The Three Base Strategy

• By Robert Pater
• Aug 01, 2023

Persistence is a critical leadership attribute — but not when it comes to those nagging injuries that continue to drag down safety performance and culture and adversely impact workers and workloads. Even with leaders having tried things that didn’t much move the needle.

This is why we’ve been called on over 30 years to target certain tenacious injuries — and know these and others can be significantly reduced. And if other companies can make a sizable dent in their most difficult, ongoing injuries, then so can you.

Organizational solutions typically start with leadership. As in, the Senior Vice-President of Manufacturing of a Fortune 50 company telling me, “90 percent of the things we’ve done to improve safety are positive. But to get another 1 percent improvement now, it’s about us, our people and our culture.” Double-ditto for leaders, the “us” in his statement.

Significant gains with longstanding seemingly insolvable safety problems begin with leaders high-grading their mindset and vision. How decision-makers consider a problem will channel where they direct attention, planning, and resources.

Even in many safety-dedicated companies, why do some injuries just keep on keeping on? Though some are company-specific, we’ve seen how leadership’s mindset can be among the biggest obstacles in overcoming tenacious injuries. This stems from assumptions that these safety problems are: 

A. “Inevitable (“What can we do? Our workforce is aging?”), which leads to “Why even bother trying anything else?”

B. “Faked” (“They’re trying to get a free ride. The work ethic has deteriorated.”) This inevitably leads to “clamp down,” “catch them,” “monitor them heavily,” or “motivate with a bigger stick.”

C. Blaming a deficient workforce (“We’re doing all we can, provided the tools and training. They’re just too stupid or ornery to do what they’re supposed to do.”) Leading to pointing critical fingers at those who hire or do onboarding, or to complaining about “the current generation,” etc.

D. Quick-fix mentality, looking for the “ultimate answer” either to “idiot-proof” work or to “force compliance.”

E. Doubling sown — doing more of the same or minor-variations-on-a-theme approaches, which may help to a degree but now gets diminishing returns (like putting in 2 scissors lifts in the same workstation when one only could be accessed).

F. Not Sustained? Applying acute, one-shot approaches to persistent, cumulatively related injuries. Like a flavor-of-the-month attempt to combat “every day of the year” problems.

If any of the above sounds somewhat familiar, consider how to make real differences by adopting this three-base strategy:

1. Take strategic control. Be tenaciously determined to actually, sizably reduce longstanding problems. Recognize a persistent approach is needed to impact persistent injuries.

• Determine: Identify those injuries that have persistently plagued your company. Communicate this and get acceptance and awareness these have been ongoing problems.
• Break through the “it’s inevitable” barrier. Reset everyone’s expectations that these injuries can be considerably reduced.
• Go beyond doing more of the same while expecting different results.
• Check: “Are we stuck in a status quo quagmire?” For example, by legislating “the one, right way” to conduct tasks safely, which is seen as unrealistic, disregarded, and can even backfire into increased risk.

2. Enlist a Human factors focus where persistent injuries have strong human factors components (which applies to many such issues in our experience) — both physical or psychosocial. Avoid an only- or mostly-external approach. Think safety from the inside out. In his third term on the American Society of Safety Professionals’ Board of Directors, Anil Mathur says, “I’ve always found that the only way people can change is from within. That’s why safety is most effective when it comes from inside.”

• Promote internalizing safety through trial and discovery to give people more opportunities to “convince themselves” of the best safety methods, rather than dictating them.
• Build personal safety ownership. Enlist workers to take greater control of their own safety.
• Redirect safety motivation from “shoulds” and carrots-and-sticks more towards “wants” and what they see as benefits to them that go beyond preventing events from happening they don’t believe will actually occur.
• Fortify skills. Incorporating personal injury-prevention skillsets, both physical and mental. Make sure to show how such decision-making and personal injury prevention skills can be ported to a wide array of tasks, both at work and at home.

3. Influence efficiently. When it comes to overcoming stubborn, persistent injuries, we’ve found three levels of influence effectiveness: A. the least effective safety persuasion approach tells people what to think and do. B. The next best teaches them how to think, to understand the need and application of best methods. C. The most effective approach helps others discover for themselves how to think, decide and act the safest ways to perform tasks in a wide array of often-changing situations.

• Go beyond just talk; include a supporting structure (such as training a select range of workers as safety advocates).
• Provide opportunities for people to discover what works.
• Collect and disseminate stories of injury prevention.
• Get as many as possible to share positive safety applications.
• Pilot different approaches rather than over-narrowing prevention options in advance.
• Include ongoing messaging and scheduled reinforcement.
• Make it easy for people to change, rather than expecting them to memorize and comply with overly-complex methods.

A dedicated, persistent approach can do wonders for actually shrinking the incidence and impact of longstanding persistent injuries. While significantly elevating safety culture.

This article originally appeared in the August 1, 2023 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.