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Scoring a Touchdown with Safety Culture with Dr. Josh Williams

Scoring a Touchdown with Safety Culture

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“Improving safety culture is vital to long-term performance excellence.” We are very excited to have Dr. Josh Williams join us on the podcast this week to dive into how to bolster safety culture as he shares his insights into the five core competencies of safety leadership. Forward thinking leaders must continually consider ways to enhance safety culture. Explore ways to improve the effectiveness of your safe culture by visiting https://www.ratemysafetyculture.com/ to complete the safety culture self-assessment uniquely created by Dr. Josh.

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies, ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C suite, it’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now. 

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m extremely excited to have with me Dr. Josh Williams, who’s probably one of our favorite guests on the podcast. He’s a great resource in terms of safety culture, safety leadership, and observation programs do a lot of work in this space. Josh, welcome to the show once again. 

Thanks, glad to be here. 

So, tell me a little bit again about your background and how you got interested and passionate about safety leadership, safety culture, the behavioral side of safety, and so forth. 

When I was in grad school, I was getting a Ph.D. in industrial organizational psychology, and honestly Eric, I was kind of bummed out. It just felt very theoretical. There’s a lot of statistical stuff. It was good, but it didn’t feel practical. And I had the chance to work with a guy named Scott Galler, whom many of the listeners may know was at the forefront of safety culture and behavior-based safety. He and a guy named Tom Kraus, formerly of BBS, really started behavior-based safety or at least popularized it. And it was great because we were doing real stuff with real people and I just immediately enjoyed it and the mission of two things, one, trying to keep people out of harm’s way, but also getting leaders to listen to folks a little more when making decisions. It just felt right. It felt like we were fighting a good fight and I’ve been doing it, I guess for 25-something years now.

Welcome back to the show. So, let’s start a little bit by talking about safety culture, why it matters, and you’ve authored a great quiz on safety culture. We’re going to talk about some of the themes within it that allow listeners to reflect, to see how they’re doing around safety culture and whether should they go deeper in terms of understanding how to drive improvements. But let’s start first in terms of why safety culture matter. 

Culture is everything. It really is. I’m going to struggle with a sports analogy here. I’m not a huge Alabama fan or a Nick Saban fan necessarily, but you’ve got to respect what he’s established. That Alabama. He comes in and just completely turned around a proud team that had fallen on hard times for many years. They were cycling through different coaches. He came in and it was an immediate turnaround and it stuck. I was watching the game a couple of years ago and I’ll make this as quick as I can, but I was just kind of flipping through channels and I see the score. Alabama beat New Mexico State 62 to ten. 

Wow.

And they’re doing a press conference and Nick Saban is irate and he’s kind of containers anyway, but they’re asking him questions and he’s not happy. Why aren’t you happy, Nick? These are his quotes I went through and kind of went back and forth and wrote down almost verbatim. But these were his comments. We didn’t play up to our high standards for large parts of the game. We didn’t get better this week compared to last week. And when you don’t get better, you start developing bad habits and bad habits lead to problems down the road, especially against better opponents. And then his final comment was you’ve got to play to your own high standard every day. And that stuck with me because you know as well as I do, a lot of times we get called in because you have a rash of injuries and all we’ve got a problem, we’ve got to fix it. And people get so tied into these injury numbers and injury rates. The flip side is sometimes you could be doing really good on the injury numbers, but complacency is setting in. The normalized deviation is setting in. We haven’t seen it yet because nobody’s gotten hurt.

But the point I’m trying to make is playing to your own standard, having a culture of excellence in everything you do, doesn’t mean you’re perfect, and it doesn’t mean things aren’t going to go wrong. But you play to your standards and not some number, whether it went up or down last month, last quarter, this, that, or the other. So, I hope that makes sense to the listeners. It’s just that safety is part of who we are and how we operate, and we want to establish that culture of excellence it takes effort, it takes vision, it takes looking in the mirror. Safety culture assessments are big in large part because it gives people an opportunity to see where I am good. Where am I not so good? What’s the plan to get better? 

I think that’s a really important element and really getting a good view, talking to people about what was happening. What are the themes, how do we address them it, and how do we drive improvements? So, tell me about some of the themes in the quiz that you authored because I think it’s a good tool for listeners to have a quick scan to say how’s my culture? Not doing an assessment, just doing a quick scan self-reflection in terms of where I could get better. 

Yes, a lot of its own leadership, having that ownership mindset at the leadership level, it’s not EHS’s job, it’s everybody’s job but mine as a leader. I’m setting the tone for everybody. Active participation from employees. He talks about employee engagement. That’s the big buzzword. What’s this big mystery? It’s not that much of a mystery. Listen to your people, be responsive, and then advertise improvements based on their feedback. That’s how you get involved. It’s not some secret. It just takes effort and energy. Learning culture with close call reporting, making sure incident analysis is system-focused and not blame-oriented. And then other things like making sure rules make sense, they’re practical, having the right tools and equipment, et cetera. But leadership is really, in my mind, where a lot of it starts. And if I can just let me go through a couple of things really quick here. In terms of leadership competencies, we did a bunch of research looking at what are good predictors of effective leadership. And in terms of safety leadership, five core competencies come through. I’ll go through each R1 quickly. 

Sure. 

The first one is active caring. And of course, my mentor, Scott Gellard, used the term active carrying many years ago in reference to something that happened at ExxonMobil. People in a room, we’re asking questions. Why aren’t we doing X, Y, and Z ah? Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Then he started talking about it, that people care, but they weren’t doing something about it. So active caring is not just being a good guy or a good person. Active caring is going out and doing something. Quick example, I was working at a steel mill, not at an I was consulting for a company that was a steel mill, and they had an awful plan. Manager, old school, crack the whip, scare people off, rule by fear. It was a mess, and they fired them, which was a smart move. They bring in this new guy named Bob. And Bob’s, the first order of business is to set up meetings with everybody in this facility, and everybody is unhappy. 30 minutes. Meetings called 30 minutes with Bob. And not a sexy name for the meeting, but it got everybody in there, and he just asked people, what do you need? What can we do? 

And it was an immediate change in tone and immediate change in culture because this guy comes in and says, I want to hear from you. How can we get better? And so active caring is having the right intentions but doing something about it. Walking to talk, of course, is setting the right example and making sure you’re doing what you say you’re doing. So, for leaders, it’s being out in the field, listening to people, talking to people. Something as simple as wearing your PPE. I’ve seen that too. We’re going to do a couple of stories here. But we were at a facility, and this is 20 years ago. I’m dating myself, but we’re working with this company, and they are struggling. I mean, they can’t even get PPE. People are fighting over hearing protection glasses. So, we’re making some progress. And then they interviewed the CEO who was talking to Morley Safer. It was a big show, like 20 2016 minutes. One of those, anyway, he’s in the middle of operations with four trucks flying around talking about profits and how they were successful financially with no PPE on zero during operations. And we’re like, oh my God, that was it.

All the progress excuses me, with PPE out the window immediately. So, walking the talk is not just having nice corporate messaging. It’s doing what you say you’re going to do. Here’s another example in terms of leadership and listening to your people and how you’re treating them. I’m in a big facility that creates these small little bearings for vehicles. I think I didn’t remember now, but this is again, many years ago, and they had a guy who cuts his head open, and they’re doing an incident investigation, and the plant manager is in there and he asked the guy, why didn’t you have your hard hat on? That’s a requirement. And the guy says to him, I thought I did. I had my baseball cap on it. I followed my heart hat and is telling the story. And the plan manager stops the, quote, investigates, goes on a PA system and says literally to everybody, attention all employees. Baseball caps are no longer allowed in the building. You have ten minutes to return all baseball caps to your vehicles, and effective immediately, they’re no longer allowed in the building.

True. 

Anyway, people are like, what’s going on? They go to their cars and trucks and whatever, throw their caps and come back in. They’re not happy. They’re grumbling about it. And anyway, so the next day they come in, and most people, and of course not wearing their caps, but one little section of this big building, this big factory, they kind of did a mini revolt. They came in, no baseball caps, but they had on cowboy hats. One guy had a football, one guy had an authentic Mexican. Sombrero from Tijuana, the little tassels come down and they’re their jobs doing their work. And it was their way of saying, this isn’t right. And the point manager was smart, and he kind of pumped the brakes on that and they had some discussions and made some changes. But it kind of goes to show you people don’t like being told what to do. And oftentimes you have an injury and all of a sudden, what do you do? Okay, we’re going to retrain the employee. We’re going to throw a new rule out there. Then all of a sudden, you got 61 million rules. So, I think you got to be careful with how we handle that. 

