Safety’s Personal Touch

Environmental, Health & Safety speakers focused on the personal touch—ways employees, not regulators, can help prevent injuries.

“It’s the behaviors of people that have to be managed," said Albert H. Schultz, independent consultant to DuPont Safety Resources of Newark, Del. Schultz, who has developed his techniques for reducing injuries over more than 30 years, stressed that the best behavioral safety programs motivate managers and employees to jointly identify problems, offer solutions and monitor progress.

Dow Jones & Co. uses simple forms to conduct job safety analyses on a wide range of production tasks.

Management must put communication and problem-solving ahead of recrimination and punishment, Schultz said. An employee may climb a ladder to perform a work-related task, but fail to have someone hold the ladder and fall. "You can’t control the fall," Schultz said. "All you can control is whether or not that ladder is there in the first place."

One way to explore such issues is a job-safety analysis. Simply put, JSAs are "a systematic method to determine safety hazards and controls for specific jobs," said Paul Jakubski, manager of corporate environmental and safety issues for Dow Jones & Co.

The process is simple. For each job, Dow Jones employees first break a task down into five-to-10 sequential steps. For each step, they identify potential hazards, including everything from falls and mechanical dangers to chemicals. Workers then recommend actions to prevent the hazards, including controls and training, or protective equipment as a last resort. Everything can be recorded on a simple, one-page form (pictured above).

At Dow Jones’ 17 plants, some 80 to 90 JSAs are now on record and shared among facilities via an intranet. Along with the obvious benefits, JSAs can train new employees, help existing workers review the hazards of nonroutine jobs, and open the door for continuous-improvement changes.

"You get great buy-in from employees," Jakubski added. In fact, Dow Jones requires its plants to conduct at least four JSAs a year, but many voluntarily do more "because they see the benefit," he said.

Not only do such audits put line workers on notice that the company wants input on safety issues, it forces managers to "see the unvarnished truth" about how the business is run, Schultz argued. "You wind up looking beyond situations that have caused accidents in the past to see the next opportunities for harm."

When accidents do happen, a well-conducted investigation can help prevent a costly recurrence, said Elizabeth Miller-Philbrook, safety manager of the Houston Chronicle Publishing Co.

The goal is not to find a scapegoat, but to "influence how you’re going to act in the future," she said. To that end, accident reports should always include action items to help make proactive changes.

Another key: "Don’t accept lame excuses," she said, urging attendees to reject explanations such as "the employee should have been paying more attention." Most accidents are caused either by acts, based on an employee’s knowledge, ability and motivation, or by specific conditions, such as facility design, equipment maintenance or the actions of others.

Schultz discussed an employee initially given a five-day suspension for failing to wear goggles following an eye injury. A thorough review found that no employees had been trained to wear goggles. Worse yet, the task that caused the injury was poorly planned, not poorly executed. Subsequent changes created "a group of people who have a say in how their own jobs operate," he said. "Compare that to a whole group angry that someone got disciplined."

Skeptical that touchy-feely approaches like safety committees contribute to the bottom line? At least one insurance company offers discounts on worker’s compensation premiums to companies with safety committees, said John J. Little, safety manager of The New York Times. What’s more, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires employee involvement in many of its standards, and a committee is an ideal way of complying, he said.

When creating a committee, be sure to identify who should be involved and any specific goals before the first meeting, Little said. Meetings should have agendas and remain focused on safety issues, but "meetings that become too formal and have too many rules... lose the involvement," he said.

At Newsday in Melville, N.Y., managers created one such committee made up of union reps and some "of our more outspoken journeymen," said John Wills, operations director of administration. While fears of "gripe sessions" were initially confirmed, "over time, the meetings grew more productive," suggesting a wide range of specific changes to equipment and procedures that have contributed to dramatic reductions in injuries, he said.

While employee involvement must come from the bottom up, the overall culture of safety must be instilled from the top down, said consultant Arthur N. Mabbett, president of Mabbett & Associates Inc. of Bedford, Mass.

Such an approach "must be a daily management activity, not an add-on," he said.

EHS issues should become key parts of both new-employee orientation and regular performance reviews, Mabbett said. Supervisors should be gauged on how well they impart the importance of safety to their teams, he added. Indeed, at Newsday, meeting safety goals now accounts for 35 percent of managers’ annual bonuses, according to Wills.

Each of these approaches affects workers’ behavior, which in turn affects the bottom line, speakers agreed. "If people believe you really want change," Schultz said, "they’ll respond properly."

Training: Online or Off?

Information Age technology affords new ways to train employees, but conventional instructional methods still work better in some situations, experts said during a discussion-turned-debate on training.

“My position is to defend training the old-fashioned way," said George Ayers, managing director of Envision Compliance Ltd. of Concord, Ontario. His position, in fact, was exemplified by the speaker-intensive SuperConference itself.

Technology is hardly absent from such settings, Ayers said, citing the use of video and audio, computer-generated presentations and handouts. Nine companies in 10 use such tools in a classroom-style setting, he said, "because it works."

