10. Time: finding the time to do everything that is expected—and manage safety performance.

Are you surprised by anything on the list?

Hardly. Take the time to contemplate the challenges you face in managing safety, and you’ll likely come up with a similar list. The problem is that most leaders are too busy dealing with the challenges to spend time thinking about them. Or to do the research, benchmarking, and observation of the best practices needed to determine the what to do and how to do it in order to deal effectively with these real-world leadership challenges.

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What a difference a day can make … for better or worse

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Providing practical answers to these kinds of challenges is exactly why this book was written, and what it is intended to do. Sure, there’s a place for academic research and leadership theory about safety management. But in the heat of battle—and most days, leading the outfit to get the product out the door and do that safely is just that, a battle—leaders want practical solutions that are guaranteed to work. And they want those solutions in a readily useable form: simple, practical, and effective.

Alive and Well at the End of the Day is a book about the practice of leadership, specifically as it relates to managing safety on the job. If you’re facing the same kinds of leadership challenges as your peers all over the world—attitude, accountability, behavior, compliance, complacency, culture—this is the right book for you to read.

The answers are here: proven techniques that successful leaders in operations all over the world—who have faced those same challenges—use in seeing to it that people work safely. This is a book written for use by leaders out in real operations—and in real time.

You’ll find the answers laid out, one challenge at a time, in a very logical sequence. For many of the challenges there are real-world scenarios that illustrate how the challenge manifests itself out on the shop floor, and examples of how the techniques might look when properly executed. You won’t need much imagination to picture the problems—likely you’ll think many of the situations came from your operation, maybe even someone on your crew.

FINDING TIME: ONE OF YOUR GREATEST CHALLENGES

Most of us grew up being trained to read books from beginning to end. The presumption is that a book is written sequentially, each chapter building on the one preceding. By that logic, you can’t appreciate the last chapter unless you’ve read all the chapters leading up to it.

Of course, the presumption by the author is that the reader actually has ample spare time to read the book from beginning to end. In this day and age, how realistic is that?

Alive and Well at the End of the Day started out to be a short book—the kind of book a busy leader like you might actually have the time to read, cover to cover. There was a problem with that: the challenges leaders face in managing safety performance are too numerous and too complex to be dealt with in a brief or incomplete way. So, to do the subject of leading safety performance justice, this is a long book. You would still do well to read it from beginning to end—if you have time.

I didn’t.

Not when I had a management job in operations. Likely you don’t either. Therein lies a very fundamental problem. Your time as a leader is precious. You’re looking for help, but don’t really have the time to wade through pages of written material to find it.

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Quick answers or a complete course … designed to fit your needs

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That’s why you find this chapter, A Guide to the Guide, at the beginning. Think of it as the troubleshooting guide in the owner’s manual. You know how that works: a condition, symptom, or problem is described, followed by instructions for fixing the problem. It’s a great approach to getting the information you need—fast. No need to spend time on what’s working well.

This book wasn’t written on the assumption that it needs to be read from beginning to end, or that you have the time to do that. If you don’t, here is the alternative approach: read the chapters that offer immediate help for the specific challenges you face right now. Save the other chapters for later, when need dictates or time permits.

Figure 1.1

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READ CHAPTER 2 FIRST

No matter what kind of challenges you face, Chapter 2, The Case for Safety, is the place to start. The Case for Safety describes the real reasons why safety is always the most important thing to get right for every leader in operations. More important than getting the product to the customer or making sure the customer is satisfied with the work.

Even if you’re already sure you know the reasons for that, it’s still a chapter worth reading. It explains the most fundamental idea in the book. But then, the basics never go out of style, and there have been more than a few leaders who never fully appreciated the case for safety until it was too late. You’ll read some of their stories in this chapter, and will be able to appreciate why you never want to be in their shoes!

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Building toward a complete understanding of managing for safe results

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Once you’ve read Chapter 2, go for solutions to your most pressing problems. In Alive and Well you’ll find ways to deal with each of the specific safety leadership challenges in the chapter list. In each chapter you’ll find a fuller explanation of the nature of each of these challenges: why each isn’t some minor irritant and can’t be easily solved by a safety meeting or another safety policy, and why leadership is required to make a real difference. Often the challenge will be illustrated by a case study or scenario.

