Building a zero-injury culture

Zero-injury culture: turn goals into expectations.

What’s the difference between having a goal and having an expectation, and does it matter?

Let me present the answer in a football analogy: At the start of every NFL season, all 32 teams have the goal of winning the Super Bowl, but only a few have the expectation of it. They all (very much) want the Lombardi trophy, but only a few will be surprised if they don’t hoist it in January. There’s a huge difference between the two.

Now, let’s put it in safety terms: No one wants anyone injured at work. When you stand in front of your team and announce: “No one should ever be hurt here! We should have zero injuries. Who’s with me?” how many hands do you expect to go up? Every single one, of course! Everyone is on board with that. So, you might be puzzled in an environment of such

overwhelming support and agreement when outcomes fall short. But your team isn’t. They only agreed with a perfectly reasonable goal, not for making the changes and doing the difficult work it would take to actually make it happen. They know you want that, but they also know you don’t expect it.

Leaders often struggle to understand the difference between what they want, and what they

expect. It’s very easy to confuse the two, as you might think how much you want a result, and

your level of disappointment when not achieved, make it an expectation. They don’t. Neither

hope nor disappointment make any difference. If you want a fail-proof method to properly

distinguish between what you merely want and what you expect, it’s this:

Any outcome (good or bad) that doesn’t surprise you is an expectation. Any outcome

that is a surprise (good or bad) is not.

Manager and forklift operator in brief safety huddle, reviewing hazards and setting expectations for an injury-free culture.

Ask yourself, for example, if you would be surprised if someone were to be injured at a

particular job in your facility. If you’ve had several injuries there before and made no real

changes beyond asking people to be more careful, you already know the answer: No, you

would not be surprised. In fact, you should be surprised if it didn’t happen again. Your goal maybe that no one gets hurt there, but your expectation is most definitely that the job will result in injury.

That’s why most companies who work on safety make zero their goal, and compliance their

expectation. Compliance is manageable. You can expect to control hazards through rigorous

programs designed and managed by the safety department, with reasonable support from the

management team. Front-line team members can be generally expected to follow the rules

under threat of discipline. But everyone knows zero injuries is unrealistic in that environment. There are too many holes with just compliance. You keep zero a goal as a point to aim for, but preserve your credibility by not pretending you actually expect it to happen.

But what would it take to convert it to an expectation? In my experience, you do this in steps,

and it starts with you. Once you set the expectation for yourself that no-one will be hurt here,

how you see everything changes. Where before if you saw a bolt left on the floor you walked

by disappointed in the housekeeping, now you ask yourself, “Would I be surprised if someone slipped on that and fell?” No, it’s easy to imagine that. So now with your expectation of zero you don’t see a bolt – instead you see a twisted ankle or a broken bone, so you stop and pick that bolt up. Before the expectation, you could walk by a workstation and do a safety review of it by checking for OSHA violations on your way to somewhere else. You might not even need to break stride. Now, with expectations of zero injuries you ask: “Would I be surprised if someone got hurt here?” That’s a different question. You see a few things right away that wouldn’t surprise you, so you stop. After a few minutes of observation it’s easy to add a few more scenarios. Before, you waltzed on by with no problems. Now, you’ve got some significant work assignments if you’re serious about no one getting hurt. That leads to the first decision point as a leader: Do I leave safety as a goal (easy), or do I make it an expectation (hard)?

If you decide to take the hard road, you’ll soon realize something else: There is too much for

just one person (you) to do. There is also too much for just your safety team, and even the full

management team to do. You understand if you’re serious about this, the entire team must be equally committed. That can seem an even greater hurdle. It’s one thing for you as a leader to have high expectations, but your managers and supervisors too, much less your front-line team? Some leaders who make it this far turn around at this point. They see it as too much to expect of the rest of team. But is it? Is it a hard sell for management to understand hurting people is bad for business and wrong for society? Is it hard to convince people working on the floor that it’s bad for them to get injured and that they should look out for the wellbeing of the people they work with?

Once you resolve to treat your people with the respect deserved of good, competent people

(you know – the ones you employ) and have high but reasonable expectations of them, you

will find you need to have difficult conversations with some of them. Let me give you a

personal example. At one of my previous facilities, we had seven recordable injuries in one

year. Three of those were associated with one person. We met with him and asked if he would

be surprised if he were to get injured at work. He replied, “Yes.” We asked, “Why? We aren’t.

Last year, you were 40% of our recordables! If we knew only that one of our 300 employees

was injured yesterday, we could make a good living just guessing it was you. We’re surprised

when it’s not you!”

The point is, you know from observed patterns of behavior who you would be surprised (if not shocked) to see injured, and who you would not. Many managers are afraid to take this next step of addressing employee behavior – telling them how they are seen as a pattern of

behavior. They consider it judgmental and opinionated. The opposite is true; it’s rational and

fact-based. It is your moral responsibility to give people the information it’s in their best interest to know, even when it’s hard for you to say, and difficult for them to hear. It’s also the only way to get to zero injuries. You should never have a long-term employee, who after you learn they were injured can say, “Yes, that’s not surprising with them.”

That is the last decision for a leader who makes zero an expectation. Some people will not

change. You will never be surprised when they do the wrong thing, and so you must decide if

either they or your expectations are more important, because one of them must go. An

expectation of zero is going to be disruptive to your business, and some leaders are not willing to have it. But for the ones who are, the rewards are great. The same people you can trust to be safe and look out for others are also the ones you can count on to make a quality product and work efficiently. Safety becomes the foundation for building a great business. Or, in the words of the late Paul O’Neil, former CEO of Alcoa Aluminum to financial analysts:

“If you want to get a sense of whether this management team can truly deliver on what we tell you, take a close look at safety. Because if we can’t get that right, you ought to be damned skeptical we can deliver on anything else we say.”

So, if you’re serious about building a workplace where no one gets injured, don’t set goals; set

expectations. And guess what? Even after you do, and everyone gets on board, people will

still sometimes get hurt. But that will be fewer and farther between, and most importantly, it will be a surprise. Your team will learn something they didn’t know before was a hazard or unsafe behavior, and move even closer to a true zero-injury facility as the universe of threats to your people gets smaller and smaller.

I hope this explanation has been beneficial to you, and that you can see zero injuries is a choice, not a wish. I would ask for one more thing: Please take some time to assess the

current level of safety expectations at your facility. Be honest with yourself, and write them

down. Then decide if that is good enough for you.

Thank you, good luck, and Go Steelers and Aaron Rodgers. (Super Bowl Baby!)

Anthony Orlowski, SafePath LLC

Co-author with Ken Chapman of “Safety Beyond the

Numbers”