Culture Scale

I can remember when I was a child growing up in Akron, Ohio, returning home from school on the big yellow Springfield Township school bus. Once home, I would tell my mother how some big bully had called me names and humiliated me in front of my friends. I can still see her smiling face saying these comforting words, “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me.” That was my mother’s way of protecting me against all that was bad in the world, and it made sense to me at the time.

Today as a grey-headed safety professional working in a metal recycling facility, I have found that my mother was wrong about the power of words. I believe that words have the power to hurt people and possibly have hurt someone in your company and may have even killed someone.

You may not believe me when I say that.

However, as a safety professional, I have been taught to find the root cause of an accident, to find out who did what and to fix the problem. I look at behavior, I look at the incident rate and I look at the process in general.

But, how many of safety professionals consider the words we use? How many of us even think about words at all? I know I never did, until it dawned on me one day while I was out in the scrap yard checking fire extinguishers and overheard employees and a supervisor conversing about a job to be performed. The words I heard overwhelmed me, and I suddenly had a new perspective on safety: the impact of the spoken word.

Let’s look at how words can potentially hurt or possibly even kill workers every day in the workplace, even in your workplace.

DIRTY CULTURE

Words are like seeds, giving rise to a company’s safety program and culture.

Do you have supervisors, managers or employees who are saying things like, “Don’t lock this machine out, because we’ll have it fixed before you can even lock it out,” or, “Don’t bother wearing your safety glasses, hardhats or steel-toed shoes, because we don’t have time for you to put this stuff on; we need to fix this machine now, so production can resume.”

Words can change the way a person thinks. If your employees hear the phrases stated above, your employees are starting to think that it’s OK not to lock out a machine or wear their personal protective equipment (PPE).

What a person thinks can change the way he or she feels about a subject. In the above examples, your employees may start to feel safe doing their jobs when equipment isn’t locked out or when they are not wearing their PPE. They feel that it is acceptable.

What a person feels affects the decisions that he or she makes. Because they feel it’s acceptable, your employees make a conscious decision not to lock out a machine or to wear their PPE.

The decisions that a person makes affect the actions he or she takes. When a decision is made, the next step is to act on it. Now your employees are doing their jobs without locking out a machine or wearing their PPE.

A person’s actions shape his or her habits. At this stage, your employees don’t even think about locking out equipment or wearing their PPE; their unsafe actions are now habits.

A person’s habits shape his or her character. Your employees are now a liability, as they have become unsafe; it is now part of their character.

Your character shapes your destination in life. Somewhere in your employees’ working life, he or she is likely to get hurt or possibly even killed because his or her actions and character have created this destiny.

It is not a question of if, but when, the accident will happen. It could be at work or sometime during their off hours because this type of employee is destined to become a statistic. This likelihood has arisen because your company and its lifestyle have let this cultural shift away from safety to occur. The question is, how do you change it?

CLEAN CULTURE

I believe that we as managers have the employees that we deserve. Let’s face it, we have created these people; we have let them become who they are.

If you want to get extraordinary safety results from a group of ordinary people, I believe it must start with the safety professional or manager. The people in these roles must become more proficient in the way they present safety in the workplace, and I believe that starts by carefully selecting the words employees and management use.

To develop a clean culture of safety, your supervisors, managers or employees should be saying things like, “Hey! You need to wear that fall protection because you are working 6 feet off the ground. We can’t get production out if you’re not here to help the company because of an industrial injury.”

The words an employee hears starts to change the way that person thinks. Your employees start to think that they could get hurt if they don’t follow the rules; they think it’s unsafe.

What a person thinks changes the way he or she feels. Your employees don’t feel safe working in a dirty culture, and they start to understand the dangers.

The way a person feels changes the decisions that her or she makes. When safety is a priority throughout the organization, your employees now make a conscience decision to change the way they work; they start making the right decisions regarding safety.

A person’s decisions change the actions he or she takes. Your employees are doing their jobs safely because they have decided the best action to take is the safe one.

A person’s actions shape the habits he or she develops. When safety is a priority, your employees won’t even think about safety procedures, because safe actions are now a habit.

Habits influence a person’s character. Your employee is no longer a liability, as he or she has become a safe employee.

A person’s character affects his or her destination. Your employees are safe workers because their destiny has changed.

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

The two scenarios listed above are examples of dirty and clean safety cultures. I think that each of us at some point in our careers have worked for or visited a work site and said, “Oh my God, someone is going to get killed working here.” I would be willing to bet that the words used at that location are from the “dirty culture” example and that those employees have been exposed to that culture for so long that they don’t realize they are destined for peril.

The next time you go out to the yard, I would like you to listen to your employees talk as they do their jobs. Listen to the words they use. Once you have done that, consider where they might be in the cycle: Are they at the habit stage or has their destination already been set? Is your safety culture clean or dirty? Once you know where on the scale each employee rates, you will know the level of difficulty you face in changing your culture to emphasize safety.

And remember, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, and words can definitely hurt me.”

The author is director of safety and human resources for City Scrap & Salvage Co., Akron, Ohio, and an Occupational Safety and Health Administration-authorized trainer and ambassador. He serves on the board of Summit County (Ohio) Safety Council, as website chair for the Akron Society for Human Resource Management and as safety committee chair for the Northern Ohio Chapter of Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. He can be reached at gnewsome@neo.rr.com.