Page 83 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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Employee Involvement—Developing Teamwork 61

the involvement of employees on formal teams. Teams can be effective in
carrying out numerous types of safety initiatives, including identifying and
implementing safety improvements, providing feedback to management on
key safety initiatives, and helping to identify and remove barriers to im-
provement.
Using safety teams comprised of personnel at all levels of the organi-
zation provides many benefits. A primary benefit is that participation on
teams creates the employee ownership and commitment needed to carry out
and sustain successful safety initiatives. As reviewed in Chapter 5, the
achievement of synergy is also dependent upon effective teamwork.
Without teamwork, the quality of decisions and programs suffers. A third
benefit in using teams is that it expands the organization’s available re-
sources for problem solving. Hourly-roll and other personnel not normally
in the development loop for safety initiatives can make valuable contribu-
tions to the organization through their involvement on teams.

Effective Teamwork Techniques

When forming a new team, care must be taken to ensure that roles of
team members are understood. Clarifying roles and responsibilities helps
ensure that critical items get done, overlap and duplication are minimized,
and disruptive power grabbing is avoided. Roles should be clarified for
members, leader(s), facilitator(s), and for other participants. Although a fa-
cilitator is not always a necessity, a trained facilitator, who is aware of what
is going on in the group and possesses the expertise to make appropriate in-
terventions, can often greatly enhance teamwork.
Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for teams to reach decisions and then
have individual team members criticize team decisions to coworkers. Once
a team has “shot itself in the foot” in this manner, it has little chance of ob-
taining the full organizational support needed to meet team objectives. Such
undesirable situations can be avoided by working toward a true consensus
in team meetings, rather than reaching decisions by other methods, such as
“the boss decides” or “majority rules.”
Consensus is often confused with reaching a unanimous decision or
with “majority rules.” However, making decisions by majority vote does not
usually provide a situation in which team members walk away from meet-
ings in full support of the decisions made. For example, if a decision passes
on a 60-to-40 vote, 40 percent of team members are likely to leave the meet-
ing not supporting the team’s decision. A true consensus is reached when
each individual team member can affirm the following:

I believe you understand my point of view;