Role of leadership in establishing a safety culture

Each one of us come to our workplace to contribute to the economic growth, earn living and return to our families safely. Though, we come with a clear aim to return safely, still accidents occur resulting in injuries, fatalities, loss of assets and environmental & health impacts.

Petrochemical plants contributed to about 26% of the losses in the recent years and more than 15,000 miners are killed every year – and this is just the official number of losses & deaths. Most likely, it is many more. Nobody really knows how many people are injured in Chemical and mining business, but it is likely to be hundreds of thousands of people every year.

We witness a spiral of Safety Performance – The industry is unable to sustain good Safety performance. We notice that after an accident the organization goes into heightened Safety mode and everyone focuses on Safety, especially the leaders. But slowly “Complacency” creeps in and we start to shortcuts, take chances, and continue activities with known risks without implementing good mitigations – the driver and motivation is to continue production. The organization “Normalizes the risks”. The leaders ignore the deviations, risks, and negative behaviors because they are happy to see good production results. Such behaviors continue till another accident occurs and then the organization starts focusing on Safety again. Often such a spiral results in a serious negative impact to the employees, assets, and business. The industry is not only unable to sustain good Safety performance but is unable to reap the maximum economical benefits.

The question is how to break this Spiral and maintain a continuous sense of unease for each one of us to help others to conform, care for others, and to have a sustained Safety Performance. Lessons from major incidents such as Piper Alpha, Texas City, Chornobyl, Deep-Water Horizon & Columbia have highlighted leadership failures as the key issues – the leaders are unable to maintain a good Safety Culture to ensure Safety is always kept as a top priority and a Value, to ensure everyone at their facilities goes back home safely, and to sustain good safety performance.

The industry has learned in the hard way that establishing good Safety Culture is fundamental for the Safety of everyone and to sustain good Safety Performance. And to establish good Safety Culture, it is imperative that Leadership at all levels know and plays their role. Keep in mind that the employees change their behavior only if the Leaders consistently demonstrate Safety as a value and be a role models – The unspoken words and the actions of the Leaders pass the “Real” message to the employees.

To establish a good Safety culture, the leaders must:

• Create Buy-in – “for the employee to know why he needs to change, agree with it and is meaningful to him”
• Builds Competencies – “For the employee to have the skills and capabilities to behave and act in a new way”
• Establish formal mechanism – “The employee has the design, structures, processes, and systems to support the desired change”
• Role Modeling – “The employee sees his leaders behaving in a new way”