Page 25 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2017

SAFETY MANAGEMENT
will, in turn, reward you with an improved safety management system free of bul- letproof employees. Help them make the connection.
Strategies to Helping the Bulletproof Employee Make the Connection
Help bulletproof employees make a con- nection by redesigning defective leadership processes. This is very achievable.
The following mindsets, focus areas, and strategies can make it all happen:
1. Understand what bulletproof em- ployees are, what encourages them to be- have the way they do and how they perform their risk assessments. Use this knowledge to drive strategy development.
2. Perform due diligence on your pro- cesses. Revise any that solely rely on human behavior for success.
3. Perform a self-check on your biases and take action to keep them in check. Look outside your window. Is there a stan- dard you are using or comparing others to that may be viewed as disjointed? Is there an issue with your approach or approaches that have cemented opinions to the point of no return? Is your bias in conflict with those of others? Identify your organization- al risk blind spots.
4. Commit to stepping back and evalu- ating the intent of the bulletproof employ- ee.Dotheynotcareiftheydieorisitacase of not seeing the risk they are taking and its impact on everyone? Is there an unspo- ken expectation that production is ahead of all else at all cost, a unit bias? Is there a culture dichotomy that is the culprit where employees are only playing their roles from their point of view? Incremental rational- ization, perhaps.
5. Ensure that the safety culture at your company is one that promotes open dis- cussions without retribution, one that pro- motes the concept of taking care of each other, one that promotes no tolerance for taking unmitigated or uncontrolled risks, one that holds leadership accountable for employee actions and their well-being, one that is committed to making safety a core value and one that focuses on fixing pro- cesses rather than fixing people. Encourage employee engagement. Utilize the power of information pit stops.
6. Consider all outcomes of processes the responsibility of leadership, including work-related injuries and illnesses. Adopt
the philosophy, that an injury is the result of a process owned, designed, and imple- mented by leadership and that the in place process at the time of the injury is the ulti- mate cause of the undesired outcome.
7. Focus more on process changes and less on people changes because behavior changes are often difficult to achieve. Peo- ple changes will organically occur through their personal risk assessment process.
8. Evaluate your process at every legiti- mate opportunity to assure a predictable and sustainable result. Trust but verify.
The first step in any journey is the most
important because it determines intent, direction and commitment to reach the desired destination. Driving your safety program from the standpoint of reducing risk to the lowest possible levels is essen- tial in any well-implemented safety man- agement system. A leadership team that holds itself accountable for the outcomes of all processes will deter the concept of the bulletproof employees from ever en- tering the workplace. The focus is then on process design for excellence in safety per- formance. A team such as this also thinks differently about how to be the spark plug
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