Page 51 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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A Proven Process

Improvement Model

In my career as a manager, nothing was more personally disappoint-
ing than an injury to a team member. (My active involvement in promot-
ing safety as a line manager ultimately led to my reassignment as safety
director.) For many years, my efforts resulted in rather marginal improve-
ments in safety performance despite a strong commitment to the achieve-
ment of a safe workplace. The inability to achieve and sustain
breakthrough levels of improvement became a source of frustration.
Finally, in the mid-1980s a change from the traditional safety man-
agement process to a performance-management-based, behavioral ap-
proach was initiated with employees taking a leadership role. The change
to a behavioral approach proved to be a milestone event that led to break-
through improvements. The behavioral safety process remains in effect
today and has been the catalyst for reducing injuries in many areas of the
company by more than 80 percent.
While eliminating workplace injuries is a part of a manager’s safety
responsibilities, there are other requirements that are also critical to suc-
cess. In addition to preventing injuries, managers must be responsible for
the safety of the process, i.e., preventing property and equipment damage,
production downtime, hazardous material spills, and similar incidents.
Ensuring regulatory compliance and workplace security are other key per-
formance expectations.

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