Then we’ll delve into potential solutions. Instead of theory, we’ll offer concrete strategies and tactics—what to do and how to do it—that have been successfully used by leaders. In each chapter we’ll also show you, with examples, how to implement these techniques. See Figure 1.1 for a guide to this book.

All that is designed to help you improve safety performance, or stay at the level of excellence you are currently achieving. Getting there is half the battle; staying there is the other part.

JUST IN CASE

You might be one of the lucky few in the ranks of leaders who have managing safety performance down to a science and don’t think they need any help. If so, luck probably has little to do with your success. But if you have any nagging doubts about whether you really do have all the bases covered, try reading Chapter 20 next, The Top 10 Mistakes Managers Make in Managing Safety Performance. If nothing else, that chapter will provide a cross-check to ensure you haven’t overlooked something that might prove fatal.

CHAPTER 2

THE CASE FOR SAFETY

Knowing something—and understanding it—are not the same thing.

— Charles Kettering

In the 21st-century business world it’s just about impossible to find a leader—from the CEO down to the front-line supervisor—who doesn’t know that safety is a top priority. That’s reality. But there’s another, more critical question facing every leader in operations: Why is safety the most important goal of every leader in operations?

The answer to that question seems rather obvious. No leader would ever want to see someone working under his or her supervision get hurt. If that’s not enough, leaders have been told by the boss that safety is a key part of their job duties and performance measures. Good safety performance is a requirement for a successful career. Moreover, safety is no longer just a priority. It has become an organizational value listed in the mission statement that hangs on the wall of every conference room. All that ought to be more than enough to settle the issue once and for all… safety is really that important. Case closed. Time to move on to other important matters.

As you’re beginning to suspect, there must be a catch. There is. If every leader really understood how important safety is, every leader would always demonstrate that understanding in his or her everyday actions. And if they all did, the business world would look more than a little bit different. You wouldn’t see everyday happenings like these:

Because of a shortage of staff, new employees are put to work even though they are not up to the appropriate level of proficiency.

Operating equipment isn’t maintained as it should be—or as the standards require.

Possibly unsafe shortcuts are taken in order to get the work done.

Known safety problems are ignored because fixing them will take too much time and/or money, or get in the way of getting the work done fast.

Training is eliminated, reduced, or delivered on the computer to save money and so it won’t interfere with operations.

Safety procedures are reengineered, streamlined to speed up the work.

More work is piled on leaders, leaving them with less time to manage safety performance.

That’s often what the practice of managing safety performance actually looks like out in the real world of operations. Things like that go on all the time. All you have to do is ask—or look. I know because they went on in my company—and we were pretty good at managing safety performance. As I’ve spoken with leaders in industries all over the world, they’ve told me the same things happen in their operations. If that’s not proof enough, that very list of examples can be found at the root of high-profile accidents with now-household names such as Challenger, Columbia, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Sago Mine, and Texas City.

That’s simply an observation, not an indictment. Every one of those organizations placed a high value on safety; their leaders professed a belief in the value of safety. The problem was that actions by leaders in those organizations—individually or collectively—belied those words. In every one of those cases there were people working in those organizations who knew things weren’t right, operations weren’t as safe as they appeared to be, actions weren’t being taken to support the commitment those words implied.

Safety may have been stated as a corporate value but it wasn’t the top priority—that which comes first, as practiced by the managers and supervisors who made the important decisions that spelled the difference between going home safe or hurt at the end of each day.

If only the leaders had understood the real reasons why safety is the most important business objective they had, we might never have heard of any of those names or associated them with tragedy. Consider those the real reasons for the case for safety.

TAKE TWO: FROM THE TOP

If you’re reading this book, the odds are good that you are not the CEO of your company. That’s not the target audience for Alive and Well. Rather, this book is aimed at an even more important audience of leaders: middle managers and front-line leaders working well down the chain of command, often far away from world headquarters. Intel’s Andy Grove described those leaders as the muscle and sinew of the organization: leaders who, when it comes to managing safety, are the real difference-makers in the outfit. If you are one of those leaders, every day your performance has a far greater impact than that of folks in the executive suite on the really important measures of success in your business—how much work gets done, how well the product is made, how well the customer is taken care of, and who goes home safe at the end of the shift.

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Excruciating: learning the painful way

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But every leader working in the middle knows he or she is not working in a democracy. Leaders at the top are the ones responsible for determining strategy, goals, objectives, and priorities. The role of middle managers is to understand what those goals are, and then turn around and make things happen. The former is today known as alignment—getting aligned with the goals of leaders—and the latter is execution—translating goals into results. Those two processes define both the role and the everyday work life of middle managers the world over.

