Page 45 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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The Barriers to Improvement 23

for achieving results. Organizations typically recognize employee involve-
ment as a prerequisite for improvements in performance areas such as prod-
uct quality, productivity, cost control, customer service, and injury
prevention. However, the same organizations may attempt to address the
prevention of high-consequence incidents with a top-down, regulatory-
driven approach. Such an approach fails to achieve ownership at the impor-
tant point-of-control operating level. Restricting employee involvement
may also result in failure to include preventative actions known to be criti-
cal only by point-of-control personnel.
Failure to actively involve employees is a barrier to achieving a com-
mon understanding throughout the organization of “how, when, and why”
work critical to sustaining safe operations must be done. Without a common
understanding of performance expectations or the relevance of the work,
failure is a predictable outcome.

Inadequate Measurement and Feedback

Teams are more likely to achieve and sustain excellent results when per-
formance is measured and feedback is provided. Experience has validated
the accuracy of the old adage, “What gets measured gets done.” However,
in many organizations, measurement and feedback systems regarding the
status of work necessary to sustain incident-free operations are often inad-
equate. As a result, operating personnel, management, and others with a
need to know are not sufficiently informed and are therefore not in position
to manage effectively.
Most organizations maintain a strong focus on minimizing the fre-
quency of OSHA recordable injuries. As part of an organization’s process
for preventing recordable injuries, observations of work practices and the
documentation of minor injuries serve as ongoing reminders of the poten-
tial for experiencing injuries. These actions also provide ongoing feedback
of effectiveness for the injury prevention process. In the process to prevent
serious incidents, however, measurement and feedback systems are often
not as formally established for upstream indicators of potential problems.
For managers who typically “manage by exception,” such lack of informa-
tion about potential problems can create an unjustified overconfidence in an
organization’s serious incident prevention efforts.
Without knowing the status of critical work, management options to in-
fluence serious incident prevention become limited—typically to general
exhortations regarding the importance of safe work. You know them well—
“Safety is Number 1—Let’s make all production safe production”—and
similar slogans. Such communications, when not supported by adequate