Again, watch the knee-jerk reactions. Listen to your people, and just be smart about implementing new things and building and living. The vision is the next one. So, you’ve got a vision, you share that vision. People feel that vision. It’s legitimate, it’s real, it’s authentic. Recognition is another part of it. Number four is reward and foster growth. When we provide appreciation and sincere recognition, two things happen. One, I’m more likely to do it next time. That’s why we give our kids allowances. It’s like, you did good, here’s a financial reward. Now the reward and recognition don’t have to be money appreciation. I think the default recognition is not a program, although it can be good. Default recognition is just appreciation. People working hard under difficult circumstances, they got a lot going on in their personal lives. There’s a lot of stuff happening when you see people going beyond the call of duty, in particular for safety, mentoring a newer employee, etc. E. A little pad on the background again, goes a long way. People appreciate being appreciated. So, the last one is driving thinking and speaking. People that are on the job, doing the job know what’s going on. 

And if we listen to what they’re saying, it doesn’t mean we’re going to do everything they recommend. But people understand what’s going on and we’ve got to drive that ground-level engagement and participation to be successful. Another quick example is Eric. The same steel mill I mentioned earlier had a problem lockout tag out. They called it lockout tag out tryout. And the challenge was people weren’t doing it. And in a steel mill, if you’re not locking something out, you can get hurt or killed in that area. It’s dangerous. So the supervisor is like, okay, well, we’re going to if we don’t, they start threatening people. One of the employees had a suggestion to get a team together and talk about the issue. Just, let’s just take a step back. And when they did, they found where you were locked out was not in the appropriate place. The rules for lockout tag out were convoluted and hard to understand different opinions on how to do it. By simply getting together, they shortened the process of how it was done. They made everything closer to the person to make it easier to save time because they had ridiculous production pressure. 

But the solution was made from an employee’s suggestion to change the system. Don’t just come down with a heavier hammer. So, driving thinking and speaking is a big part of getting that engagement and improving the overall safety culture. 

It makes a lot of sense, and a lot of focus in terms of leadership as a key lever to drive improvements in culture. What are some of the other things? Leadership obviously really is the key lever to drive change around safety culture. But in some cases, culture can be also a legacy. Could be something that comes from the past. 20 years ago, a CEO did X and it’s still in the present memory and it’s still shaping the behaviors, the choices, and the attitudes of people.

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety, and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, reenergize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions. Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com. 

100%. And the first thing I’ll say is the system. So, if you want to look at it holistically. Big picture. If you’re trying to get more predictable results with your incident rates, it doesn’t fluctuate out of control. If you want to get more control over that and also improve sift prevention, three things to look at are one mindset, and attitudes. Number two, your behavior, what people are looking for. Number three is the system. And for many years, particularly in the house Ion days of BBS, the system was taking a backseat. And if we don’t focus on the system, we have problems. So, systems are things like when things go wrong, our first response should be, where did the system fail? Don’t blame somebody. Where did the system fail? It could be excessive time pressure. It could be we don’t have enough people for this job. It could be we don’t have the right tools and equipment readily available to do it. It could be we got a bunch of boring online training. When I first hired on, I don’t remember any of it, and now I’m throwing the wolves out there. Those system factors are big, and I think organizational leaders are well served to focus on tightening up those systems as a close call, reporting behavior-based safety. 

These are systems and when the systems are running smoothly and we’re getting ongoing communication up and down the organization, everything else works better. And by the way, it’s easier for leaders to hold people accountable. We talk about positive accountability. You don’t want to be heavy-handed, but you also can go too far the other way and let everything slide. And when your standards drop, the injuries pop up too. My point on that is, as a leader, if I know my systems are tight and most people are doing the right thing, when you have outliers that are repeatedly not doing the right thing or doing egregious things, it’s easier to punish, quite frankly, because we understand we’ve got our system. It’s not the system that’s the challenge. We’ve got that figured out. So, I think system factors are a big, big part of it, I would say on the other side too. On the behavior side, we know from National Safety Council 9 that 5% of all injuries do in part to add risk behavior. That doesn’t mean blaming people now, but it just means risky actions. You’re increasing the probability of something going wrong, basically. And if we can minimize risky behavior, that can be done in a lot of ways.

One, engage people more behavior-based safety. I just mentioned we did a study with NIOS many years ago. Picture this, Eric, me and a bunch of other grad students are going into this environment doing training with these guys, looking at us like, who are you, youngsters? We’re going and doing this training with two different groups and they’re not either one is really happy, but we do our training, and then we implement a behavior-based safety process. So, you’ve got if you’re familiar with behavior-based safety, folks, the cards, you’ve got various things like proper tools and equipment, body position, things like that. Anyway, one group was given a card and said, go use it. The other group, we work with them to create their own card, how it was going to be used when it was going to be used, and where it was going to be used. That group that had their own card that they created themselves, we call it the ownership group used their card seven times more.

Seven times more. 

We were shocked. If we had gotten double, we would have fallen out of our seats seven times more. Said very clearly, employee engagement matters. And I think people want to get more involved, and they want to speak up with each other more too. On one of the surveys, they used to use years ago, one of the questions is, should you tell somebody if they’re being risky? 90% of people are saying, yeah, you should tell them. The next question on the survey is, do you, do it? And it was like 660-something percent.

Wow.

So, to me, that’s an eye-opener. I want to get involved, but our culture is macho. You do your thing; I do my thing. Don’t tell me how to do my job, all that nonsense. So, we want to do it, and sometimes we’re reluctant to speak up. So, I think part of that learning culture we talked about too, is making it acceptable and normal to speak up with each other. It doesn’t have to be a supervisor or safety when they see something that doesn’t quite feel right. So, there are just a couple of thoughts there. Make sure we don’t get focused on one thing. Focus on attitudes and behaviors and the system.

I love that safety culture is something that’s widely discussed and accepted. How do you measure it? The right way.

The wrong way is to give somebody 150 items, as a survey, and everybody goes to fill it out. That’s the wrong way. Surveys are good, but they’re a good tool. But they’re only one tool out of many. So of course, when we do our assessments, we focus on talking to people and interviewing people, whether it’s in groups, whether it’s one on one. But we’ve got questions that we’re asking on important things like learning culture and leadership, things like that. But people will tell you, and we use a survey to supplement that. But that gives us an overall picture. When we do it. We’ve got our maturity model, and it goes from disengaged a citizen, and there are various steps in between, but it shows you where you are, where is your starting point, and what’s your baseline. Because if you’re trying to get better, you got to know where you stand. And those assessments do a good job of that, and it also affects what you can do. So if your maturity is low, you don’t want to be trying to shoot the moon, doing all kinds of crazy stuff. You need the basic foundational stuff to try to get better. If you’re further along, you’re more advanced.

You can start doing things like human performance, or we call it Bhop, behavioral safety, and human performance. Those kinds of things are more achievable if you’re further along the road. So those assessments are really good. The other thing I’ll say on that too, and I’ve seen this with other organizations that kind of do what we do is sometimes that’s the end of it. Here’s your 1165-page report. Enjoy it. Also, if you have any questions, we’re here for you. And that’s it. Of course, we do. Planning all that information you get, all that is ammunition for your plan, like, what are we going to do? And that’s where you get groups together. We recommend getting hourly folks involved, field folks involved, and union folks involved. We’ve got a union at some levels, and we plan it out. All right, so this is good. Got to keep doing that. This is not good. Got to get better. What are we going to do? And line it all out. And sometimes, as you know, we’ll do five-year plans with it. It could be simple, it could be complicated, but what are we going to do?

What are the three, or four big things we got to get done? Who is going to do it? When are we going to do it? Where do we need to help? What potential resistance is there? And by lining everything out, very specifically, going back to Nick Savin. He didn’t roll into College Station to play Texas A and M winging it. Let’s see what works here. They’ve got the plan, and they’ve got contingency plans if plan A is not working. So, part of the preparation for getting better is to understand where you’re at and get a smart strategic plan.

Moving forward, a couple of things just come to mind based on what you just shared. So, one for me is it’s not a safety culture assessment if you don’t have a combination of surveys with interviews and focus groups kicking the tires in terms of how the work gets done at a site level, and then finally, also looking at artifact reviews, looking at how is a culture shaped by system items. Any thoughts on that? Because to me, that’s the part is a lot of people do one part of this and think it’s a safety culture assessment, but it’s only by looking at all those three elements can you really assess the culture. In my mind, 100% a part of it.

That too is talking to executives. Sometimes there’s a heavy focus on field employees, which is good. We’ll do system assessments with executives like we’ll do artifact reviews. You say close-call reporting is good. Show us what you’re doing. I don’t mean that to be challenging. But sometimes reality and perceptions aren’t always the same. So, I think speaking more to executives and getting some tangibles in terms of stuff that you’re doing also gives you a more complete picture.

