

		November 2005

Welcome

Workplace safety is discussed in most boardrooms and executive suites across Australia. Businesses are not prepared to tolerate workplace incidents causing pain and suffering as well as disruption to production and avoidable cost.

In eight years of consulting practice, we have found time and again that companies who successfully improve their safety performance understand that safety is a journey. They elevate safety into the ranks of business drivers and adopt it as a genuine core value.

We have been partnering with many organisations on their journey, and with our Newsletter, we want to provide a forum for sharing our experiences with you, our stakeholders, and we hope you will also share your insights with us and other readers.

Max Lloyd-Jones
Managing Director
Lloyd-Jones Meakin Group

A Word from E. Scott Geller

Safety is about actively caring for the prevention of injuries to our friends and co-workers, and sharing our knowledge and experience with others. Actively caring requires us to be constantly aware of environmental and behavioural risks in the workplace and elsewhere, and thinking about how best to eliminate these on a daily basis so they don't lead to incidents or injuries.

My students and I have been researching interventions for keeping people safe for almost four decades, and the results of this research have been applied in numerous organisations worldwide by my consulting partners at Safety Performance Solutions and the Lloyd-Jones Meakin Group. We know that organisations achieve safety performance improvement when they take a strategic and integrated approach to safety and invest the time and resources needed to implement research-based approaches.

The LJM newsletter provides a forum for sharing leading-edge ideas, principles, and procedures, as well as practical lessons learned from real-world applications of our research findings. The synergy from the diverse contributions to this newsletter will help dramatically to keep people safe at work, at home, and when travelling in between.

E. Scott Geller, Ph.D.
Professor, Virginia Tech
Senior Partner, Safety Performance Solutions

Dr. Geller's Top Ten Safety Tips

I'd like to offer ten prime ways to get people involved in injury-prevention efforts. Each of these is practical and supported by empirical research. I suggest considering this list as a guideline for developing specific intervention strategies.

10. Make Safety Personal

How do successful advertisers sell their products? They display individuals similar to their potential customers enjoying the benefits of their products. In contrast, many organizations try to motivate safety involvement with group statistics like total recordable injury rate or worker compensation costs. This takes the focus away from what people relate to - - other people.

9. Teach and Motivate with Personal Stories

A well-told, personal story activates vivid imagery. Listeners can put themselves in the position of the story-teller and feel relevant emotions. When the story is linked to a related lesson, learning is facilitated and remembered. Thus, master teachers use personal stories to both motivate people and help them learn.

8. Accompany Scare Tactics with Action Plans

A personal story about the consequential pain and suffering of an injury is emotional and motivational. Listeners who visualize themselves in the same aversive predicament, experience fear and anxiety. They are ready to take action to prevent such negative consequences in their own lives. This is the prime time to teach an injury-prevention technique. Bottom line: A scary story is especially good for safety when it is accompanied by a proactive action plan.

7. Activate and Support Success Seeking

While scare tactics and prevention strategies activate desirable behavior, they can also lead to an undesirable attitude or mindset. People will work hard to avoid an unpleasant event like an injury, but they may not feel good about the experience. When the focus is on avoiding failure, one's sense of personal control and freedom is stifled. And if the prevention efforts do not work, you can get failure acceptance, apathy, and feelings of helplessness.

The antidote: Substitute success seeking for failure avoiding. When people focus more on achieving success than avoiding failure, they feel more personal control and less distress. They are happier and more optimistic, and more likely to help others. Thus, we should define our injury-prevention efforts and results in achievement terms. Get people talking about what they do for safety, and discuss outcomes in terms of milestones accomplished instead of losses avoided.

6. Motivate with Positive Consequences

Recognition for desirable performance is key to a success-seeking attitude. Only with rewards and recognition can behavior and attitude be improved at the same time. So, as trite as it sounds, become a "good finder". Look for the good things people do and support that behavior with positive consequences. But, remember the power is in the delivery. Sincere one-to-one words of genuine appreciation are usually more influential than material rewards.

5. Focus on the Process

A key way to promote success seeking, accentuate the positive, and increase participation in safety efforts is to believe and act on this popular slogan: "Success is a journey, not a destination." When we focus on the various steps to a desired outcome, we create opportunities to support and celebrate successive accomplishments.

In safety, the focus is typically on negative outcomes, from recordable incidents to compensation costs. With our attention on the negative and reactive scoreboard of total recordables, it's easy to take our eyes off the "ball" - the proactive process things we need to do daily in order to prevent workplace injuries.

