Creating a Safety Culture is a Matter of Trust
Plant management got buy-in from a veteran workforce by emphasizing that nothing is more important than their safety.
General Cable's Lincoln, R.I., facility has made tremendous strides in its safety performance since Michael Brown became plant manager in May 2006 and Rick Flaxington became EH&S manager in August 2006.
Over the past three years, the plant has reduced its OSHA recordable-incident rate by 60% and its days-away-from-work incident rate by 85%, and both rates now are well-below the industry averages.
Perhaps more importantly, the facility has created a culture in which the workforce -- with the support of the local union -- has taken ownership of safety.
Flaxington, though, still vividly recalls the state of safety when he took his post in 2006.
"Quite honestly, it was a horror show," Flaxington says. "We had over 150 associate concerns and safety work orders that were open."
The big challenge was breaking through to a veteran workforce that was, understandably, set in its ways. As of January 2010, 40% of the workforce of 200-plus employees had logged more than 30 years of service.
"People get programmed to do [their job] a certain way everyday for 30 years," Brown says. "Sometimes it's hard to break that thought process."
Although Brown and his management team knew that the majority of incidents were attributed to unsafe behaviors, the culture of the plant was to blame incidents on "conditional issues" such as equipment hazards. So one of the first steps the plant took was to assign maintenance to address the outstanding safety work orders.
"We had to take the excuse of conditional away," Brown says. "We spent a lot of time fixing little things on their machines -- loose bolts, loose guards, trip hazards, whatever it was."
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From there, plant management focused on creating a culture that viewed safety as a behavioral (and not a conditional) issue.
The culture change first took root in the maintenance department, which had been driving the plant's OSHA recordable rates because of a longstanding pattern of engaging in unsafe acts "to be a hero," as Igoe puts it.
Things turned around, though, when the plant began emphasizing the need for maintenance staffers to follow lockout/tagout procedures, to ask for help when needed, and perhaps most importantly, to avoid acts of heroism, maintenance manager Tom Flynn explains.