Okay. The other part that drives me bonkers when we’re talking about surveys is an obsession with benchmarking. I want to compare myself with everybody else in my industry, and I get that, for example, in employee engagement surveys. But because of the nature of surveys in safety culture, I’m not saying there’s no value in it, but my challenge is too often I’ve seen a company that has lower maturity from a safety culture standpoint, have higher scores and a really good maybe have lower scores because as you get better, you start becoming more self-critical. And if you know very little about what you could look like or should look like, you might look very positive.

Yeah, I’m with you. I mean, I think benchmarking is a nice thing to have, but people take way too much faith in that. As I said, I’ve seen the same thing. Some awful organization, they get a bunch of vests and they’re like, oh my god, they care about us. You should have had vests 15 years ago, man. It can be misleading. And sometimes the really, really good organizations are more critical because they have the mindset of excellence, and they may raise themselves lower than they really are. So, I get your point there. I think it’s nice to have, but I’m more interested, frankly, in various iterations of the survey. Like five years ago we were here, two years ago we were here. And I think that’s something that’s smart too for companies. It’s not a one-and-done deal. You do an assessment, see how much you’ve progressed, do another one, two, or three years later. It doesn’t have to be as intent. It can be on a smaller scale, but that to me is more interesting. And also, comparisons between groups, whether, for instance, managers are telling us this, employees are telling us something different, and the scores on the survey may be quite different sometimes the higher you go anyway, so that’s one issue. 

And also, different groups. Maintenance is saying this, operations are saying that. And so the scores are interesting when they’re different, but also the comments from the interviews in the focus groups. So again, I think the best benchmarking is within your own organization, and also from the time one to time two to time three.

And I think the points you bring up there I think are important because it’s looking at even between-group differences. You have an overall culture, but you could have a microculture within a particular environment. We had somebody on the podcast that had a serious injury, and he came from an organization that had, by all accounts, a fairly, fairly mature safety culture. But in his specific area, there were a lot of challenges from a leadership standpoint, and people showed up in a very, very different, noncongruent way from the rest of the organization. So, understanding those differences, as you said, I think is incredibly important. The other element is longitudinally understanding how we’re shifting. I love pulse surveys as an indicator of how we’re making progress, even with higher frequency. So, as you’re driving improvements to check or is it landing with employees, are we actually seeing the impact? If I’m doing leadership training, am I feeling my leader showing up in a different way?

100% and that’s hard. I can add more really quick here too, in terms of how our leaders show up. Executive coaching, I think, is a big one. And just from experience, when we’re able to get into higher levels of the organization and talk to people, at the executive level, it’s different and it doesn’t mean it’s always easy, but that sets the tone. And again, I think sometimes with assessments, in particular, we miss the mark as we only talk to the EHS director, which is a very important position, but there are a lot of things that are also happening at the C-suite level that we need to address. So, I think executive coaching, when it’s paired with assessment-type work, is really good because you’ve got a strategic plan, and you need help from the top to get there. I don’t care who you are. So that’s something I think to consider as well.

And it also relates back to your story when you’re talking about Bob, who came into me, is when a new leader comes in and needs to show change, it’s very important to have a good strategy around what signals are you going to share. Because we talked about how culture can be based on something that happened 20 years ago in the organization that’s still in the present memory. So how does a leader come in and send some very intentional signals to show things have changed? I am going to show up differently or we’re going to show up differently.

100%.

So, great place to start. I love your quiz. Ratemysafetyculture.com so that’s a website. No gimmicks, no catches, completely anonymous. It just allows you to ask a couple of questions, 15 questions in total. To give you a bit of a sense in terms of where you’re at, should you consider some improvements, what are some of the areas of focus? So ratemycafetyculture.com it’s definitely not a safety culture assessment, it’s just a personal self-reflection to see how my organization is doing. So, I encourage people to go and visit their website, try it out, and get a few simple insights. And Josh, I’m sure they can always reach out to you if they want to have more conversations about, what does it mean, how do I make improvements, and how do I know where I’m at?

100% and I’ll give you more sports analogies.

So, Josh, thank you so much for joining us. Once again, I really appreciate you sharing yours. Wisdom around safety leadership, safety culture, and again, recommend anybody to go to the website ratemycafetyculture.com. No gimmicks. Just a good self-reflection quiz to say how am I doing? You’ll find links as well to all sorts of other quizzes that Josh has authored that help you look at different facets of safety culture, safety leadership, learning organizations, and so forth to see how you’re doing. So once again, thank you so much, Josh, for joining me today.

My pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo consulting.

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ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. Josh Williams is a partner at Propulo Consulting. For more than 20 years, Josh has partnered with clients around the world to improve safety culture and prevent SIFs. Dr. Williams earned his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Virginia Tech and is a behavioral safety, human performance, and safety culture improvement expert. Josh is the author of Keeping People Safe: The Human Dynamics of Injury Prevention and co-editor of Keys to Behavior Based Safety. He has published more than 150 book chapters, government reports, white papers, blogs and articles in leading journals. Josh has also delivered hundreds of presentations at leading national conferences and is a highly regarded public speaker. He received the Cambridge Center National First Prize for his research on behavioral safety feedback.

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Safety Communications with Dr. Josh Williams

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Effective safety communication is the cornerstone of a healthy safe production culture.

This is particularly important with one-on-one conversations with employees.

Employees who feel listened to and appreciated are more likely to go beyond the call of duty for safety and other organizational efforts.

Effective communicators demonstrate genuine caring, promote psychological safety, actively listen, and provide recognition regularly.

How strong are your safety communication skills?

Find out with our free Safety Communication Quiz: https://www.zeroharmleadership.com/

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams; their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-Suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized Ops and The Safety Guru public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru, where we explore topics around operations, leadership and particularly the role that leaders play in driving safety in their business. My name is Eric Michrowski, president and CEO of Propulo. Today on our show, I’m delighted to have once again Dr. Josh Williams. He’s a partner Human Performance and Business Transformation at Propulo, an absolute guru in the safety space. Thank you for being on the show. Josh, thanks. I appreciate it. Dr. Josh has a Ph.D. in psychology from Virginia Tech. He is one of the pioneers in safety culture with over 20 years of experience in the space, with a broad range of clients in industries ranging from aerospace firm military oil and gas, utilities and manufacturing, a really diverse group of organizations. He’s authored a book. He’s coedited a second one. He’s published over 40 different articles and various publications. He’s also a prize winner and national prize winner for the Cambridge Center on Behavioral Safety. And he has presented over a hundred times to some really delighted audiences that were happy to hear his story. So really excited to have you here. We’ve talked on prior shows about how you got into the safety culture space. Is there an element of why you really got into this space that you’d like to share with our listeners?

I kind of touched on it in some earlier ones in grad school, kind of moving from maybe traditional ivory tower to a professor, Scott Geller, who many of you may know really as kind of the fountainhead for the psychology of safety, sort of working with him. And there was a passion there that was contagious. And part of it is just the feeling of fighting the good fight. You know, you’re trying to do the right thing to make organizations better, more pleasant and keep people from getting hurt.

So that’s kind of where the HWI in it is there for me.

I couldn’t agree more. I mean, it’s really empowering to know that you spend most of your day, most of your life making it safer for others, thinking about how other people can come home to their loved ones every day. So, I completely agree with what you’re sharing there today. We’re talking about a really important topic. I know both of us are passionate about is around safety communication. And it’s a topic that a lot of organizations struggle with.

You’ve recently authored a quiz, which is a novel way to start thinking about how am I doing? How do I compare against some of the leaders in this space and what actions do I need to take to make a difference? So, again, on safety communication, if you want to take that frequency, no gimmicks, no nothing that will come out of it other than great insights and ideas go to zero harm leadership, dotcom, zero harm leadership, dotcom.

We’ll be right back with a couple more questions to understand some of the wisdom that Josh can share around safety communication. Thank you. Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru, this is your host, Eric Michrowski. We know how many businesses have been impacted by the current covid-19 Black Swan event. Propulo has invested all its available capacity to create free resources for leaders on how to navigate this crisis. Whether you would like to explore some of our free tools, subscribe to our free biweekly newsletter or seek free advice.

I encourage you to visit covid. Black Swan dot com covid black swan dot com Propulo has committed not to profit from this crisis in any way. It’s our way of giving back to the communities that we serve. Thank you.

Like what we do here, this is your Socials and tell everyone, a lot of leaders come to me and they ask me, what do I do to really get more meaningful, more impactful communication? They worried that they keep putting different messages and nobody’s listening to the message being sent. Josh, any thoughts on the topic of safety communications to start?

Yeah, and we can look at it from an employer to employee. We can look at it from a leader with employees. I think from the leadership side is getting out of this mindset. And I think a lot of a lot of leaders do. But the mindset is it’s not compliance. I mean, we have to have compliance, obviously. But when I if I’m a leader out there on the floor, I should be asking people, how are they doing?

