Poor Safety Record? Blame Your Process, Not The Worker
Everything we do in business is a process. From hiring to paying our workers, selling our services to distributing products, processes dictate how managers and employees achieve the goals of the company. When well developed and maintained, processes can be helpful in streamlining our approach and creating consistency in our outcomes; however, when poorly created, communicated, and maintained, processes will create frustration and lead to low productivity, poor quality, increased incidents, and lower returns. In safety, one example of a broken process for many companies is the Incident Cause Analysis. If your company is like most, cause analysis typically will lead to blaming the worker and proclaiming that they either lacked training or purposefully broke the rules and took unnecessary risks. You may also notice that the same incidents seem to come around over and over, regardless of the amount of training workers received or that despite a written disciplinary policy, those workers w...