Injuries in the workplace are impermissible by law. If an injury occurs for a worker due to a work-related accident, with or without lost time, the company for which that person works is liable.

In line with international guidelines, a management system must be firmly in place to deal with the occurrence of an incident itself and with its aftermath. This system must, in fact, work to prevent the incident from occurring again. Logically, companies across the globe have sought to minimize the chances of any type of incident occurring in order to comply with legal requirements.

For many companies and safety professionals, this type of reasoning has translated into a cultural approach to safety: encouraging active participation in safety reasoning across the organisational structure, and connecting safe work to the optimal performance of the whole organisation. The end goal in terms of safety management, both for industry and government, is to achieve the zero-incident target: no recordable incidents, no lost time events.

The road forward

This is no simple task. In order to achieve a sustainable level of safety performance and create support for safety protocols among the entire workforce, companies have pushed for a trickle-down strategy combined with the Deming circle of improvement. What does this strategy look like for a zero-incident approach?

• Safety leadership assesses the state of affairs in the company and creates a plan for improvement based on the findings.
• They will want to emphasize the responsibility of individuals in safety, and define safety processes. Both are tied to control of work.
• The previous step is performed in order to develop and implement the action plan.
• Finally, after implementation, safety leadership assesses the results of the planning, analyzes the new findings, and starts over to close the circle.

A fairly straightforward approach at its base, and one every safety professional will know as plan – do – check – act. What stands out here, however, is the first step: to assess the current state of affairs. What you’re actually looking for is the current company culture. This is not easily retrievable: the means to do so are limited (questionnaires, inspections, systematic control, …) and many would argue culture does not manifest itself in measurable units. So how should one move forward?

Watershed Culture

One way to achieve a zero-incident track record is to implement a work-culture which acts as a self-motivator and take it from there. Limiting the number of incidents and accidents should sprout from the manner of working and should be intrinsically present in the way work is performed.

This means you won’t be assessing the current culture and working from there. Rather, you’ll start at the planning phase. Think of it rather like working back from the negative of a photograph: you’ll only see a clear image if you develop it first. Tackling safety processes in this way and then assessing the results will give you a good idea of how safety actually sits in your company. You’ll have an idea of the work culture and where to go from there.

That is not to say you’ll see a concise and homogeneous picture. Be aware that you will see variance per department, per unit and per individual. This is only natural. Keep in mind that the goal of zero-incident culture is not to hone every mind into the same shape; rather, it’s a means to motivate and include all workers as you move forward together. A process is easier to follow and believe in if it has a clear goal, after all.

Two sides to safety

We’ve established that zero-incidents culture programs seek to limit negative occurrences. But there is a flip-side to this coin that should be mentioned. More and more safety professionals have begun to think differently about the bedrock of what safety actually is: the work as it is performed, rather than how it is imagined. Traditionally, safety management has attempted to limit accidents from occurring by implementing prevention measures. In effect, this means you imagine how the work was performed by analyzing what went wrong when it was performed, and acting on the lagging indicator.

Since the late 1990s and the early 2000s, a novel approach to safety has begun to appear. Whereas traditional safety tends to focus on negative events, the newer approach seeks to look at what goes right most of the time and build from there. Instead of looking at instances where safety is absent, one should try to learn from the events where safe work succeeds. The merit of this different approach lies in its reliance on leading indicators. The ideology uses prevention as an umbrella rather than a fence.

Combined to great effect

A combination of traditional managerial safety and grassroots safety done differently will likely give the best results if you’re trying to put in place a zero-incident approach. Not only will you be able to ascertain that no incidents occur, but also that the goal is met by performing work safely. Not simply striving for zero incidents, but also looking to build the safe procedures from the ground up.

So how can we combine these two approaches? A few principles lie at the basis of the process in order to achieve zero-incident safety in a sustainable way, which you’ll need to keep in mind. They are the cornerstones without which the tower would fall.

• Track everything

Without data, you are blind, and this goes for both sides of the equation. You’ll want to create a categorizable log of all events that contribute to a safe work environment. Look for abnormalities and deviances, and track what goes right and act on that as well. Be sure that the methods to perform work safely and successfully are based on the very reason it’s safe and successful in the first place.

• Learn what goes right (and wrong)

Learn what goes right and wrong, and describe it. The best way to approach this is to provide open communication in your company: a feedback loop that feeds right into your understanding of where safety stands in your company. The better your grip on the procedures, the better the results will be.

• Pause and reflect

It’s important to create specific ‘bottlenecks’ or gates which allow for some control over the process, which make it clear that safety should be a part of productivity.

• Small teams on the job

This is important in part because individuals share competences and can act as checks for each other, but also because cohesion is easier to promote in smaller groups.

Following these rudimentary steps will provide you with a headstart on creating a safety platform that can help you attain a zero-incident rate. Remember that this metric is a guiding principle and that achieving it is more of a touchpoint along the way. The real goal is to continually improve towards a safer environment for everyone. And while there are different approaches to safety coming into focus each year, one constant remains: any incident is an event that should be prevented from happening again.

At TenForce, we recently released an update for our Incident Management offering. Our software provides you with straightforward process automation which will help you collect all incident data, perform root cause analyses, and set up actions — all on a single application. Get in touch with Jane or Tobias if you would like to learn more!