What do they need anything scaring them about the job? It should be, you know, asking questions, trying to get their input and having it more conversational thing. You can still get your point across if there’s an issue that needs to be addressed to address it. But I think from a leadership perspective, one, get out there more in two. When you’re out there, the more conversational asking questions, I think the better off we’re going to be.

I love when you’re talking about get out there, spend more time in front of a team members, more time in the field. One of our other colleagues, Bri, had done some research a long time ago where she really looked at the impact that spending time on the floor had. And how is one of the biggest predictors? Can you tell me a little bit more of that time in field time on the floor? Why is it so important?

I think it sets the tone for everything. I mean, first of all, you know, I think we all have experience where sometimes the decision makers may be perceived as being out of touch with people that are out there on the job doing the job. I’m not trying to cast aspersions at any group, but that us versus them thing is a real issue. It’s a real problem. It’s a morale issue. And if someone’s making decisions that have never been out here and they don’t always make sense, there’s been some goofy policies, frankly, I’ve seen over the years where it just doesn’t make sense and people understand it.

So, I’ll save some stories for another podcast on that. But bottom line is, the more we’re out with folks, everyone has a better understanding of what both sides are doing. It breaks down barriers. And I think people appreciate the fact that their leaders are out there talking to them, working with them and showing respect.

Is there a percentage of time that a leader should be spending in front of their team members? Is there an order of magnitude or is it just make a commitment to do better tomorrow?

That’s a good question. I don’t think there’s a stock answer in terms of percentage. You could say 10x or whatever you’re doing, do it, do a more. But I think that the real challenge is part of it is people want to they just want to have time. And so, I know one of the things that we do, we have a kind of a tool that we use to set aside time for folks to get out there. It’s a scheduling issue in many ways.

So, we work with leaders to kind of figure out what can we do with all these various meetings? Can we combine these can we get rid of that one and carve out space so we at least we have a dedicated time to get out there and see folks that is so important. Too often what I hear is a message where I reduce the ranks of my frontline leaders, yet I’m expecting them to do so much more. And at the end of the day, what gets done is usually just the remaining task and they spend most of it in front of the computer instead of going in front.

So, I absolutely agree with what you’re saying. Start by asking what could be removed, what are some of the low hanging fruits non-value-added tasks that just should be taken out and do that, like as your first major initiative? Any tips for a leader who’s maybe new, who goes on the floor, who’s not sure how to how to start conversations?

Yeah, ask questions. And that’s for everybody. But especially if I’m a new leader. People but people are smart. And if I am not exactly sure, you know, what’s going on there. That’s all right. Strong leaders show vulnerability. It’s smart. It’s a strength. It’s not a weakness. And asking questions, being authentic. If you genuinely care and you have the right intentions, people have good sensors for that. They entered.

They feel it. They understand it. So, I think it’s good for everybody, but particularly new leaders. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a sign of strength to be doing those things.

That’s such an important comment. And I think this is something we should expand on in a future podcast. I know for me as a leader really early on in my career, I think probably six, seven years into it, I was given a task which was to go into business I knew absolutely nothing about, turned that business around, change everything from an operational standpoint. And that’s really where I understood humility from a whole different level because I can solve a single thing.

I didn’t understand what was going on in front of me, and I was forced to listen to Top End to go on the floor, ask my team members to figure out how to solve things, and I had no choice but to listen to what they had to say. Organizations that do this well, are there any tips on are things that you see that are markedly different in those organizations that are really good at this?

I was night and day and trust me, you walk in in the first five minutes, ten minutes, you get a feel for culture. I mean, immediately. You do a site tour, you can tell, and it is it’s a huge difference and that doesn’t mean the you know, the really good organizations. It’s not fairy dust and unicorns and rainbows and people high 5min and hugging. But it’s a noticeable difference when you don’t have that.

When you have people that are disengaged, when you don’t have interactions between folks, you get like I said earlier, you get some really dumb rules and decisions that are being made and you’ve got resentment on both sides. And there is no discussion, we all know from any kind of relationship when the communication goes away, people stop talking, problems come up. So that that communication to me is not just a safety issue. It’s a barometer.

It’s a litmus test, really, for your culture and how well you’re running things. So, if you’ve got those problems or you don’t have people talking to each other, you need to address it right away.

I think that’s a great point. What are the themes I want to double click on? You were talking a little bit in terms of what I call safety participation. So, in terms of how do I engage people to make better decisions, there’s some great work that was done by students, INSEAD professors, and they call it really open leadership or fair process, which was really this concept of I have a problem as a leader. I’m used to solving that problem.

But instead of trying to solve it, I’m going to go and involve my team members to come up with solutions. And it doesn’t mean I’m creating democracy. It doesn’t mean that I’m allowing everybody to do whatever they want. But just asking for input. In the end of the day, as a leader, I’m going to make the choice, but I’m going to explain that choice. And they’ve done some huge correlations between that approach and leadership and success in general in terms of that business, that it maybe took more time in the answer to get to a solution, but the end outcome was so much better.

Any thoughts around that concept of involving team members in driving safety?

Ford So quick example. I was working for a steel mill in the northern part of the U.S. years ago, and they had a problem with logout. Tagert And as you all know, if you’re not locking out equipment, particularly in a steel mill, you can get hurt or killed in a hurry. And so, the plant manager was like, look, if we see somebody that’s not locked out, they call it a lockout, tag out, try out there.

Anyway, if we don’t see locked out, you’re gone. And his thinking was, look, we take this seriously and if you’re not following along, you’re out of here. And the safety manager or the safety director was smart. He’s like, let’s hold on, let’s go talk to people. And they actually went out. They got engineers; they’ve got some supervisors. They got some employees out there actually operating the equipment, started talking to him.

The problem was it was so complicated, locking out the equipment. And by the way, they had almost the worst production pressure I can remember. I mean, it was brutal. So, you couple that with really complicated procedures that take forever to do. It’s not surprising sometimes people took shortcuts. So bottom line is employees with the help of some other folks came up with a way to energize the equipment. And half the time, half the steps, they wrote it down.

Really simple. I could understand it, you know, hit the button after you hit the button, do this. The problem went away immediately. It was not an enforcement issue. It was a communication issue. And by talking to people, people are, again, are smart and they are going to come up with good solutions if you let them.

That’s great. So, this time I’m going to say don’t hit the button. Keep listening on. We’re going to talk more about safety communication in just a second. But in the interim, if you have a couple of minutes, go to zero harm leadership, dotcom zero harm leadership dot com to do joshes safety communication, self-assessment to see how you stack up and what actions you can take to make a meaningful difference. We’ll be right back. Here we go again with some more great insights and conversations with Dr Josh Williams here on The Safety Guru talking about safety communication.

So, I want to dial in to another topic, which is peer-to-peer communications. So, to employees, how they communicate with each other. Tell me more of your thoughts on this.

You know, it’s a funny thing. When I first started doing this years ago, when I was younger and skinnier, I was doing a training in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And I am nervous. I’ve got all my notes. I’ve got them in order. I’ve prepared, I’ve practiced, but I am nervous. And about 30 minutes in, I’m saying something. I don’t know what I was talking about, but this guy stood up in this auditorium and said, I have underwear older than you.

Who are you to tell me whatever? And I was like, I was not prepared for that. My comment was, that’s a whole other problem. You got to deal with that first. But it’s a real serious mindset. Don’t tell me what to do. There was a famous country song years ago, if you mind your own business, you won’t be mine and mine. And I think sometimes we take that too far. We take it as disrespect.

Someone says something to me, you’re disrespecting me. I’ve been here thirty years. You’ve been here three. Who are you to tell me how to do my job? I’m maintenance your operations you don’t want. Do we have these barriers where we just bristle at the thought of someone trying to help us? So, I think it’s really important to start trying to break that down when you start thinking about people getting seriously hurt or injured on the job. Some you know, some of the listeners, Charlie Morecroft, you know, good guy and a lot of people know was burnt almost on his entire body, almost died and talks about that story.

Brad Gardner, another individual, lost an arm in a potato factory, felt the heat. He was pulled into an auger. He didn’t block it out first. All of a sudden, he’s being pulled in that machine. I hate to be gruesome, but he had a decision to yank himself out, left his arm in the equipment. And sadly, I’ve got a ton of those stories just from doing this for a while. If someone had spoken up, if someone had said, hey, man, I don’t feel right.

If you don’t lock us out, you can get hurt. Or I was doing the same thing, tore my shoulder. I don’t see it happen to you. If we’re communicating these things, we’re keeping people from getting hurt. We’ve got to start changing that mindset of this isn’t disrespect. This is simply just caring. I don’t I don’t see it happen to you and we need to work on that.

