Let’s take a trip back to high school chemistry (but this time, please stifle your groans of boredom). Perhaps you remember filing into the smelly, cold laboratory and listening to the safety protocol presentation drone on with painfully self-explanatory directions: “If you get doused in chemicals, run to the chemical shower. If a vial breaks, alert a teacher immediately.”
Looking back, we can clearly see the value of those basic safety rules. But did it ever occur to you that those simple safety protocols wouldn’t extend to the nation’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?
That’s just what happened with the CDC’s recent anthrax and bird flu exposure, a serious example of a safety breakdown in the workplace. The lab didn’t use approved sterilization techniques and had no standard operating procedures in place regarding the safe transfer of hazardous materials. The resulting debate over safety protocol has brought a lot of attention to workplace safety and the pressures leaders face in trying to create safe operating cultures.
Members of the oversight committee were rightfully livid that CDC scientists exposed themselves and others to potentially life-threatening biohazards. However, their anger took the path of quick-fire blame and punishment instead of effective resolution and future avoidance. Rather than moving the organization toward a culture of safety, this approach based on punishment pushes it far, far away.
Leaders can learn an important lesson about workplace safety from this incident and the resulting staff changes: Workplace safety requires a whole new approach to safety violations, and you need to get started now.
Immediate Alternatives for Workplace Safety Incidents
Not every change to policy and procedure needs a long-term adjustment period. Here are three methods of handling safety and culture issues that will push your company toward a culture of safety now:
- Don’t shoot the messenger. If you punish employees for reporting safety issues to leadership, it will only lead to a culture of cover-ups. The real enemy is the cause of the risk, not the employee. And the only way safety can be proactively managed is by creating a safe environment where employees can fearlessly report safety problems.
- Embrace complexity. Dr. Levi Nieminen, director of R&D at Denison Consulting and a renowned safety culture expert, noted that serious incidents often create legal pressure to hold someone accountable, which amplifies our already potent tendency to attribute error to a single source (often the fired employee). Members of leadership need to fight the urge to oversimplify these incidents and be open to the fact that many factors play into each serious event.
- Learn from your mistakes. Nieminen also explained that the deepest learning opportunities are often outsourced to panels of experts who only partially involve organizational insiders, viewing them as the subjects of investigation rather than an important set of co-investigators. Rather than sitting back and waiting for results, organizations need to internalize the knowledge gained through the incident investigation process.
How to Proactively Create a Culture of Safety
Adjusting your company’s approach to safety right now can help you avoid short-term problems, but for long-term success, you need to work toward building a more effective process overall. Here are four ways to do it:
- Establish common safety standards. Every safe environment starts with establishing and enforcing clear standard operating procedures. But safety can mean different things to different people. To establish an authentic culture of safety, your entire organization needs to accept common definitions and act out these safety standards among employees and leadership alike.
- Invest in equipment and training. Continuous investment in training and education provides employees with the latest knowledge, skills, and abilities to do their jobs safely. It also provides consistent reinforcement that safety is a top priority in the organization.
- Adopt a reporting-friendly process. Your employees need to be able to report safety issues without fear of punishment. Consider adopting an approach that puts the focus on accountability and honesty rather than blame, such as the Aviation Safety Action Program, which many U.S. airlines use to encourage individuals to foster an environment where employees are incentivized to report safety issues.
- Track safety issues. With an increase in reporting comes an incredible amount of useful data. Track and analyze this data to identify and uproot the causes of risk, which will allow you to prevent incidents before they happen.
Our impulse to assign blame and punish quickly is an outdated, reactionary measure that will destroy a company’s culture of safety before it reaches maturity. Instead, apply what we’ve learned from the CDC’s publicized safety breach to build a healthier, safer workplace culture.
Chris Cancialosi, Ph.D., is managing partner and founder at gothamCulture.