4. Use Behavior-Based Feedback

Effective behavior change usually incorporates a feedback component. Behavior-based recognition, rewards, coaching, training, and corrective action identify behaviors to support or improve. To some degree, each of these intervention approaches holds people accountable for what they do well and/or what can be improved.

Behavior-based feedback provides direction or motivation, or both of these, depending on its delivery. It is also necessary for performance improvement and competence building. Because people want to be more competent at what they believe is important, opportunities to receive feedback invite participation. Our challenge is to convince others that safety-related tasks are important.

3. Set SMART Goals

"Zero injuries" reflects the vision of dedicated safety pros. It is a destination, not a goal. Goal-setting is a journey tool. Goals define the process efforts needed to prevent injuries.

SMART goals are empowering because they facilitate a process people believe is achievable, effective, and worth the effort. This is reflected in the words represented by the letters of SMART: Specific, Motivational, Achievable, Relevant, and Trackable.

2. Use Empowering Language

For more than three decades I have been complaining about the unfortunate language used by safety pros. Words like "behavior modification", "accident investigation", "loss control", "compliance training", "root cause", and "occupant restraint" come across as failure-oriented and freedom-limiting. They set the stage for fault-finding over fact-finding, peer pressure rather than peer support, win-lose competition instead of win-win collaboration, and top-down control rather than company-wide empowerment.

How we talk to ourselves and to others affects how we feel about ourselves and others. Our language both influences and reflects our culture. Thus, we need to take a careful look at our safety language and make necessary adjustments. Substitute "incident analysis" for "accident investigation", "contributing factors" for "root causes", and "safety belt" for "occupant restraint".

1. Ask the Right Question

Not only can some safety language be a "turn-off", but the initial questions we ask when approaching an injury-prevention challenge can also stifle constructive participation. Consider the effects of questions like "Who did that?", "Why was that hazard not removed earlier?," and "Why didn't you follow the guidelines?"

Notice how all of these questions project the problem beyond the person asking the question. Plus, they deflect a solution to someone else. Someone or something beyond the control of the person asking the question is responsible for causing and solving the problem.

Notice how the perspective changes with this question, "How can I help?" It's not "Why did that have to happen?", but rather "What can I do to help correct the mishap?" It should not be "Why are you working at-risk?," but instead "How can I help you adopt more safe work behaviors?"

In Conclusion

I sincerely hope these ten basic lessons serve as a useful framework for encouraging more active participation in your injury-prevention efforts. I recommend you start with the question "What can I do?", and proceed to do whatever is within your domain of influence to focus on the positive and make your injury-prevention process more achievement-focused.

Safe & Sound Advice — Drive Safely

In Australia, road vehicle crashes are the most common cause of work-related death, injury and absence from work. Over half of workplace fatalities are found to be vehicle-related and company vehicle drivers are likely to have more crashes than the general population.

In the next issues of the LJM Newsletter, we will include our tips on the various aspects of safe driving. In this issue we focus on Journey Planning.

If you need to drive somewhere, especially on a longer trip, please consider the following:

Do I need to make this journey? Are there alternatives to making the journey (eg. tele-conference, email, fax)? Are there alternative forms of transport available?
Have I booked a manageable number of meetings today, or will I be hard pressed to make them all?
Are the weather conditions hazardous?
What will the traffic conditions be like?
Am I taking the quickest route, or the safest route?
Am I familiar with the route? Have I checked the map?
When will I take rest breaks? Have I allocated enough time to take rest breaks? (As a minimum, a 15 minute break is recommended every 2-3 hours.)
Am I on any medication that could affect my driving ability?
Have I made any phone calls I need to make before getting in the car? Is my mobile set so that calls go directly to my message bank?

The Safety Journey — Current State Analysis

A successful journey of safety improvement begins with a thorough understanding of where you are today. The Lloyd-Jones Meakin Current State Analysis process:

recognises the strengths of your organisation and its culture,
identifies the focus for driving significant safety improvement,
helps build a unified team, with a shared understanding of the current state and a commitment to progress in safety practices and culture,
provides a benchmark for repeat surveys to measure progress, and
results in a strategic plan with specific initiatives to drive the organisation towards its vision and deliver against its safety goals.

Call Chris Meakin or Paul Hood on (02) 9955 4473 to learn more about how this process can aid the safety journey of your business.

Feedback

Do you have your own tips or anecdotes about driving safely, or comments or questions about Dr. E. Scott Geller's article? Suggestions for future topics are also welcome. Email us your feedback!

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