That reminds me of a story. When I was early on my first leadership role, I remember that I provided some coaching to somebody from a cell on a safety standpoint. And she turned around and she started screaming at me and putting her finger in my face very close to my nose and saying, I could be your grandma. So, it was it’s not always easy when you have to deal with that. So, any closing thoughts around safety communication as we close off our show for today?

Yeah, I mean, and it’s one of those things, too. I think, frankly, training and we incorporate in some of the stuff that we do. But you have to practice it. It’s a skill we don’t all grow up being communications experts. You know, I got into this job because I’m really good at whatever I do. And so, I think we have to work on it. And so, a couple of quick hitter tips. First is asking questions.

You know, the first thing, if you come up and I’m working on something, I maybe I’m working on turbine engine. I’ve been doing this for hours. I don’t have the equipment I need. I’m in a confined, you know, kind of a difficult space. And you come up, start telling me what I need to be doing right or wrong. It’s going to be a problem. You come up and ask me, how are you doing?

Anything I can do to help? What do you need? Asking questions kind of breaks down people’s barriers because now we’re having a conversation. So, I think step one would be asking questions. Of course, showing respect at all times is an obvious one and praising the good stuff to you. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t need a group hug for where am I hearing protection. But if, you know, if I’m going out of my way helping out a newer employee, I’m cleaning up a spill after my shift.

You know, a little tip of the cap now and again. It’s not a bad thing either. I think the last one, too. I mean, this may not be a great one to end on, but we’ve got to watch our language, you know, must never, always sometimes. You know, you mentioned that a Ph.D. in psychology, my wife won’t mind me saying this, I hope, but it did not prepare me for the first couple months of marriage.

And part of the funny part of it was we would get an argument and I didn’t understand why. And sometimes I would say words that elicited it like must never, always. And I finally learned, okay, don’t be a dummy. You know, quit doing that and also say, yes, I know you’re right. But just think about that. In fact, this will be a homework assignment for the listeners. This will be a test in social psychology.

Either use must never or always. As soon as you go home tonight, as soon as you see the person that you live with, if you live with somebody, tell them they never do something just for fun. Hi, honey. You never do this or, you know, you always complain about that and then see what happens. And if they start yelling at you, you could say, well, listen to that dang podcast. And the guy said to try it and he was right.

We just got to be careful and mindful sometimes because I think unintentionally, we by accident may send the wrong message, because, again, keep in mind, we’re all a little defensive. Sometimes when it is about our job, we take pride in what we do and it gets really easy for people to get defensive. So, I think the last point, and I don’t want to be soapbox here. I think the last point, though, we need to consider is talking to people are caring.

You’re looking out for people. It’s not about telling them what to do. And I think change in that mindset goes a long way to preventing those serious injuries and fatalities.

Thank you so much for those closing thoughts. Again, if you have a couple of minutes, go to zero harm leadership, dotcom, do Joshes quick, which will give you some meaningful insights in terms of what you need to do next. And this was, again, Dr. Josh William on The Safety Guru. Thank you so much. And we’ll talk again soon. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-Suite radio. Leave a legacy, distinguish yourself from the pack, grow your success, capture the hearts and minds of your team—fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode or listen to our sister show with the Ops guru Eric Michrowski.

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ABOUT THE GUEST

For more than 20 years, Josh has partnered with clients around the world to deliver customized, sustainable solutions to improve safety culture and prevent SIFs. Dr. Williams earned his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Virginia Tech and is a behavioral safety, human performance, and safety culture improvement expert.

Josh is the author of Keeping People Safe: The Human Dynamics of Injury Prevention and co-editor of Keys to Behavior Based Safety. He has published more than 50 book chapters, government reports, white papers, blogs and articles in leading journals. Josh has also delivered hundreds of presentations at leading national conferences and is a highly regarded public speaker. He received the Cambridge Center National First Prize for his research on behavioral safety feedback.

A sample of Josh’s recent projects include delivering a series of motivational presentations, conducting comprehensive strategic planning sessions, and managing safety culture assessments and improvement activities.

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Close Call Reporting with Dr. Josh Williams

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Close Call Reporting with Dr Josh Williams

Does your organization reinforce a culture of reporting or is there some fear (or hassle) associated with close call events? The answer to that question is a great litmus test for your overall safe production culture.

The purpose of reporting close calls (and minor injuries) is to promote a learning culture and avoid serious injuries in the future.

Close call reporting, when done correctly, is a powerful tool to improve safety culture and prevent serious injuries and fatalities. How well does your organization manage close call reporting?

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams; their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-Suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized Ops and The Safety Guru public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru, where we explore topics around operations, leadership and particularly the essential role that operational leaders have in driving The Safety Guru. I’m Eric Michrowski president and CEO of Propulo, our host for this show today. And previously on The Safety Guru. We had Dr. Josh Williams partner, Human Performance and Business Transformation at Propulo, and I’m glad to have him back on our show this time to talk about Close Call reporting. Thank you, George, for coming back on the show.

I appreciate it. Thanks very.

So, Dr. Josh Williams has a Ph.D. in psychology from Virginia Tech. He is a pioneer in the safety culture space with over twenty years of experience with a broad range of clients ranging from aerospace, pharmaceutical, military, oil and gas, utilities and manufacturing. Wow, quite the impressive resume. He’s authored a book. He’s the coeditor’s second one. He has published over 40 different articles and presented over 100 different conferences. And he’s also the national prize winner from the Cambridge Center on Behavioral Safety.

Wow. An impressive background. So, Josh, maybe you can refresh our listeners a little bit about how you came about in the safety space and what brought you here. Thank you right now. Thanks, Eric. So I was in graduate school, as you mentioned, you know, working towards a Ph.D. and I enjoyed it. But it just felt to me like a lot of the stuff that we were learning and talking about was very kind of ivory tower. And that’s OK. But it wasn’t for me. And I was getting a bit frustrated. And one of the professors at Virginia Tech, a guy named Scott Geller, who many, many people may know and really is kind of the in my mind, sort of the father was sort of the fountainhead of the psychology of safety, really, if you boil it down. But anyway, he was a professor there, asked me to, you know, get on board with his team, which I did.

And it was great. You know, we were out in the field, we were mines. We were doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And for a graduate student, it was a really good experience. So, this is back in the late 90s. I’m getting old, but it was a long time ago. But that’s kind of where we where I got started. And I just really liked it. It felt like, you know, you’re fighting the good fight once a quarter finished up.

And I worked with him for a bit. But, you know, you’re fighting the good fight. You’re trying to keep people from getting hurt and just kind of resonated with me. So that’s kind of how I got started.

That’s such an impressive story and really exciting. So today we’re going to talk a little bit more about close call reporting, which is a really key component of any safety strategy. We’ll be right back to talk more about it. Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru, this is your host, Eric Michrowski. We know how many businesses have been impacted by the current covid-19 Black Swan event. Propulo has invested all its available capacity to create free resources for leaders on how to navigate this crisis.

Whether you would like to explore some of our retools, subscribe to our free biweekly newsletter or seek free advice. I encourage you to visit covid. Black Swan dot com covid. Black Swan dot com Propulo has committed not to profit from this crisis in any way. It’s our way of giving back to the communities that we serve. Thank you.

Like what we do here, this is your Socials and tell everyone, Josh, you’ve really blown me away. You’ve talked about a close call reporting you created a quiz to help leaders address is so critical component, a free quiz where people can see how they’re doing, compare themselves against others. And if you’re interested in getting there, go to highway to zero, dot com, highway to zero dot com. Great way to get started. So maybe let’s start talking a little bit about close call reporting.

Why is it so important for a leader to make sure that the close call reporting is working? Well, you know, when you see all these different organizations and I’ve seen some really good ones, I’ve seen some really rough ones, one of the big differences, you know, differentiators, I guess, between the two is this concept now called, you know, learning environment or learning organizations. And I think it’s a good trend. You know, human performance, I think, has helped push us in that direction where the idea is simply, you know, things happen.

We learn from mistakes. We’re not beating people up. We’re trying to move in the right direction in the best way to get that information from the people that are on the job doing the job and they know what’s going on. And if we have an environment where people are free to speak up, that may be reinforced for speaking up, it just creates a more positive environment and it’s just a lot more open environment. So, if somebody gets hurt or killed on the job, if someone else had a similar experience, they got lucky and dodged a bullet.

Well, if they don’t say something, somebody else may not be so lucky. So, from a big picture perspective, we’re creating a learning organization. In the spirit of that is we’re speaking up more. We’re keeping each other safe.

That’s phenomenal. So, I was talking a couple of weeks ago to this leader and he told me, hey, I’m not well shop. And if somebody gets injured, I just fire the person. So why should I care about close call reporting? If that’s my philosophy, if that’s your philosophy, you shouldn’t. That’s your philosophy. You should be doing something else. That’s the scary old school command and control. And look, 20 something years ago that that was I was seeing that a whole lot more, I’ll say, especially over the last maybe 10, 12 years, cultures are getting better.

