I was just thinking about the slogan “Safety is No Accident” and I was wondering how old it actually is.  I know that the slogan has been around since before I started in this industry and my quick Google search hasn’t told me anything yet!  

However “cliché” the slogan is, I was thinking about how appropriate it still  is.  Safety in general and accident prevention is not a passive activity.  There is no way that simply sending an email out to the team or placing some well positioned signs in the plant will prevent accidents by themselves.  We cannot just will ourselves to be safer.  Safety and accident prevention is a highly involved suite of activities that must occur daily in order to have the effect that we want.  It starts with leadership and the leader’s true belief that all incidents are preventable and that core to this is being self-aware of their own and other’s risk tolerance.  Emails, signs and posters are just too passive to make the difference in the behaviours and the culture of the organization that are needed to eliminate injuries and incidents from occurring; they have a role as reminders, but they are simply not engaging enough.

But some of the activities that are much more “active” in nature to improve safety performance include:

• Better work planning that includes execution reviews from a safety prevention perspective.  If we include “safety” as part of the planning of the work, we tend to be safer in the execution.  This includes thinking through the set-up of a job, the required tools that are needed, and the implications of other potential work happening nearby (including overhead).  The work planning phase has the single biggest impact on the potential safety of the workers executing a job than anything else.
• Daily start of shift meetings in which the day’s work plans are reviewed and discussed in detail.  The set up of the job can be reviewed and final considerations such as weather and clashes with other tasks in the area can be assessed.  This time is also an opportunity for supervisors to determine if they have the right crew make up in terms of numbers and competencies to do the work and to interact with each of their team mates and assess if they are fit for work.
• Good quality field level risk reviews and tool box talks in which the task at hand is fully reviewed by the workers and the risks of executing the job at that time and place may have.
• High quality field tours in which safety is promoted, work observations completed, and face to face discussions with work crews occur.  Remember to “catch” people doing things right, and to do this much more than pointing out only what is wrong.
• PPE checks in which team members check each other’s PPE as a final assurance to make sure that everyone is “good to go” (if it is good enough for the U.S. Navy SEALs, it’s good enough for me!)
• Organized housekeeping events in which the entire crew is involved in a plant specific clean up activity.  This can be expanded to include things like painting handrails or walkways and corridors, or similar other minor maintenance activity.  Leveraging personnel from another area to walk through your area to leverage their cold eyes, may highlight things that we may have become “blind” to.

Finally, remember that we as leaders cannot delegate safety to someone else.  It is our top priority and paramount duty, and it takes a lot of work by each of us to get it right.  We must continually model the active behaviours of leading the way with respect to safety.  And, of course, remember, “Safety is No Accident!”