Deming on Safety Point 14: The Transformation is Everyone’s Job
December 1, 2012 2 Comments
By Phil La Duke
By far the most universal belief in worker safety is that safety is impossible without top management commitment and action. It’s also the most offered excuse for the failure of a safety management system. I don’t think I have ever attended a safety conference where I didn’t run into at least one caterwauling, simpering, burnt-out safety professional who blamed all his failures on a lack of support from leadership, or management.
Too many safety professionals are orphans of the modern workplace; helpless eunuchs who are afraid to do their jobs. In most cases, the safety professional is both leader and management. What’s worse is that they don’t want their jobs to get better; they would rather have sympathy. Too many safety professionals would rather stand on the sidelines and grouse that the game is fixed and they have been cheated than to get in the game and win.
Deming believed that organizational transformation was everyone’s job; that everyone in the organization played an integral role in moving the organization away from outdated methodologies and obsolete values and toward a high-functioning organization that is capable of competing on a global scale.
Deming was big on vision but offered little in instruction as to exactly how we are supposed to achieve the desired state. A lot of people criticize him for that, but I think Deming’s lack of prescriptive tools is the greatest manifestation of his genius. There is no magic bullet in business, and there is no one solution that every organization can implement that will guarantee success. Ideas need to be adapted to the business conditions of each individual organization and environments. And while there is no magic recipe for transforming a corporate culture, here are some general guidelines for exactly who owns what in cultural transformation.
Top management commitment and action
This step resonates with safety professionals who desperately want operations leadership to assume ownership of safety. Certainly senior leadership must be committed to an efficient and safe workplace. If the C-suite doesn’t value safety, then safety cannot exist. Unfortunately, many senior leaders don’t have a clue as to exactly what it means to transform the workplace into one that values safety. This issue underscores the on-going need for safety professionals to educate leaders in what they need to do to achieve true workplace safety. It’s unfair for safety professionals to expect management support and commitment until they provide, in specific, measurable terms exactly what their goals and methods are, and the tasks necessary to achieve them.
Transformation of Safety
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. This idiom nicely describes many in safety. If we are going to transform our organizations into high-functioning, highly effective organizations that value worker safety as essential to business excellence then perhaps the biggest transformation must come in the safety professionals themselves. It’s time to reengineer safety—scrape away all the fads, the vestigial practices based on junk science, and commit to change. Changing the safety professional begins in academia. We need to stop producing generation after generation of safety professionals who are trained to perpetuate safety superstitions based on eighty-year old research. We could quickly add safety professional organizations to this list of institutions in need of transformation. Professional conferences must stop pandering to the safety demagogues and hucksters who gather to tell each other what they already believe. The safety media has to stop buckling to safety vendors who, in many cases, dictate which stories are permitted in print (and before anyone accuses me of belly aching, I have never had a story squelched because of an advertiser, but I have been asked to tone down my rhetoric a bit in response to an advertiser complaint.
Operations
Operations must invest in core skills training and stop pressuring the training function for less time spent in classrooms. Training remains the single best way to improve workplace safety, and yet Operations often fights to get workers back into production quicker. This is short-sighted; studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between quality worker training and workplace productivity and worker safety. Operations must come to realize that there is no such thing as profitability and profits without safety.
Maintenance
Poorly maintained facilities and equipment are significant sources of workplace risk. Unfortunately, too often, the maintenance and facilities departments are given passes for not meeting their obligations for worker safety. All maintenance and facility managers need do is howl that they don’t have enough resources and too often senior leadership let’s them off the hook. Lack of resources is not an excuse for not containing a hazard. While it is often impossible to correct a hazard, it is seldom impossible, or even prohibitive to contain a hazard using low-cost alternatives.
Purchasing
Too often purchasing does not look beyond cost. Buying equipment, tools, machines, and materials without taking the safety of these items into consideration often undermines the overall safety of the workplace. In some cases, an investment in purchased goods that are more safe to work with and operate will pay off significantly by creating a safer work environment.
Continuous Improvement
In many organizations the continuous improvement group is completely removed and independent from the Safety function. This organization needs to change quickly if the company is to steward its resources and to improve safety through process improvements. The internecine rivalries between Safety and CI are destructive and should be sought out and exterminated.
Deming was right. Transformation IS everyone’s job and transforming the organization to one that values worker safety and sees safety as an integral element in workplace efficiency will require unprecedented cooperation between traditional rivals. The work will be hard, but the benefits will make this work worth the effort.
About workersafetynet
As a vendor to Ford back in the 80’s I had the privilege of sitting in on a closed circuit presentation by Deming. I understand that one of Deming’s transformational issues in quality manufacturing was to recognize that the person most capable of quality performance was the front line worker. One of the quality improvement initiatives involved allowing line workers to stop the line to insure quality and remove supervisors and manager from such a decision. In essence, if a line worker experienced a problem during the assembly process, rather than let it go, the employee could literally stop the line to fix the problem. This required nothing more from management then acceptance and approval. I recall that Deming believe that the vast majority of employees want to do a good job and would do so given the responsibility, ability, and limitations from supervisors and managers. I remember from this presentation that Deming commented in his quintessential Deming way; “middle management too fat, not good.”
I also understood too at that time that one of the local Ford assembly plants was ninety days from a scheduled closing because poor production and union issues. Management and union accepted Deming’s initiatives and in fact, that initiative was “tested” on the line. The acceptance and approval by plant managers and union leaders coupled with the front line employee embracing the responsibility after the “test” proved significant. That plant is still in operation.
Employees want to work safely. After all, they are the ones with “true” skin in the game. Perhaps if we gave employees the means, methods, and less management we would have a safer workplace and workforce.
Mike:
I learned the Deming/Drucker/Jurand methods turning around a Ford plant that was 90 days from closing in the mid 1980s. Small world. I am amazed at how much resistance I have faced essentially just applying what Deming said about Quality to Safety. But then I remember that it was only when plants were faced with certain extinction that they considered changing. And the objections that the people made against Deming’s views on Quality are essentially the same objections thrown up against making these changes to safety.
One of the other consultants back then used to say, “power can never be created or destroyed; it merely changes forms. that’s as true in organizations as it is in nature. And when we empower employees to make decisions we are taking that power away from someone who has it now. Never expect people to give up power without a fight.” That might have been the only smart thing he ever said, but he hit the nail on the head. Thanks for reading and thanks for your comments.
Phil