An understanding of the case for safety—the reasons why safety comes before all the other business objectives—starts at the top of the enterprise with those who set the goals. There must be reasons why a CEO running any kind of industrial business invariably puts safety on the short list of goals critical to the organization. Why? The answer is pretty obvious, but there’s no harm in asking. So let’s ask a typical CEO, As the person running the company, why is safety important to you?

The predictable answer would go something like this: Our company is built on delivering great products to our customers, which makes the people who build those products the most important asset we have. We would never want to see any of them suffer any harm. That’s why safety is one of our core values.

A simple answer, readily understandable. But is that answer the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth… or something less?

It’s become popular for leaders to profess safety as a personal value, and to name safety as a value the organization shares. We’ll assume for the moment that saying that, and writing that, actually makes something a value. It would be nice if life—and leading—were that simple!

But let’s stick with this values thing. The theory behind the practice of describing safety as a value is simply that values never change. Values last a lifetime; they aren’t subject to popular trends or the pressure of the moment. Priorities, on the other hand, can change every day. Safety is something that should always be valued, and should never change with the tide.

That rationale sounds good until you apply just a bit of critical thinking. Then the flaws in the logic become rather apparent.

Where is it written that values never change? Have your values never changed over your lifetime? My values certainly have changed. What I valued most when I was 19 bears little resemblance to what I value 40 years later. In my case that change was good. Values do change, and that change is often for the good. That makes the distinction between values and priorities a distinction without a difference.

But even if there were a difference, a value represents something intangible. You can’t see a value, but you can place value on something or someone. When it comes to leading, a follower can’t see a leader’s values, but he can certainly witness a leader’s actions, and reach conclusions as to what that leader really values. Unfortunately, the world is filled with examples of a leader’s actions failing to match his professed values.

In some circles, describing safety as the priority has fallen out of fashion. That’s really too bad: priority connotes that which comes first. It’s actually a very appropriate way to describe how best to manage safety out on the shop floor: given competing objectives, what comes first? Getting the work done fast or taking the time to do it safely? Meeting the budget or spending the money to fix a safety problem? Sending people right out to the job, or investing the time and money to train them in doing that job safely?

No matter what values they profess to have, the everyday actions of leaders delineate their true priorities concerning safety. That’s when followers pay attention to their leaders and decide what really comes first, and, in turn, what the leader’s values really are. That list of everyday happenings speaks volumes to followers about the leader’s real priorities regarding safety.

The CEO’s answer to the question of why safety is important might look good in a press release, but it’s far from the whole story. The complete truth, as viewed from the top, may read more like this:

Look, poor safety performance can wreck this company. A serious accident could cripple production, cost millions of dollars, do irreparable harm to the name and reputation of the company, and cost us customers.

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The demise of a great company began with the tragedy of Bhopal

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True? Of course it is. That’s exactly what happened to my company, Union Carbide Corporation. When I joined them in the seventies I was one of 125,000 employees. Then came Bhopal, the world’s worst industrial tragedy. The stock price fell precipitously, leading to a hostile takeover from which the company never recovered.

Safety is good business; conversely, bad safety is terrible business. There’s not a thing wrong about being honest about that. That safety is good business can be proven by cases such as Union Carbide Corporation, whose market cap fell by nearly 50 percent immediately following the Bhopal accident; the price tag for accidents like Three Mile Island, the Exxon Valdez, and BP Texas City, which ran into the billions of dollars; and the fact that in the US alone, the annual cost of medical treatment of work related injuries is estimated to be in excess of $80 billion and the loss in productivity is estimated at four times that amount. Even stock prices can reflect good performance: a study of the oil and gas exploration and production industry and the hydrocarbon pipeline industry demonstrates a clear correlation between environmental safety and stock performance.

Everybody knows that safety is good business—in the long run. The problem is that not everyone understands that, in the short run, the safest way isn’t the fastest way, the cheapest way, or even the easiest way to run the business. Over a period of years, doing the right things—investing in training, properly maintaining equipment, buying better tools, planning the work, fixing safety problems—will pay a good return. The problem is that the payout comes in the future, not today. And that investment almost always costs something—time, effort, recourses, money—in the short term. An operation can under-train, skimp on maintenance, get by with inferior tools and equipment, and even overlook problems and not see the damage from those choices. Worse, leaders might even be rewarded in the short term for doing more with less.

