August 25, 2009
Safety's economic and human virtues are unquestioned, but making safety a workplace reality is no simple task. Even companies passionate about safety struggle to bring real change to operations. Managers develop procedures and distribute safety equipment, but preventable accidents continue to occur.
The circumstances leading to the success or failure of a safety initiative are as unique as varied companies, but there are shared dynamics across industries. Landscape Develop-ment, Inc., a Southern California landscape design and construction company, recently designed and implemented a far-reaching safety initiative, highlighting these dynamics. This has created a significantly safer workforce and a healthier managerial culture.
Safety: luxury or fundamental?
A common source of policy failure is the resilient employee attitude that, ‘getting the job done’ rationalizes bending of safety policies. Dual mandates of safety and extreme effi-ciency can crosscut each other unless management works carefully with production to set goals that are achievable while maintaining a safe work environment. Employees should be shown that accidents have a dramatic impact on a company’s bottom line: accidents cost, safety pays.
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Compelling, pertinent training
Effective training must communicate the personal consequences of failing to uphold safety practices in a clear and compelling way. Vivid illustrations of injuries sustained when not using safety equipment, and their long-term consequences, motivate employees to use safety equipment out of real self-interest. Training that is interesting, relevant, and ex-planatory brings about real change in employee behavior and attitude.
Accountability and follow through
Successful human systems require persistent monitoring and clear accountability. Knowing who received training or equipment, and when, is critical information but is only the begin-ning of an effective monitoring program. Employees must know that management regularly reviews their performance and consistently reports on progress. If employees sense that management is ambivalent about their performance relative to a policy, compliance will degrade over time.
Everyone is responsible for safety
Responsibility for safe practices must be equally shared by all levels of management. Your company may have a Safety Officer, Team or other manager that is responsible for inves-tigating accidents and distributing safety information. If other managers do not require the same level of safety compliance as the Safety Officer, other employees may see him/her as a ‘safety narc’. This management breakdown is a deal-killer to an effective safety eco-system as it compromises the utility of the Safety Officer and weakens safe practices com-pany-wide. Implementation plans should hold each tier of the employee hierarchy respon-sible for compliance and continued safe operation.
Creating a Program That Works
In 2008, Landscape Development, Inc. launched a new initiative to enhance career focus in our field staff. We started with the most basic information every employee needs to know: how to work safely. Experienced managers were assembled to identify the content and characteristics of our ideal training material. Our safety content had to be bilingual, engaging, easy to deploy, and encourage interaction between trainer and employee. None of the commercially available solutions we reviewed met our requirements, so we decided to create our own training program.
We created five separate full-color bilingual manuals covering the most common safety is-sues in our industry: Personal Protective Equipment, Weather Hazards, Animal Hazards (two volumes), and Plant Hazards. The books are wide format with plentiful pictures and large text bullet points to make the content concise, straight forward, and compelling. But beautiful training materials only get you so far; managerial roadblocks to successful im-plementation also had to be addressed.
Material should be relevant and of interest
We paid special attention to the utility of covered topics while planning the training mate-rial. First, high-level managers reviewed the content and suggested changes, deletions and additions. We then ran a pilot program to evaluate ‘real world’ applicability in the field. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with employees reporting that the information was valuable not just for their work, but more generally in their personal lives.
Provide time for training
It takes between thirty and forty-five minutes to teach one lesson, depending on the amount of group discussion. There is a lot of productivity ‘lost’, and many managers would balk at having to use that much production time on training. So, we created distinct job costing codes for training time. While this doesn’t eliminate the loss of time to non-direct production tasks, it keeps job accounting balanced, so managers don’t feel a pressure to rush through, or fraudulently document training.
Clear accountability in implementation
We designed the program implementation around maintaining clear accountability. High-level field supervisors (superintendents) receive an overview of the program and are as-sessed for mastery of content. Superintendents then train foremen, keeping record of at-tendance and material distribution. Later, they meet individually with each foreman to ad-minister a quiz on the key concepts in the training. Quizzes are graded immediately with errors reviewed and initialed by the superintendent, indicating satisfaction that the foreman understands the concept. Foremen are then ready to teach the lesson to their crews.
On the designated training day, superintendents and office-based managers observe crew lessons to provide support and demonstrate the importance of the program. Foremen complete an easy-to-use form that employees sign to certify their attendance and compre-hension of material. All paperwork is then audited to identify missing or incomplete docu-mentation and the process of ensuring 100% compliance begins. This process is repeated as each new manual is implemented.
Safety is everybody’s job
One of the most valuable aspects of this initiative is that it truly makes safety a part of eve-ryone’s job—not just the Safety Officer’s. Employees hear about working safely from their direct supervisors up through the field hierarchy, and have a clear responsibility for their own safety. Gone are the days where an employee can say that his supervisor, “never told me.” We continue to hold supervisors responsible for safety on the job site, but the more eyes, ears, and minds actively focused on safety, the better.
Designing for success
Evaluating your company’s strengths and weaknesses is essential when introducing a new program. By identifying weaknesses in your management system, you can design your program to result in successful safety improvements, even with management buy-in.
We’ve wanted our foremen to demonstrate greater leadership with their crews on issues of safety and professional growth. By placing them in the position of ‘trainer’ we infuse them with leadership and support their position as a source of knowledge within their crew. We also confronted a weakness where responsibility for safety fell on the shoulders of one employee, and by designing a system that holds every supervisor accountable for part of the program, responsibility for safety is spread across all levels of management.
With health and worker’s compensation costs rising, a single accident can be the deciding factor in a company’s profitability. Simply put, safety pays. But making safety a reality can be harder than it sounds. Paying close attention to cross-cutting directives, training effi-cacy, accountability, and management culture can ensure the success of your safety initia-tive.
Jonathan Horton, M.Ed., is the Coordinator of Training and Recruitment at Landscape De-velopment, Inc. in Valencia, Calif. Contact Jonathan at 661.295.1970 or [email protected]
For over 25 years, Landscape Development, Inc. has earned its reputation as California’s most respected, admired and sought-after landscape contractor and desirable place to work. Our entire employee base shares and lives our vision: to make our clients’ lives eas-ier and bring them peace of mind. Landscape Development’s corporate office is located in Valencia, Calif. For more information, call 661-295-1970.