Applying Deming's 14-Points to Worker Safety
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Dr. W. Edward Deming developed 14 points for continual improvement that can be applied to worker safety. The points focus on constancy of purpose for safety, eliminating fear in the workplace, and ensuring management's commitment to safety improvement through education, training, and breaking down barriers between departments. Top management must clearly define their permanent commitment to improving safety and take action to implement Deming's principles.
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Applying Deming's 14-Points to Worker Safety
- 1. Applying Deming’s 14-Points to Worker Safety Phil La Duke O/E Learning Presents… My Account o Global Dashboard o Stats o Blog Surfer o Tag Surfer o My Comments o My Blogs o Edit Profile o Support o WordPress.com o Log Out * My Dashboard * New Post * Edit Post * Blog Info o Random Post o Follow this Blog o Add to Blogroll
- 17. Thank You! This presentation is available at www.safety-impact.com.
Editor's Notes
- Phil La Duke makes this presentation to companies and professional events. If you are interested in having Mr. La Duke present, call him at 248.860.1086 or email him at Pladuke@oe.com
- After yet another safety professional asked me how to change their safety culture I decided to revisit the father of the quality revolution, Dr. W. Edward Deming seminal work, Out of Crisis, (in my estimation) remains the quintessential blue-print for organizational change. Many consider Dr. Edward Deming the father of modern manufacturing, the inventor of the Total Quality Management, and of the principle architect of the quality revolution. In 1982 Dr. Deming summarized his philosophy in 14 points in his book Out of Crisis . Deming’s 14 points are the foundation of lean manufacturing and lean principles. But underlying Deming’s philosophy was his deep seated belief that variation was the root cause of most of the problems in manufacturing. While Deming’s 14 points were intended to address quality issues they are equally pertinent to safety issues.
- Deming advocated the rejection of short-term reactions in favor of proactive long-term planning. At the crux of this planning was the belief that organizations should focus more on prevention than on short term goals. Certainly constancy of purpose—the belief in the value of a long-term commitment to continual improvement—applies to safety. The constancy of purpose toward safety supports safety inspections that look for process improvements to reduce work place risk, the development and deployment of safety strategies, and continuous improvement workshops focused on safety improvements.
- If we extrapolate Deming’s second point to include safety we discover a safety system that no longer tolerates Incident Rates or Days Away or Restricted Time rates as acceptable measures of safety. The transformation of Western management style needs to include the rejection of any metric that tolerates any injury level as expected or acceptable in favor of metrics that express safety as the absence of risk factors and that seek to eliminate all risk of injury from a production system. Additionally, there has been much attention in recent years on the idea that organizations must transform their corporate culture to a safety culture. Despite the differences in opinion among safety professionals as to the exact form this change should take, and the best means by which to achieve this change, many agree that a new and radical change in the approach to worker safety must be adopted.
- Basically, Deming argued that the way to achieve quality is to hardwire it into the process, and this is absolutely true for safety as well. As Deming argued for organizations to cease dependence on mass inspection, companies wishing to become truly safe must cease dependence on annual audits and compliance programs to ensure worker safety and look for ways to use statistical evidence to identify and correct safety “hot spots”. This is not to say that organizations should abandon safety audits, rather, the focus of audits needs to shift from being primarily an indicator of compliance and more an indicator or progress toward the goal of a zero-risk workplace. Safety audits should be focused on validating improvements in safety not on validating compliance.
- When suppliers fail to meet specifications the variation it introduces into our processes are just as likely to injure our workers as it is to imperil our quality, reliability, or delivery. When suppliers fail to meet production schedules, ship poor quality, or otherwise work out of process they force us to escalate our risks by working outside of our own processes. Unreliable suppliers cannot be tolerated. Additionally, the safety records of our potential suppliers should be a key determining factor in whether or not we award our business to them. Unreliable suppliers force our workers to work out of process which raises the risk of injury exponentially.
- A robust process is the greatest safeguard against worker injury available to organizations today. A truly efficient process is one that does not produce waste, and injuries are a profound source of workplace waste in that they expend resources without returning anything of value. The safest processes are also the most efficient processes. The key to a safer work places lies not in the creation of a safety culture (or more accurately a safety subculture) rather in the development of a corporate culture that is characterized by a relentless pursuit of process improvement.
- Perhaps the best way to keep worker’s safe is to train them in the safest way to do their jobs, and the best way to train workers is to do so in an environment that approximates the actual conditions in which the worker will work. Where it is safe to do so, workers should be trained on the job. And as the job requirements change, so too should the workers be trained in the new processes; ideally, this training should occur well in advance of the implementation of those changes. But far too often, safety training is focused solely on meeting a government regulation and little importance is placed on skills building. The quality of safety training must be improved such that it not only satisfies a governmental mandate but that it also provides meaningful skills for making the workplace safer.
- Safety needs to be leadership driven and Operations owned, but for that to happen safety professionals need to do a far better job of educating Operations leadership in interpreting safety data and indicators, and the basics of safety strategy. It’s fine for safety professionals to demand that Operations own safety, but unless they step up to the challenge of educating Operations leadership it is unlikely that Operations will assume ownership
- When people fear reporting injuries and near misses either because of a threat of punishment or a loss of safety incentive their silence impedes continuous improvement and process refinement. The disciplinary approach so often used in the name of accountability reinforces a climate of fear and while it will always be appropriate to discipline those who willfully, recklessly, and negligently endanger themselves and others, these incidents are exceedingly rare. The organization must be taught to see near misses and incidents as opportunities to learn about shortfalls within their processes. Injury causes and workplace hazards must be investigated to their root causes and permanent corrective actions must be implemented.
- Safety is everyone’s job and the safety process must make this more than a philosophical slogan. Each job description should have a clear, measurable, and observable explanation of specifically what tasks must be completed by that individual to ensure that the workplace is operating with minimal risk of injury.
- Deming saw efforts to promote quality through slogans and reward systems as sources of friction and conflict within the organization—because defects are most often the result of human error or naturally occurring variation—the punishment for such actions do not achieve the intended results nor do rewards make a marked difference in improvement. Safety has seen a similar trend. Injured employees are often blamed for the loss of safety rewards and the pain of their injuries is compounded by the hostility or disappointment of coworkers and supervisors. Nobody wants to get hurt, and the process is not intentionally designed to hurt them: fix the problem not the blame.
- In simple terms, Deming was saying that one gets what one measures but often the measurements yield unintended and unwanted results. In the same way, Safety professionals must stop establishing goals for safety that are anything less than zero risk of injuries. Also, safety incentives and reward programs should either be abandoned or modified such that they reward desired behaviors and not unwanted results.
- Similarly, organizations must eliminate performance incentives for safe workplaces and replace the incentives for removing risk. When an organization rewards the absence of something, i.e. injuries, it risks rewarding the concealment of those things. Studies have shown that many safety incentive programs reward people for concealing recordable injuries and punish individuals for getting hurt.
- The more people understand about the process and how to do their jobs the better equipped they are to make meaningful suggestions as to how to improve the process. Safety training should be completely revamped and designed using the latest in instructional design concepts and theories.
- This step resonates with safety professionals who seek to have operations leadership and ownership of safety, but it also underscores the on-going need for safety professionals to educate leadership in what they need to do to achieve true workplace safety. Too often safety professionals throw up their hands and blame their failures on a lack of leadership commitment. Sometimes leaders don’t commit to the safety professional because the safety professional has no credibility, is incompetent, or doesn’t understand the organization’s core business.
- If you enjoyed this presentation you may also enjoy Mr. La Duke’s blog: www.philladuke.wordpress.com