The old-style lecture-and-listen methodology allows trainers to adjust to the needs of the group before them, he said. Without an instructor, a student may stall undetected.

Instruction based on reading followed by group discussion and demonstrations can generate 90 percent retention rates, he argued. Disadvantages include juggling class schedules around work schedules and rounding up a good training staff, Ayers acknowledged.

GoTrain.net LLCıs Web-based training modules include interactive exercises such as this one on hazardous spills.

Ayers cautioned that certain forms of new-style instruction do not meet U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration training requirements.

"I really think that traditional training is the training with a future," he said.

Ayers’ online counterpart, Allison von Gruenigen, client-services director of GoTrain.net LLC of Knoxville, Tenn., argued that the future’s already here—and on the World Wide Web.

Web-based training is ideally suited to teaching cognitive skills, such as basic facts, figures, rules and processes, said von Gruenigen. It’s not as useful in teaching psycho-motor skills, such as how to golf, or in helping people adopt new attitudes.

Web training also has the distinct advantage of being free of geographic and scheduling constraints, she said. Moreover, students can choose approaches best suited to individual learning styles. Online monitoring lets instructors track each student’s progress.

Effective Web-based training does not simply shovel existing materials online, she said. Instead, it makes full use of the Web’s interactivity. For instance, one of GoTrain.net’s quizzes involves dragging containers of various substances to a storage locker, with interactive explanations of right and wrong decisions.

But she cautioned that Web-based training has to balance good instruction practices with available technology, "not just some splash and flash to look good on the screen."  

Driving Safer Performance

Turning employees into better drivers is paying off for Media General Inc. of Richmond, Va.

“Driver training,” admitted Safety Director David Templeman Jr., "is about as fun as getting sand in your eye." But for a newspaper, which may have hundreds of people driving around on company business, improving skills to reduce accidents is time and money well spent.

Media General is halfway through a multiyear program to train its employees—regardless of whether they drive company- owned or personal vehicles—in enhanced driver skills. The program has proved effective in changing behavior behind the wheel, Templeman said, citing a 27 percent reduction in accident frequency and 74 percent decrease in accident costs since the program was launched in 1998.

At The Tampa Tribune, driver training is now part of the new-employee orientation program, said Tom Boudreaux, safety and environmental manager.

The Tribune uses employees who have been trained as trainers by Smith System Driver Improvement Institute Inc. of Arlington, Texas. Boudreaux recommended that trainers be selected carefully, as they need to be willing to work with others, talk in front of a group, and hold down jobs with the flexibility needed to conduct training sessions. Managers are not good choices because of the demands on their time, he said.

Like parent company Media General, the Tribune reported a sharp reduction in accidents, from 4.2 auto liability claims per million miles driven in 1998 to 3.0 claims per million miles in 1999 and 1.5 claims per million miles last year. The community benefits as well, Boudreaux noted, as the good driving skills practiced on the job are carried over into nonwork travel.

The Smith System, explained James A. Smith, vice president of training, helps alter dangerous habits, such as failing to look far down the road and simply not staying in touch with the highway environment. The program repositions a driver to always have a way out of a dangerous situation, he said, resulting in fewer accidents, less fuel use, reduced maintenance, lower stress and reduced insurance premiums.

Many companies that turn to Smith are self-insured, he said, so cutting claims costs has a direct impact on the bottom line.  

Regulation Innovations

Changes to federal regulations and tools to make compliance easier were top-of-mind during many sessions.

Changes to watch include the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s site-specific targeting program, record-keeping requirements for workplace injuries and illnesses, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s anticipated notice of proposed rulemaking for shop towels.

Although an OSHA official praised the newspaper industry for its low injury-and-illness rates, he warned attendees that specific newspapers could still be singled out for inspections through the agency’s site-specific targeting program.

"Even though you have a low industry average, you could have facilities above [the average injury-and-illness rate] that merit inspection," said Tom Galassi, OSHA’s deputy director of compliance programs.

Launched last February, OSHA’s site-specific targeting program brings inspectors to workplaces with lost-workday rates dramatically above industry averages—a lost-workday-due-to-injuries-and-illness rate of 14.0 puts a company on the initial inspection list, while plants with LWDII rates between 8.0 and 14.0 also may be inspected. According to information collected through OSHA’s data initiative, the newspaper industry’s LWDII rate in 1998 was 2.6, below the all-industry average of 3.0. But Galassi noted that some newspapers’ individual rates have exceeded the 14.0 trigger.

Unlike traditional OSHA inspections that focus on specific areas of concern, site-specific targeting investigations are comprehensive—"wall to wall," as Galassi put it—and four times more likely to generate penalties exceeding $100,000.

When newspapers experience workplace injuries and illnesses, they need to be recorded. James J. Kubalik, manager of safety, worker’s compensation and risk management for the Los Angeles Times, previewed changes in OSHA’s record-keeping requirements.