And I don’t know if it’s I’m not sure why exactly. Hopefully, some of our efforts are helping us move in the right direction. But that command and control, fear based is old school outdated. If you’re doing that, you’re a dinosaur. I’m sorry. You know, it’s just the reality of it and it’s just really unhealthy for everybody. So leading organizations are positive. They’re looking at trying to get information. That doesn’t mean that there’s never, you know, negative consequences potentially for something going wrong.

You know, don’t get me wrong. It just shouldn’t. That’s the last resort. That shouldn’t be our first response.

I completely agree. I think that’s one of the pieces I’ve heard too often where even I was talking to one executive and somebody had just got injured. And then they said I probably went to the hospital to fire the person, to teach him a lesson. And I said, I think they got enough of a lesson by getting injured and getting into the hospital. Right. So completely agree that this concept of organizational learning has been around for a very long time. 

I often talk about in terms of you want people to see problems, the opportunities within the business. You want to then teach them how to solve them so that we constantly trying to find ways to make things better inside the organization at all levels within the organization. And then, you want to share and embed those learnings across the organization. That’s really, to me, this concept of organizational learnings in this close call reporting is such a critical component of that.

So, I haven’t started one of my businesses. What would be the first thing that I should do if I want to have a good close call reporting system, eliminate fear.

There should be no fear associated with reporting close calls, which I don’t know, Eric. And I think you brought this to my attention once upon a time. But I think in 2011 there was an air traffic controller in Switzerland who was a close call to airplanes, were too close to each other, I guess, on the runway. And they this person took it upon himself to report it. And rather than, you know, being thanked or whatever else, he was faced criminal proceedings, I guess, and was fined 19000 francs.

I don’t know what that is in U.S. or Canadian dollars, but it was a criminal offense. And it’s like if you’re doing that to folks for reporting, what do you think is going to happen? It’s going to drive everything underground and people start hiding things. So, step one, above all else with close call reporting is drive out the fear.

I think such an important point. I grew up, as many of you know, in the airline industry. And that’s where I really got my understanding of safety and safety culture and the importance of it. And one of the things I just really admired was how it was so embedded that you would just share if you made a mistake and something was wrong, you would talk about it and you’d have a negative ramification. You try to hide it. But even if both pilots fell asleep, it was I’m encouraging you to report it because otherwise that’s one day become a big issue.

So, I love what you’re talking about, Rime. Big fear, any ideas if fear is being part of the organization, the leader I was just talking to you about that basically fire somebody if they make a mistake, if they listen to your podcast and say, oh, my goodness, Josh, you are absolutely right. I need to do things differently. How do I start the process of removing fear from the equation?

Talk to your leaders to make sure all leaders are on board. Sometimes, let’s say I see the light as a CEO, for instance, and I realize we’re doing things wrong. We’re going to get a changed first message because you may have been doing it that way 10 years. It’s hard to change culture. It’s hard to change mindsets. So, the first order of business is getting your executive folks to understand and cascading that down. That is how we’re going to be doing things to make sure that leaders are reinforcing that they should be thanking people for bringing something up if there’s a close call and someone if there’s an injury even, I mean, the first response, the default response is thanks for bringing things up.

We need to bring it to everybody’s attention. Information sharing is critical. If you want to prevent bad things from happening, share with others, not just in that particular area with other organizations. If you’ve got a sister facility in other areas, share with them to that’s king. We’ve got to make sure we get that information out to folks.

That’s really good. How about competitors? Should you be sharing close calls with your competition? Right. Because at the end of the day, safety is not a competitive differentiator. How do you broach that topic? The airlines are really good at doing that, I have to say, is they realize that safety is so paramount that I’m going to share it. Even if you’re my competitor on a daily basis.

Yeah. Fight them in a different space. You know, give us more leg room. You know, you don’t we don’t need to be fighting about that. We should be sharing information freely across the board. Look, this is a bigger issue. This is people’s lives at stake. If you talk to people that have had serious injuries or they’ve been apart, I’ve seen other people getting killed. And again, I’ve talked to people that make those phone calls to people’s families.

It’s devastating for everybody. Not so little. Let’s just put that aside and fight, you know, fight the good fight in terms of, you know, protecting themselves.

So how would I do this? I just ring up my competitor and say, hey, can we start sharing some ideas on how to improve safety or go to an organization? We’re a little bit of all of the above.

Yeah, I think all the above more information is good.

And that’s fantastic. OK, so now I want to double click on another topic. You talk a lot about how you do something with what you learn and the importance of creating credibility in the close call reporting process I talked about before in terms of see, solve share. And it’s really the that the sharing part, but also the solving part. Any words of wisdom around that?

Yeah, that’s a big one. And I appreciate you asking the question because, you know, part of the challenge is we people will set up a close call reporting system and no one reports anything in there that look at me and then they start going. The incentives, like we had talked about in our last podcast. Look, incentives are not the answer there necessarily. It may be something to do if I bring something up. Let me add and this is a question, I guess, rhetorical for the listeners, but if I’m out there on the job, I got an issue.

It’s important to me. I bring it up and I never hear back. What’s my impression of what’s going on? You know, people don’t care. It’s a problem. So, making sure we get back to people as critical and sometimes it maybe we can’t fix this exactly the way you want right away. We’re doing ABC in the meantime to try to address it, but we need to be highly responsive. And that’s one of the biggest weaknesses with close call reporting, is we’re not getting information back to people.

We’re expecting them to fill out these cards or tell somebody and they never hear back. They’re going to quit doing it. So that information back to folks is really important. I think that’s phenomenal. So, if you haven’t already done so, go to highway to zero, dot com, highway to zero dot com. Take this free self-assessment quiz. It’s going to look at best practices, ideas, provoke thinking and most importantly, provoke you to start thinking about what actions you can take. 

I’ll be right back with some additional questions to close off with Dr. Josh Williams. Thank you. We’re back with Dr. Josh Williams. And once again, highway to zero dot com. That free self-assessment to see how are you doing, how you stack up against others in this space. We’ve done really well around Close Call reporting. So, a couple of closing questions. One of the things that I’ve often talked about is that there’s a degree of maturity that starts progressing in terms of close call reporting.

You start out and maybe you start to report things that that team did and that team maybe is a subcontractor, another competitor that’s on-site as a contractor on your site or another team. Then you start progressing to saying, I’m willing to accept things that my team, my teammates, my colleagues, my crew has done that need to be changed and that the higher level of maturity, as I said, recognizing, you know what, I’m not perfect.

And I’ve also made some mistakes. And the value of learning from my mistakes, from the errors I’ve made is really worthy of it. So, I look at those steps really in terms of understanding where am I from a maturity enclosed Carpet, any thoughts for me?

Yeah, that’s a nice way to look at it. And I think, you know, testimonials are powerful. We all know the if you’re watching debates and you have politicians telling a story, well, I was in Iowa and someone came, you know, there’s a reason stories have impact. And when someone has the courage to stand up in front of other folks and say, look, I had a close call, this could have really got me in trouble.

It didn’t, but it could have. Sharing that information is big. And if we can get people to do that, naturally, I think you’re right. That’s a sign of high maturity with your close call reporting.

That’s phenomenal. Thank you. Thank you so much. So very quickly. Some people call it near-miss reporting. Close call reporting. Is it the same thing?

I think so. I mean, it’s not a near miss that being almost hit me in the head. That was not; it was a near hit or maybe a close call. I just, I think a close call. I think people are moving more and more toward because it is a close call. You almost got hit by a car as a close call. So, I think it may be a semantics issue, but I think it’s a better way to go, I think it is what people are using more and more.

So really thinking about the things that if something had happened differently, could have resulted in an injury is really what we’re trying to summarize and capture any closing thoughts for us as we talk about this?

Yeah, I like what you said about the maturity level and our discussion kind of on learning organizations is just, again, kind of repeating that having an open environment where people want to speak up as important as a couple of quick hitter points to consider. First, it should be made easy. Sometimes not everyone’s comfortable with computers. Not everyone’s comfortable with doing things on apps. Speaking for myself. So, keep it simple, you know, I mean and paper reporting, some people prefer that make it easy for people to report things that shouldn’t be a hassle.

I think that would be step one. Step two would be prioritizing, tracking these close calls that are coming in. And one thing I think better organizations are starting to do is not just do a laundry list of different close calls, but they’re prioritizing particularly for specific potential. I mean, if they can get you killed, we need to address it. Now that comes to the front of the line. So doing a better job with a prioritization and tracking.

