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Total Safety Management

by Geof Cox 1992

Most major disasters—the Clapham rail crash, the Zeebrugge ferry sinking, the Piper Alpha fire, the Titanic—have all, in part, been the result of the human side of safety falling down. In all of these situations there were safety policies and procedures that should have prevented the disaster happening, if they were properly followed. They were not followed, and this points to the need for change in emphasis in the world of safety training and management. We need to move from hard side of safety: procedures, policies etc., to soft side of safety: the human skills that make sure systems work and are followed. In the soft side people are trained in communication, motivation and problem solving and develop the skills to lead others.

Learning from Quality Training

The world of quality training has been through a revolution in recent years with the emphasis changing from Quality Control and Quality Assurance (QC/QA) to Total Quality Management (TQM). In QC/QA the emphasis is placed on systems and checks to detect faults, in TQM the emphasis is placed on preventing faults occuring. It does this by creating a total organisation attitude of quality.

What do you want from people in your organisation? You want them to be doing the Right Things Right.

When something goes wrong, our natural reaction is to assume that someone has made a mistake, in other words tried to do the Right Thing but got it Wrong. We check, and set up controls or procedures that will prevent it happening again.

This is the traditional view of quality improvement, and of safety management - inspecting for defects, investigating incidents when things go wrong and setting controls to assure they do not happen again. What we don't often see is that the processes that people use in their jobs may have actually caused the mistakes. Thankfully, there are very few Luddites in business today, most people don't deliberately make mistakes, they try hard, they follow what has been set out for them, but something goes wrong. They are doing the Wrong Things Right. Traditional quality and traditional safety management would increase the number of inspections and checks in the process, and take responsibility for quality further away from the individual.

In short TQM focuses on creating a quality orientated culture where everyone in the organisation accepts and operates a habitual process of continuous improvement. Doing the Right Things Right, First Time, Every Time.

Safety Management

The same principles and processes can be applied to safety management. As we have already seen, the QC/QA systems are analogous to traditional safety management. Total Quality Management can be adapted to fit the safety scene. In Total Safety Management the focus is on creating a safety orientated culture where everyone in the organisation accepts and operates in a safe manner and looks to make improvements to the safety environment.

Just as in TQM, externally set standards can be derived from the process of competitive benchmarking, where your own standards are compared with the best in the industry. This process was pioneered by Rank Xerox when making their response to the Japanese domination of the photocopier market. In the safety world, many companies have a system of internal comparisons and league tables between plants and factories, but unless external comparisons are made, a sense of complacency can develop with disastrous results. Many organisations have found this to their cost in the quality world, as any study of the automobile and electronics industries will show.

A development of benchmarking as a standard to aim for is the idea of zero defects. The concept that it is possible to operate a manufacturing or service process without making mistakes. There is an apocryphal story of Texas Instruments in its early quality management days writing to all its suppliers with a quality standard of 3 defective parts per 1000. A Japanese supplier wrote back with its next shipment the following: “We do not understand your latest quality demand - we have supplied the 3 defective parts as requested, but have wrapped them separately”. Someone, somewhere is working to a higher standard than you -- in the safety world, some have adopted the notion that it is possible to create and work in a zero accidents environment, and have a different attitude to safety as a result. The DuPont organisation is a case in point. Their safety record is second to none in the highly sensitive chemical industry, and their processes form the basis of a successful consultancy operation.

In a system of Total Safety Management, Safety Committees become action oriented in problem solving and improvement, not just backward looking or confrontational. Training focuses on leadership, teamwork, observation and communication skills as much as on legislation and procedures. Safety management becomes everyone's responsibility, not just the Safety Manager's.

Esso Petroleum began to use Total Quality techniques in the early 1980s (though they weren't called that then) in their safety programme, and the results can still be seen through one of the best safety records in the oil industry. They regularly achieve well in excess of 12 months, often several years, between time losing injuries across the whole company. A board in their Head Office at Leatherhead, Surrey proudly relays the total numbers of days registered in each department between time losing injuries, and over 1000 is not unusual, even in the hazardous areas such as refining, distribution and marine transportation.

Command training

Elsewhere there are some innovative training programmes that have been spawned by the recent reports on the disasters, such as the Command Course run by the Offshore Command Training Organisation for the offshore oil industry. (The Cullen Report stated clearly “...conventional selection and training ..... is no guarantee of ability to cope is the man himself is not able in the end to take critical decisions and lead those under his command in a time of extreme stress...”) This programme draws heavily on the experience of the Royal Navy in training submarine commanders and helps Offshore Installation Managers to experience and develop the skills of leadership and command necessary to manage crisis situations, and thus prevent them becoming disasters.

Their benchmark comparison was loss of life in offshore disasters and loss of life on Royal Navy ships during the Falklands conflict. The offshore industry lost 70.5 per cent, the Navy 7.1 per cent. On one incident alone, comparing the HMS Coventry with Piper Alpha, both which had a critical 20 minutes from initial incident to disaster, the Coventry lost 19 men whilst 167 perished on Piper Alpha. There seems no doubt that we can improve.

Moving from small `s' to big `S'

In all organisations, a change from traditional safety to Total Safety can radically improve safety standards and reduce the costs of accidents. Many organisations mark the change from traditional quality to the world of Total Quality as moving from quality with a small `q' to quality with a big `Q'. Now the need is for organisations to move from safety with a small `s' to safety with a big `S'.

Key Practices in Total Safety Management

1. Empowerment Giving people the auth-ority, information, skills, and support to do their jobs in a safe manner.

2. Employee Involvement Using particip-ative techniques to involve everyone in the process of planning and deciding.

3. Teamwork Bringing people together to learn with each other and to improve their safety awareness and practices.

4. Training and Development Using indiv-idual and team development processes includ-ing formal and informal training.

5. Recognition Identifying, recognising, and rewarding positive results that support the safety mission.

6. Replicate Success Sharing internal successes and external benchmarking as a continuous challenge to improve safety.

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