Yes, there is a business case for safety, but recognizing that requires the investment of patient money, and a long-term perspective. Still, that business case is far from the whole truth about why a CEO would take safety seriously. The CEO goes on: But even if safety weren’t good business, sending people home safely is the right thing to do. Those people have lives and families, and I have a moral obligation to provide them with a safe place to work. That’s the ethical case for safety.

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Safety: at least as important as quality, costs

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Might some CEO’s say that… with conviction? Yes. Moreover, they might actually back up those words with their actions.

Warren Anderson did that, in 1984. He was the CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the Bhopal tragedy and his reaction was to quickly travel to the site to survey the damage and see what he could do to bring some relief in the face of the terrible tragedy. I’m sure the lawyers told him, Warren, don’t go. It’s too risky.

Despite the risk, Warren Anderson traveled to Bhopal, a small town in India where his company was responsible for the deaths of more than 2,500 people who were living outside his company’s chemical plant. Why do that? The only plausible explanation is that his company did something terribly wrong and it was his moral obligation to accept responsibility for that failure. He must have thought, What happened was wrong and as the guy at the top, I have to do the right thing to begin to make amends. Books have been written criticizing management’s role in the causes of the Bhopal tragedy. No matter: what happened in the aftermath demonstrates one leader’s belief in the ethical case for safety.

Warren Anderson’s reward for going to the scene and accepting responsibility for the accident was to be placed under house arrest, charged with the murders of those who perished in the accident. That leads to a third reason why a CEO might take safety seriously: he has a lot of his own skin in the game.

Among the many goals that a CEO is responsible for achieving, safety is often on the short list of those most critical for his success. Safety performance can determine a CEO’s relationship with the board and shareholders, and affect his tenure in office and even his status in the business community. A CEO would much prefer to have his peers seek his answer to the question How do you run a safe company? than be instructed to learn that from his biggest competitor!

With just a few moments of reflection, the case for safety from the vantage point of the CEO is easy to understand: safety is good business; it’s the right thing to do; and doing it well will reflect favorably on the CEO. There is not a thing wrong with any of those motivations, and any one of the three will cause a leader to do the right thing. They know those reasons. But when they don’t do the right thing, it may very well be because they don’t understand those reasons.

THE VIEW FROM THE MIDDLE

If you manage in the middle of the organization, understanding the real reasons a CEO should see safety as a top priority is instructive. It might even prove useful, to the extent that you believe What’s important to my boss is what is important to me. But that’s not the only reason—or the biggest reason—why safety is the most important business objective you’ve got, no matter what else you’re responsible for.

Three simple questions will help you understand why.

What are the really important things in your life?

If you suffered a serious injury at work, what would be the impact on your answers to that first question?

If you are a supervisor, responsible for the safety of others, is there anyone on your team whose answers to those first two questions would be fundamentally different from yours?

Aren’t the answers to those questions obvious?

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The real case for safety has nothing to do with corner office thinking

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What are the really important things in your life? If you’re like the rest of us who work for a living, your job is an important part of your life. Studies show that most people actually like their jobs, and meaningful work is a big part of our lives. But not the biggest part. The reasons we get up and go to work have to do with things that are more important than what we do for a living. We earn a living to enable us to do the even more important things in our lives: take care of our families, spend time with the people we love, make the world a better place, and yes, have fun. That’s why we work. Everybody knows that.

If you suffered a serious injury at work, what would be the impact on your answers to that first question? In a word, devastating.

Every day, people die trying to make a living. They’re people just like you who, just like you, got up and headed off to work, but never came home. People also get seriously hurt. For some in that second group—who are injured seriously but not fatally—the impact is lifelong. Maybe they fell, suffered severe spinal cord injuries, and will have to live out their lives in a wheelchair or using a walker. I know two who got hurt just exactly like that; you probably do too.

It isn’t hard to imagine how this affects all the important things in life: family, friends, finances, and all the things people do for fun. In an instant, life changes. Dramatically. Unalterably. There’s no way to turn back the clock and change what happened. Who do you think has the worst of it—the employee or his family? It might well be the family, the ones who are left to pick up the pieces, live with the impact, and take care of a loved one.

