A perfect safety record does not just happen by chance. It takes daily -- if not hourly -- focus, scrutiny of processes and continued attention on each element of the process in order to maintain the highest level of protection for a facility's employees and contractors alike.
In calendar year 2016, The Dow Chemical Company's Seadrift Operations achieved that elusive designation of a perfect safety record, free of any recordable injuries.
Ed Boyer, Responsible Care® leader for Dow's Seadrift Operations, credits the Hazard Awareness Team, a cross-site/cross-functional team part of the site's Strategy Sustainability Element for conducting a midterm "mini-success root-cause investigation" by brainstorming answers to a number of questions.
The team addressed questions including, "How did we achieve six months injury-free?" "How do we finish the year injury-free?" and "What is the biggest factor?"
The team challenged on-site personnel to respond, Boyer said. "And the results were overwhelming," he added.
"A lot of what we did was try to solicit what we call 'noise,'" Boyd said, addressing delegates at the 30th Annual Texas/Louisiana Environmental, Health & Safety Seminar held recently in Galveston, Texas. "If someone sees some signs of something going wrong out there, like unplanned events or near-misses, we were submitting those to our 'noise meter.'"
Heather Bland, Dow's Seadrift Operations' site logistics operation leader, explained the noise meter is a chronological list of everything that happened, a one-page learning report workers could examine to become more aware of what was happening safety-wise in other areas of the site.
"At Seadrift, we are all in this together," Bland said. "So this is all part of trying to make things more visible and to make sure we're sharing."
Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative
"Before, when we were having poor performance in one unit, a lot of the attitude in another unit was, 'Well, at least it didn't happen to us,'" Boyer said.
In response to that lack of sense of shared responsibility, a change was made whereby success is no longer judged by individual units but instead across the entire site.
Boyd said he "can't emphasize enough" the importance of leadership engagement and its trickle-down effect from senior management through all levels of employees. Positive engagement combined with visibility of senior leadership resulted in increased morale on-site and encouraged a "genuine excitement to be part of Seadrift" among workers, he added.
Boyd noted the Seadrift site workforce is divided evenly between Dow employees and contractors.
"We could not have achieved our success without our Contractor Alliance Safety Team (CAST)," he said.
Ultimately, Boyd said, it is integral for employees and contractors alike to feel purpose, mastery, and autonomy in the execution of not only their own jobs but also the overall completion of their teams' projects.
"Purpose," he said, "is a shared vision for greatness or something they can believe and buy into," including visceral reminders of a can-do attitude or the goal of a perfect season.
Mastery, Boyd continued, includes giving workers the help and resources they need to succeed. It is also important to encourage workers to be partners in safety and proactively get them engaged ahead of time to help them learn.
"We are not here to police and punish," he said. "We are here to partner and to provide positive reinforcement and praise when we see the right things going on.
"Then give them autonomy, the space to do great things. Build the trust between employees and leadership, which includes accountability, but don't forget to recognize the positive."
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