I think the third thing we talked about a little bit, but is just address things quickly and be honest. If you can’t fix something right away, we’re going to do this in the meantime. But be honest with people. But getting back to people is just really important to the person that was involved and with other people as well. And then the final one would be advertising improvements. Look, it doesn’t cost any extra money. You’ve already made the fix.

Tell people, I’d say, but it is marketing. You are advertising, you are displaying and demonstrating your commitment to safety. And one of the best ways of doing that is addressing people’s issues as they come up. So, advertise, advertise, advertise in meetings, emails, one on one conversations. Make sure that people understand you are working hard to address those close calls.

I love it. Advertise, advertise, advertise. And I would all ad, communicate, communicate, communicate, make sure people see the value in what you’re doing, what’s in it for them. It’s been such a pleasure to have you on our show once again and again for the listeners. If you’re interested, go to highway to zero dot com, completely free quiz. No gimmicks, no nothing. Nobody’s going to call you. Nobody’s going to start harassing you afterwards.

Just a good way to start thinking about how you can move forward. And Dr. Josh Williams is such a generous person with his time, his ideas, so committed to driving safety forward that I’m sure if you wanted to hear more about what you could do in your space, he’d be willing to help you out. So, thank you so much and thank you for listening to The Safety Guru.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-Suite radio. Leave a legacy, distinguish yourself from the pack, grow your success, capture the hearts and minds of your team’s Fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode or listen to our sister show with the Ops Eric Michrowski.

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

More Episodes: https://thesafetyculture.guru/

C-Suite Radio: https://c-suitenetwork.com/radio/shows/the-safety-guru/

Powered By Propulo Consulting: https://propulo.com/

Eric Michrowski: https://ericmichrowski.com

ABOUT THE GUEST

For more than 20 years,  Josh has partnered with clients around the world to deliver customized, sustainable solutions to improve safety culture and prevent SIFs. Dr. Williams earned his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Virginia Tech and is a behavioral safety, human performance, and safety culture improvement expert.

Josh is the author of Keeping People Safe: The Human Dynamics of Injury Prevention and co-editor of Keys to Behavior Based Safety. He has published more than 50 book chapters, government reports, white papers, blogs and articles in leading journals. Josh has also delivered hundreds of presentations at leading national conferences and is a highly regarded public speaker. He received the Cambridge Center National First Prize for his research on behavioral safety feedback.

A sample of Josh’s recent projects include delivering a series of motivational presentations, conducting comprehensive strategic planning sessions, and managing safety culture assessments and improvement activities.

For more Information on BBS: https://www.propulo.com/bbs/

For more Information on HOP: https://www.propulo.com/hop/

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Safety Incentives with Dr. Josh Williams

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

For years, organizational leaders have used incentives to try and motivate safety. The rationale is that providing financial rewards for not getting hurt will motivate employees to “try harder” for safety. 

In reality, this often encourages non-reporting which is why OSHA now discourages outcome-based incentives. Plus, people are already motivated to avoid injury. 

Effective incentives, if used, should focus on proactive safety behaviors and efforts. 

​Rewards should be symbolic and safety themed. 

Genuine appreciation and recognition trump all other incentives.  

Take the quiz below to see how well you’re managing safety incentives. 

Please try our Free Safety Incentives Quiz: https://www.humanperformanceleader.com/

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams; their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-Suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized Ops and The Safety Guru public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru, where we explore topics around operations, leadership and particularly the role of leaders in driving safety in their business. I’m Eric Michrowski president and CEO of Propulo and also the host of this show. Today on our show we have Dr. Josh Williams. He’s a partner in human performance and business transformation at Propulo Consulting. Josh, so great to have you on the show today.

I appreciate it, Eric. Thanks. Glad to be here.

That’s great. So, Josh has an impressive background. He has a Ph.D. in psychology from Virginia Tech. He’s worked over 20 years in the space around safety culture, one of the pioneers in this space, his broad range of client experience that ranges in clients from aerospace, pharmaceutical, military, oil and gas, utilities, manufacturing. And the list goes on. He’s co-authored a book, authored his own book and has over 40 publications in his name, a really impressive range of expertise.

He’s presented at over a 100 conferences and other presentations on the topic of safety and safety culture. He also is one the Cambridge Center National Prize on Behavioral Safety. Wow. Josh, an impressive background. So impressive to have you on the show today.

I appreciate it. Thank you.

So, tell me a little bit about how you got to where you are, what got you into the safety culture space.

Yeah, so I was in graduate school and kind of working my way through there, trying to get my piece of paper, frankly. And midway through, I was a bit frustrated. Everything seemed very ivory tower and kind of academic, you know, I appreciated it, but it wasn’t for me. I met a guy named Scott Geller who was me became my advisor. So, I worked with him and it was much more of real life going out into organizations, trying to help out fight the good fight, doing some good things there.

So that’s kind of how I came into the safety world was through Scott Geller. And so that was kind of my initial introduction.

That’s excellent. It’s impressive. And your client list and the type of work that you’ve done and the impacts you have of those organizations as well. Very impressive. Today, we want to focus on a topic that’s really near and dear to so many of our listeners. It’s a topic around safety incentives. So, let’s go first to a quick commercial break and they’ll be right back. Thank you. Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru. This is your host, Eric Michrowski.

We know how many businesses have been impacted by the current covid-19 Black Swan event. Propulo has invested all its available capacity to create free resources for leaders on how to navigate this crisis. Whether you would like to explore some of our free tools, subscribe to our free biweekly newsletter or seek free advice. I encourage you to visit covid black swan dot com Propulo has committed not to profit from this crisis in any way. It’s our way of giving back to the communities that we serve.

Thank you.

Like what we do here, this is your Socials and tell everyone.

So today we’re here to talk about safety incentives. I know this is a topic that so many leaders struggle with, because if you nail it right, you can get the right impact on the business. And if you don’t, you can start causing all sorts of harm in your business, such as underreporting things of that nature. You’ve also authored a quiz, which I think is phenomenal, that helps leaders self-assess in terms of where they’re at and what actions they should do.

It’s completely free. We’re going to talk about it more. But if you’re interested, just go to human performance leader Dotcom, human performance leader, Dotcom. So, Josh, maybe let’s kick off by you sharing a little bit of your perspective over the years around what you’ve seen it that works well in the safety in cyberspace.

Well, I think one of the hardest things is incentives. Everybody struggles with him and the challenges that leaders have good intentions. They say safety matters to me is important to me is a core value, but they don’t know how to show it. And so sometimes mistakenly, especially, you know, 10, 15 years ago, you throw money at it. So, if you go if you all don’t go, you know, get her for the next three months, six months or a year, we’re going to give you money. 

And that’s our way of showing you that we care. Unfortunately, what that led to was people hiding stuff. I mean, I get hurt. And now not only am I going to lose my money, I might lose your money. And so just a quick example. I don’t know, maybe two or three years ago, we were doing some work with a company up in Canada. And they had a situation where if everyone went an entire month without getting injured, they got a gift card or for gas, it was like a gas voucher, maybe seventy-five dollars something.

And this is when gas prices were really high. So, it was a big deal. People were excited about it. They appreciated the incentive. Unfortunately, a woman was walking by her office, slipped on the ice they had and so slipped on the ice, fell down in front of everybody, had a tailbone injury, whatever the medical term for that’s called. So, she got hurt. She had the embarrassment of falling in front of everybody and she cost them their gift card.

They were upset with her. People made comments to her say, and you blue are incentives. So that’s the reality. What happens is people start hiding stuff. Small things can turn into bigger injuries because we didn’t deal with in the first place. So, as you know, Eric, you know, OSHA has kind of come down on those outcome-based incentives because frankly, they just motivate the wrong thing despite the right intentions.

I completely agree. I remember a story of somebody who shared with me several years ago, and it was about somebody that had been injured quite severely on the last day of the month. And the crew, this was a mine site, had put the person on a truck and driven away without anybody knowing and then waited till the next morning to bring that person to the hospital so that the recordable injury would pass into the next period and not impact their business.

So that’s just frightening to hear things of that nature. So, in your experience, are there certain things that leaders should be looking for when they’re creating an incentive program?

Yeah, the first and I’ll just touch on this is executive compensation. If leaders are getting a bunch of money for people not getting hurt, that’s something to consider. And that’s a topic for another day. In the immediate term for employees, process based is the way to go. And that’s what leading organizations are now doing. If you’re going the route of incentives, make it focused on what you actually doing. So close call reporting, safety suggestions, behavioral cards, human performance cards, whatever.

The point is, we’re rewarding specific actions, behaviors that we’re doing to try to get to our endgame. So being more process based is the first step in. The second step is focusing on quality. And that’s where sometimes we have issues there, too, because now all of a sudden, if I’m getting some kind of incentive for filling out cards, that’s great. But then I start pencil whipping through these cards for the incentive without putting a lot of time into it.

