A friend recently asked me, “Fitz, what do you think of the Work to Zero initiative?” I call this Zero Injures.
My answer is, “I think it is Awesome!” Let me tell you why. I started a Zero Injuries Program some 15 years ago. At that time, we had an Annual OSHA Recordable Rate of over 15.0 injuries per 100 employees. If you do the math that is at least 60 OSHA Recordables a year in a machine shop of 400 employees. Using this new philosophy in just over 5 years we lowered the number of injuries to ZERO. In the next 5 years we hit zero one other year, and for the rest of the years maintained an OSHA Recordable Rate of approximately 1.0. In 5 years, we lowered the number of injuries we had from approximately 60 per year to 0 for the next two out of 5 years with 4 or less each year for the other 3 years. Remember those numbers as you follow below and think, “There is no way my organization would buy into all this!”
First: Realize that Zero Injuries is a philosophy. If you think about it, it is not surprising that it sprung up from the philosophy in Quality Control of Zero Defects. Same logic and premise. Better yet it is more than a philosophy, it must be a value or mission of the organization. It is not a goal, for the same reason Health and Safety are not goals and is a value. We could write another article on this subject, but for now let us just say a goal can change priorities and be altered. Goals change. A value held closely by an organization does not change, it is like a guiding star. As was said in the Civil Rights Movement, “We keep our eyes on the Prize!” The power of Zero Injuries is not in the obtaining it, but in always working towards it. You cannot lose sight of that. You must be willing to run a marathon not a sprint to obtain Zero Injures! It took us 5 years!
Second, Zero Injuries requires total commitment of the organization. In the same vein, it requires a new way to look at your overall culture. Zero Injuries is very difficult to maintain if your overall culture is not undergoing positive change and improvement. Your culture must support it, from the top to the bottom. I was fortunate in bringing about Zero Injures, in part because our overall culture was also working towards Zero Defects and Lean Manufacturing. We did not work against those organizational values but used them to bring about the change we needed for Health and Safety. Our efforts in Zero Injures were complementary to the overall culture change we were trying to bring about. You must be willing to embrace change. The change is usually a change in several paradigms.
Third, you must truly engage your workforce. They are the ones that best know the work process and equipment, harness that power. Synergy is a beautiful thing! You probably already have a Safety Team, of from eight (8) to twenty (20) select employees. To engage our workforce, we added safety teams and gave everyone the opportunity to join a Safety Team! We took our once mundane boring Safety Team and charged it up and many more! When we did achieve Zero Injures, we had twelve (12) subject matter safety teams. Each team had an hourly employee as the Leader and a Supervisor as a Champion for the team. Examples of our teams were Lockout, Machine Guarding, Ergonomics, Haz Com, Slips, Trips and Falls, and we even had one on Safety Promotion. We would also add special teams for projects. One Team developed a “slip-resistance scale” for safety footwear. We had 250 employees out of 400 on active safety teams. Can you imagine the power and influence of 250 “safety experts” on your plant floor at the same time!
Now did this take time, work, and resources (money). You bet, just having 250 employees a month working on safety issues for at least an hour per month each was equivalent to what we Human Resources people call over 1.5 FTEs Full Time Equivalents. In Labor Dollars we are talking at least $60,000 to $70,000 per year. That is a lot of money for any organization. However, that was totally offset by taking our Workers Compensation dollars spent from several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, to under $5,000 per year (we are self-insured). So, you tell me, “Is Zero Injuries worth the expenditure of resources?”
What Zero Injuries also took was a lot of my time. I had to train people in all those subjects named, like, Lockout, Machine Guarding, OSHA, and on and on! I love to train but I also had to use external resources. However, I hate to administer WC, and more importantly hate calling spouses on their severely injured spouse. Overall, a substantial win-win for me! You also must teach the principles of team dynamics in the training of the teams, especially the concept of “consensus”, which is the topic of another article. I also had to train people to make presentation and sell their ideas. That was hard at first, but as we gained success it got much easier (See #5 below for how this pays off!)!
Did I mention that you could become a Hero? My team concept became a model for Health & Safety and became a corporate mandated policy for in all our several hundred locations in North America.
Fourth, Zero Injures took a huge amount of patience and faith in the mission by upper management. It took commitment from every level of management, most especially the front-line supervisors. It was an easier sell to the supervisors, when I remembered that when I was a supervisor, I hated to have to complete accident reports on my employees. Zero Injuries was an easy sell when the number of accidents reports the supervisors were required to complete dropped to near zero!
I could not guarantee at the beginning my Zero Injury Plan would be successful. But my management understood, change and improvement, because it was what we did, in the new management style of Lean. It is difficult to prove to Finance and Engineering minded managers that these ideas will have a positive ROI (Return on Investment) in classical Cost Accounting. However, Zero Injuries is much more a leap of faith, and that is where we come back to on making Zero Injuries a value. Leaps of Faith are much easier when the objective is following a value or mission.
I am not sure exactly why Zero Injures worked for us, but I believe these are some of the reasons and benefits:
- On our plant floor we had 60% of our workforce on safety teams. In their training I made sure they understood they were examples. Part of their commitment to their team was to always be a positive example. To violate a work procedure, what we call in Lean, “Standard Work” or some safety rule, was being a negative example. Peer pressure is an awesome power for negative and positive behavior. We tried to stress the latter! 250 employees wanted to be positive example and pushed others to do the same!
- We had subject matter experts all over the plant. If a supervisor had a machine guarding question, they contacted a member of that team. I could spend my time managing the process and less on day-to-day questions.
- I no longer had to worry about having all the SDS for every chemical in the plant or all the secondary labels on containers. My Haz Comm Team did it and did a better job than I ever could. The same thing occurred with auditing the Lockout Procedures on 850 machines, my Lockout Team did it, and better. Another very good example was our Slips, Trips, and Falls Team devised a method to reduce our annual falls in the main parking lot from 6-7 major injury falls per winter to 0 (We are in northern Wisconsin). Our Ergo Team implemented a dynamic lifting program and created a Lifting Lab to teach safe lifting techniques to all employees. Back Injuries dropped to Zero! With my teams being tactical I could spend much more time being strategic!
- We made it fun and enjoyable. We celebrated “Wins”. Our Safety Promotions Team came up with plant-wide games and contests! We did everything we could to keep safety on everyone’s mind and fun.
- Finally, this one surprised me some but when I discerned it, I used it all the time. It always worked! I call it the Basketball Coach Appeal. Prior to Zero Injures and Employee Engagement I would make a presentation to upper management about some safety investment I wanted to make. Even though I always tried to make a good health & safety case, again under the old paradigms, I would only win as many as I lost. It was never a sure thing. However, I learned to be like a basketball coach. If I saw a hazard, I would take it to the appropriate safety team. I would also give them ideas on control, I would usually have a favorite control, but always be careful to be subtle and let them think they came up with the idea! I would give them ideas and gently give them some of my thoughts, what I called “planting seeds. I would then sit back and watch human nature take over! The team would all jump on board and take the ball and run. It was like a good Basketball Coach planting a seed, or an idea with a player, other coach, or referee! When the safety team made a presentation on a safety project it always got great results, never failed to get the controls in place to keep employees safe! Upper Management loved the fact that hourly employees developed and advocated a project. Much more powerful than those ideas coming from a lone Safety Manager! I was once asked if this technique was devious. Maybe, but I learned a long time ago the means mostly justify the results!
“It is AWESOME and if you have the right vision and culture, anyone can do it!
If Safety Fitz may be of assistance, please let us know!