Back on the job, the memory of the tragedy slowly fades over time. There might be a plaque placed at the scene, a moment of silence a year later. It’s not that way at home, where every day there’s a constant reminder: caring for the survivor, paying the bills, and living with all the complexities of having a disabled person under your roof.

So now you’ve thought about how a serious injury would affect you and all the reasons you go to work each day. You knew those things. But that’s you. What about the people you’re supervising? What would be the impact of a serious injury on their reasons for working? Are they any different from you?

If you are a supervisor, responsible for the safety of others, is there anyone on your team whose answers to those first two questions would be fundamentally different from yours? You know the answer. A serious injury would have the same devastating impact on any member of your team that it would have on you. They’re not basically different from you.

Understanding the real answers to these three questions—the whole truth—will forever change the way you think about your role as a leader responsible for the safety of others.

YOU’RE THE ONE RESPONSIBLE

If you’re a supervisor, defined as one who is responsible for the work of others, there’s one final, critical aspect for you to consider as part of understanding the case for safety: your responsibility for what happened.

Picture the case where a serious injury happens not to you, but to one of your guys. As the supervisor you’ve got certain responsibilities in the situation. You might start addressing them by visiting the job site, where the accident happened, to survey the damage firsthand. Not a pretty picture. You may have to call the family and tell them to meet you at the emergency room. Tough duty.

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How could you let this happen? Your responsibility when one of your people gets hurt

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Later, you meet the family face-to-face. You start to find out all about the really important things in someone else’s life: his or her family, friends, interests, and passions. You realize it’s all about that person’s life—and the job is just one small part of that life.

Unlike the senior leaders back at your home office, you very well may know the employee and his family. They live in your town; chances are that you know the family outside of the job. You coached their kids when they were in Little League; used to bowl together, still root for the same high school team, go to the same church.

The employee’s family might even be your family.

Somewhere along the way, you might be asked by one of their family members, How did this happen? It could be worse: at a public hearing following a mining accident that claimed the life of 12 miners, the mine manager had to face more than a hundred family members. One of them told him, When you go home to your families today, think about us not going home to our families. I get to go home to my dad’s picture. You can be sure that is exactly what that manager did; it’s what you would do.

As bad as all that might be, the worst hasn’t happened—yet. On the drive home from the hospital, the next morning, or days later, you ask yourself questions: How could I let this happen? What should I have done to prevent this? You begin to examine your responsibility for the damage that was done to someone else’s life. That self-examination can be a brutally tough test. There will always be answers to the questions you ask yourself; you can only hope they’re good.

But what if they’re not? That may be the painful truth. If it is, you know it. Suppose you saw the employee not wearing a harness before he fell; you knew about problems with equipment; you knew shortcuts were being taken. But you didn’t say anything or do anything.

Your pain is mental: it’s called survivor guilt, pain that you have to live with for the rest of your life. If you’re a supervisor, that possibility is a sobering thought. When someone you lead gets seriously hurt, you can wind up being a victim too. What hurts someone working for you winds up hurting you. That’s one lesson you never want to learn the hard way. So learn it from someone else’s misfortune: there are plenty of examples.

And keep in mind that the best way to avoid having to deal with any of that is to keep people safe so you never have to make the trip to the hospital in the first place.

THE CASE FOR SAFETY

Now you understand the case for safety, the real reasons safety matters more than any of your other important business goals.

Everyone in your business works to live. It’s not the other way around. That’s true for you, and equally true for everyone who works for you.

A serious injury can have a devastating effect on all the reasons people go to work in the first place.

No matter how important any other business goal might be, it can never justify someone risking the most important things in his or her life.

These are the simple truths about safety. Every leader might know them, but not every leader understands them. If they all did, the world of work would look quite different.

Understanding the case for safety is a sobering thought for any leader. When something goes wrong, it isn’t just someone else’s life that can be turned upside down; you may wind up being a victim yourself. On the other hand, somebody has to lead, and you’ve been given that opportunity. So lead as if you understand the case for safety!

That is never easy. Leaders are an easy target; it’s as if they wear a bull’s-eye. Two, actually: one on the front and one on the back. Stand up, speak out when something is wrong, and deal with safety problems, and you may find yourself very unpopular with your bosses and customers, who see the short-term cost of dealing with a safety problem—and not the long-term benefit. In the short term, doing the right thing for safety may come at some cost. But the long-term benefits can