So, I think it’s important for leaders if we’re going that route or if you have process-based incentives, that’s fine. Focus on the quality. Good cards were being done, good conversations, leading safety meetings, etc. So, I think if we’re going that route again, don’t focus on the quota’s, focus on the quality of what people are doing.

That’s excellent. So, I’m a leader. I have a safety incentive program in place at this moment. I start realizing after listening to you or playing on the quiz to understand kind of how I’m doing that maybe I need to change things. What should I do? Because if I start removing incentives, I could have my team rebelling against me because they’re saying I want those incentives to show up safely. What would be your guidance to a leader?

Yeah, I think keeping the incentives it’s tricky because like, once you’ve got incentives, you’re sort of stuck with him. And it is tricky to get out. And if you’ve got outcome based, start switching to process. If you got process based, that’s fine. But focus on the HWI. The Big Five is what we. Call it four, why are we doing is the point of it, is going home safe to your friends and family? It’s not about payoff.

So, if you’re doing, you know, prizes, first aid kits are great. If you want to have some kind of celebration, have a safety fair where you bring in your family, you can do, you know, all kinds of hearing, testing and other things. But the emphasis is on safety and going home safe, your family and that we care about you. So, we just got to make sure that we’re emphasizing the right things and don’t have it seen as a, you know, a payoff.

Or a lot of leaders talk about management by objectives. They talk about how what you incentivize will get done. How do you deal with a team member that says, well, you’re not pay me my bonus to stay safe, so why should I stay safe?

That’s an issue. And there’s a big larger issue there, too, because, look, pay people more money on the front end. Really, you want to get better performance, not only having the right culture, but get the right people in the first place. There’s a whole lot that goes into the concern is trying to throw money at people is a quick fix. It is not solving the bigger problem. So, there’s got to be other things that need to be done.

Let me give you a couple if I can ask a couple of quick examples of some good things that were done. One organization where I’m from and where I live now and kind of southwest Virginia had a bunch of money, they were going to use for a poster campaign. And that’s great. But some of these signs and posters like I’ve seen some that are I saw a poster at a refinery that said think safety. And the whole thing was all kinds of rusted out, dirty, nasty.

It’s sending the wrong message. What they did was give the money to employees. They had everyone they shut down all operations. They brought in everybody into a big room. They had markers, flip charts, and they did a campaign, do your own posters. So, the money they had dedicated for that they gave as prizes to their employees. And it was, you know, not a big amount. Hundred dollars, fifty dollars per second something. But it was really fun.

And I sat in on it and there was not a lick of talent and that entire building, but it was fun and they were engaged. They had posters once they were done over the entire facility. The winning poster was like a Forrest Gump tribute face, like safety is a safety does with some guy running with a box of chocolates and hearing protection, whatever. But that’s a good example of a fun thing that’s done for the right way. Companies will do stickers for hard hats.

One company donated money to the Boys and Girls Club. So quick example, observation cards, rather than me getting a personal benefit. That money was donated every time a card was done, a small portion was donated to a local charity and that was real. They raised 40000 dollars in a couple of months. So those are some examples, maybe some ideas of when we’re going the incentive route. That’s what we should be focused on.

So, I just want to point any of the listeners, if you’re interested in kind of self-reflection in terms of how you’re doing around safety incentives, go to human performance leader dotcom, human performance leader, Dotcom. You’re going to go through a quick quiz. Completely free. No obligations, nothing come out. It’s just about sharing some ideas, some insights so you can see how you’re doing and then stack up against some of the leaders in this space and decide what are the right action plans.

We’re going to be right back in a second to talk a little bit more with Josh on what you can do next around. Senator, thank you. So, we’re back with some more with Dr. Josh Williams. So here we’re talking about safety and Sennett’s today. I don’t have a safety incentive program in place currently. And I want to know, after hearing what you had to say, going through and going through your quiz and reflecting on it, I so realizing that I have a behavior-based safety program and I need to do something to improve the quality of the reporting, what should I do first?

That’s a good question, especially with behavioral safety observations. Again, focusing on the quality. You can sometimes, of course, with people’s permission first is kind of show people examples of good comments, because that’s a good measure of quality, is what are the comments that are being made and really having discussions around what people are seeing out there, you know, in the start of the tail board meetings during the day, formally, informally, I think if you’re going to start doing an incentive program, one thing to consider is get input from people that are on the job doing the job.

They know what’s going on. They know what they want and they appreciate it. You’re going to get more involvement when you’ve got folks that are saying, well, let’s do this or we’d like to see this, keeping in mind we’re going to have a process focused and quality focused. And another thing quickly is unannounced rewards are a nice thing. There’s you didn’t tell me was coming all of a sudden, I have a pizza party. Not a big deal, but you’re getting folks together show an appreciation.

You guys have been working hard. No one’s getting hurt. Y’all are doing the right things. We just want to say a quick thank you here. Some pizza. Don’t forget the power of some of those unannounced, informal things. It doesn’t have to be programmatic when you’re going that route.

Great. And before I get to last thoughts. He talked about pizza parties. So, what happens if something didn’t go well in the last month or quarter? Should I still do a pizza party or should I just be if I do really well?

Look, it depends on what went wrong. I mean, if and I think we’ve got to be careful with punishment and that that’ll be another podcast. You know, if something goes wrong with their system factors involved, too often it’s easy to point the finger and say, well, they screwed up. They may have, but there may have been a lot of other reasons behind it. So that’s why I kind of mentioned the unannounced part.

I mean, we can still have a party. We can have a teachable moment to use. Use that term again with permission. We don’t want to be disrespectful to folks, but I think we still celebrate lots of good things that have happened because we don’t you know, I don’t think one misstep necessarily should screw everything up.

Thank you so much, Josh. The absolutely fantastic. Any closing thoughts around the topic of safety incidents before we part?

Yeah, I think, you know, everybody wants to be appreciated. People want to be respected. They want to be recognized. They want to enjoy work. They want to feel like, you know, all these things. They don’t cost companies money. They cost time because you got to spend time out there with your folks. They don’t cost money. So, I hope you know the listeners. You know, my final thoughts would be positive feedback, recognition, appreciation.

Like these people. Someone’s been doing this job 35 years. It’s their identity. It’s who they are showing respect, show appreciation, thank them for doing the right things. And I think if we and this is not just touchy feely, this is behavioral science. When you’re trying to influence behavior, it’s not just cracking the whip, praising the right things, rewarding the right things, increases the probability will happen in the future. So, I hope we keep that in mind that praise and recognition have a better work environment, but it also leads to more positive safety behaviors that in turn prevents sniffs.

So, recognition appreciation is the ultimate incentive.

Thank you so much. I couldn’t agree more. The whole thought topic of recognition rewards is so underutilized to really reinforce the things you want to see more often. So today on The Safety Guru, we’ve had Dr. Josh Williams, an absolute expert. Absolute pleasure having you on the show today. And if you haven’t already done so, I’d encourage you to go to Human Performance Leader Dotcom Free Quiz will only take you a couple of minutes. We’ll give you some great insights on how you’re doing around your incentives and maybe some ideas and some strategies to take forward.

And if you got more questions, Dr. Josh Williams is such a generous person with his time and his ideas so committed to the space. Thank you so much for listening to The Safety Guru. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-Suite radio. Leave a legacy, distinguish yourself from the pack, grow your success, capture the hearts and minds of your team’s. Fuel your future. Come back in two weeks for the next episode or listen to our sister show with the Ops guru Eric Michrowski.

The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

More Episodes: https://thesafetyculture.guru/

C-Suite Radio: https://c-suitenetwork.com/radio/shows/the-safety-guru/

Powered By Propulo Consulting: https://propulo.com/

Eric Michrowski: https://ericmichrowski.com

ABOUT THE GUEST

For more than 20 years, Josh has partnered with clients around the world to deliver customized, sustainable solutions to improve safety culture and prevent SIFs. Dr. Williams earned his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Virginia Tech and is a behavioral safety, human performance, and safety culture improvement expert.

Josh is the author of Keeping People Safe: The Human Dynamics of Injury Prevention and co-editor of Keys to Behavior Based Safety. He has published more than 50 book chapters, government reports, white papers, blogs and articles in leading journals. Josh has also delivered hundreds of presentations at leading national conferences and is a highly regarded public speaker. He received the Cambridge Center National First Prize for his research on behavioral safety feedback.

A sample of Josh’s recent projects include delivering a series of motivational presentations, conducting comprehensive strategic planning sessions, and managing safety culture assessments and improvement activities.

For more Information on BBS: https://www.propulo.com/bbs/

For more Information on HOP: https://www.propulo.com/hop/

STAY CONNECTED

RELATED EPISODES