Safety should be a top value at ANAD

ANNISTON ARMY DEPOT, Ala. -- Often, we hear the term "safety is our top priority" when our actual mindset and mantra should be "safety is one of our values."

Too often, priorities change or are rearranged in the hierarchy of daily activities according to situations.

Values are important and lasting beliefs, or ideals, shared by the members of a culture about what is desirable or undesirable.

Values are seldom changed, rearranged or compromised.

Anniston Army Depot's Safety Office is committed to creating a culture where management and employees understand and uncompromisingly reduce and manage the hazards in work environments.

This involves not only our commitment to safety as a value, but our commitment to factors integrating that value into the depot culture.

There's no question, effective safety management provides a competitive business advantage and it all starts with a personal commitment to safety.

While no prescriptive approach to safety excellence exists, there are four essential characteristics to consider: management leadership, employee involvement, measurement systems and a continuous safety improvement process.

The success of our safety program is dependent on the entire workforce driving a proactive and disciplined culture.

Several key pieces contribute to the creation of that culture, but it all has to start with leadership. Organizations need leaders, at all levels, demonstrating support and commitment by regularly engaging the workforce on the most critical safety behaviors and values.

The International Maritime Organization defines safety culture as "an organization that gives the appropriate priority to safety and realizes that safety has to be managed like other areas of the business."

Safety culture is more than just avoiding accidents or even reducing the number of accidents; although these are good measures of success.

Management systems and their associated policies and procedures depend upon the actions of individuals for their successful implementation.

For example, a work procedure or regulation may properly reflect the desired intent and be adequately detailed in its instructions. However, the successful execution of the procedure or adherence to a regulation requires the actions of properly trained individuals who understand the importance of the underlying intent, who accept their responsibility for the task and who appreciate that taking a simplifying, but potentially unsafe, shortcut would be wrong.

It has been suggested that the only thing of real importance leaders do is create and manage culture.

The leadership of an organization is responsible to identify the need for culture change, fostering that change and sustaining a sound safety culture, once it is established.

Building a safety culture in an organization does not happen overnight. At the root of a safety culture change is behavior and changing human behavior requires education.

Changes occur on two levels: getting the individual to stop doing some things and getting the individual to start doing other things.

In the past, improvement in workplace safety or in the control of workplace risks has come about through the provision of safer machinery or processes, the better training of employees and the introduction of formal safety management systems.

Consequently, in a workplace benefiting from these improvements, many residual workplace accidents result from operator error -- one or more operators doing a job differently from the safe way they were trained to and/or zero hazard awareness training for the injured employees.

Typically, focus areas such as targets, deadlines, budgets, performance criteria and profitability drive business. None of these will ever go away.

The question is, if safety is a value, do we integrate its importance during these key conversations?

Here at ANAD, six-minute huddles, or toolbox talks, focus on detailing the critical tasks for the day. A casual "be safe" is thrown in, so the supervisor can say safety was covered.

But, what does "be safe" mean?

It is too vague, too general and has no connection to the work.

It is only when supervisors at all levels take the time to discuss and explain how each task must be approached, in order for it to be safely executed, that the necessary change toward safety as a value occurs.

Safety cannot be an optional accessory, only applied as a reactionary response.

It will only become a value when we give it prominence by integrating it into discussions regarding the execution of daily planning, production targets, strategy, human resources and budgets.

Our goal should be for our whole workforce to the have the mindset of "safety is our highest value and we collectively embrace a proactive command culture of risk identification and management to achieve our mission with zero preventable mishaps."