Change, especially as it applies to the management sector of any business, is challenging. At worst, it can cause upheaval and chaos. At best, it can create opportunities for improvement and positive development.
According to Craig Branchfield, vice president of environment, health and safety at Momentive Performance Materials, a dramatic change in its leadership team in recent years allowed Momentive "to step back and really decide who we want to be as an organization."
"We have undertaken a lot of different projects over the last several years," Branchfield added, addressing the 2017 Downstream Engineering, Construction & Maintenance Conference held recently in New Orleans. "We have invested a lot of capital into new assets. And through that process, we've learned a little bit about safety on projects."
While researching safety issues pertaining to world-class projects, Branchfield noted a pervasive theme running through the information he was reading.
"That theme was, on projects, safety matters because accidents cause delays, and when a project falls behind schedule for any reason, costs mount," he said. "Therefore, since safety can keep a project on schedule and on budget, it can create a competitive advantage."
Reflecting on Momentive's 2014 safety record that charted approximately 55 injuries, Branchfield began to wonder if adherence to budget was the only value that can be generated by safety.
"And if not, what is? And how do we create that additional value?" he asked. "Our senior leadership talked about this and said, 'What is the path to changing our safety performance at Momentive?' We concluded that it had to start with the foundation of our culture."
Momentive's management team agreed the skills and competencies that had to be put in place to change its safety culture -- if done correctly -- would translate seamlessly into every other area of the company's business.
"Not only would it help safety performance, but it would also help our cost structure," Branchfield said. "And it could help the quality of our products and the reliability of our assets."
In formulating strategy, discussions focused on leadership visibility and employee engagement. Instead of relying on a hierarchy- based structure to have a dialogue about improvements, leadership would engage employees face-to-face, one-on-one. They pledged to develop a new set of core competencies among employees, focusing on communication and collaboration.
"If we were going to get better, we had to get people talking with each other," Branchfield said.
Leadership personnel also embraced taking a very close look at innovation and creativity and building skill sets within the organization.
"If we're going to improve, we had to come up with new ideas, right?" Branchfield asked. "What's that old saying? 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result.' We had to imbed those ideals of innovation and creativity into our people so we could find those things that we're going to do differently to really improve our safety culture."
Four tenets for safety culture
A slate of four key concepts were developed to spark Momentive's change in safety culture. Those included positioning safety as a value, not a priority; making safety personal by engaging families; and recognizing and reinforcing behaviors that are aligned with company values.
Fourth, and perhaps most important, Branchfield said, is driving home the philosophy that safety is never about the numbers.
"It is always about the people," Branchfield said. "When I go around our plant sites, the one thing that I never, ever talk about is the recordable rate. I could care less about recordable rate. I care about the people, because underneath that number is somebody's life that's been affected. Our employees have to believe that we as an organization really, truly feel that and that we really understand and appreciate how an injury -- even a minor injury -- can affect somebody's life.
"We need to make sure that our employees know that we care about them, and that it is not going to end with the completion of an incident investigation."
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