Proactive Safety Leadership: The Relationship between Ops and Safety

I recently had an interesting conversation with an operations manager I wanted to share.  We were discussing safety leadership and the relationship between the operations and safety departments. This organization has a good safety culture; however, the manager knew there were always opportunities to improve. He recalled a recent situation where a safety professional called a safety stop and shut down a job. The manager gave the details about the work, the hazards involved and agreed that the safety stop was the correct call. What happened next is where he saw an opportunity to improve. Getting the job back up and running took what he recalled as “an act of congress.” The safety team was slow to come up with a viable solution and could not agree on how to do the job safely, which caused days of delay. The meetings between operations and safety did not lead to a productive solution and instead leaned towards blame. This manager thought that everything was focused on what could not be done.  With a deep breath, the manager said, “I want our safety group to have the same sense of urgency in getting the job back up and running safely as they do shutting down jobs.”

Having a Sense of Urgency

What does it mean to have a sense of urgency? For this operations manager, he wanted to see the safety team prioritize safety solutions and come up with solutions quickly.  He also wanted to see the operations and safety teams work better together to create safe-production. From a behavioral standpoint, we discussed some actions the manager wanted to see when jobs are shut down:

• Prioritize the solution development. Move the solution to the most important thing on everyone’s schedule.  Some of the delays in this situation were directly attributed to regularly scheduled activities getting in the way and slowing down the process.  When jobs are shut down, developing the solution becomes a number one priority.
• Get to the job site immediately. “Getting eyes on” would allow the operations and safety teams to see the hazard(s) and develop solutions more clearly than when sitting in a meeting room.  In this situation, other delays were created when energy was spent on solutions that could not work based on job site conditions. Getting people to see the site, and discussing solutions in real time, would allow for better problem solving.
• Escalate quickly.  The final thing he saw as an opportunity for improvement was involving senior leaders faster.  It was not until this manager got involved with the shut-down, and brought in additional resources, that a viable solution was developed to mitigate the hazards associated with the job.  However, he was not proactively brought in. Instead, he had to insert himself after days of not seeing progress.  Escalating quickly could have avoided some of the time wasted related to not having the right people involved in the solution.            

Beyond Urgency to Proactivity

In discussing these actions, I shifted the conversation to how this situation could have been prevented in the first place.  This gets at the core of how operations and safety work together.  As in many organizations, jobs are planned and started by operations and then safety is involved to ensure compliance.  This means the safety department is always put in a reactive position.  Instead, the department should be brought in during the planning phase so that the plan developed becomes the safest way to get something done from the beginning. This puts operations and safety focused on the same goal: creating safe-production.  In this situation, if the safety team was brought into the planning phase, a way to mitigate the hazard that caused the safety stop could have been put into place before resources were allocated to do the job.  This would have allowed it to get done on time. While not every job may need this number of resources in the planning process, moving the safety department into a more proactive role allows for safer designed work and helps create alignment between the departments.

In discussing ways to create a sense of urgency, the operations manager and I came up with several behaviors he wanted to see from the operations and safety departments. These behaviors linked both departments towards a common goal and created a way for them to work more seamlessly together.  In sharing this story, I hope it helps you consider ways in which creating and clarifying new ways to work may help drive organizational goals and create ROI.