Robert Pemberton - Lean Safety: Transforming your Safety Culture with Lean Safety Management

People dont care about how much you know about safety until they know how much you care about safety anonymous tip for Leaders.

Attitude is a little thing that can make a big difference Winston Churchill

Introduction

O NE OF THE KEY TAKEAWAYS from this book is about how you and everyone in your organization should be thinking about safety. The way we want you to think about safety is to imagine your own teenage daughter or teenage son is about to start work at a new construction site. You would most likely be very concerned about what safeguards you would want to have in place to ensure their safety; Safeguards such as adequate training, safety barriers, personal protective equipment (PPE) and so on. This is the way we should think about safety whenever we send a worker out to work on a job. We want them to return home safely to their loved ones at the end of each shift.

But that doesnt mean we should wrap them in cotton wool, otherwise when conditions change, they wont have the knowledge to be able to deal with a different set of hazards. This is why its important to teach them to use their brains to identify the hazards and exposures in the workplace, and to check that the right controls are in place and are effective. If the controls are not in place then they should have the confidence to know they have the power to stop the job and raise the matter with their supervisor. There is no job that cant be done safely. It just needs the right attitude and the right mindset by everyone on the job. People need to be able to make decisions about matter which affect their safety. Not just their own safety, but the safety of their colleagues as well. One of the key values is to look out for your mates. This value, this attitude or set of behaviours comes from having the right culture in place and the means to support it and make it sustainable.

In this book, we make mention of both safety and production because they are inextricably linked. Gone are the days when safety and production were a dichotomy where production was always king. Improving safety performance will reduce costs and improve your bottom line. Improvements in both safety and production both derive from the same basic principles of focusing on the process and generating ideas for improvement with the involvement of workers.

The safety principles outlined in this book are universal safety principles which should apply in your country, irrespective of the specific safety legislation implemented in your country.

Why Focus on Safety?

A CCORDING TO CURRENT statistics the annual cost of injuries globally is in the billions of dollars. In the USA, UK and Australia, a workplace injury occurs approximately every 3 minutes. This is a staggering statistic. Not only does it result in loss of productivity, profit, it results in people being killed or injured, which impacts not only them but their family and friends. In addition, now days, a companys reputation is on the line if it seriously injuries or kills a worker. New and existing safety legislation has severe penalties for business owners and management who neglect to maintain a safe workplace, including heavy fines for individuals and companies and even jail terms.

Why Focus on Lean?

T HE TERM LEAN CAME from the need to eliminate waste in production processes. If you eliminate waste you become Lean. But Safety also benefits from the Lean approach. This is because waste in safety consists of things like Lost Time Injuries, downtime due to equipment damage, people taking time off from work because they are fatigued or people receiving injuries from strains (sometime repetitive strains) and sprains because of poor safety practices. The techniques outlined in the section on Lean Tools for Safety will help you build a Lean, Safer workplace.

Leadership

L EADERSHIP HAS NEVER been so important as it is now, in terms of creating a strong safety culture. Its no longer adequate for leaders to simply commit to safety, they also need to be involved in safety.

Lets contrast two leaders Bob (a strong leader) and Bane (a poor leader). The examples are based on actual real life scenarios, but we have changed the names to protect the guilty.