Drop the (safety) slogan, embrace learning

 Most of my adult life I worked in occupational health and safety and in this world you are often presented with slogan or statements such as: 

• Safety is our #1 priority
• Safety is paramount
• All accidents are preventable
• The key to safety is in your hands
• Safety is a choice you make
• Safety rules are your best tools, etc.

Have you heard any of these? I bet you did! I also can bet that people working in construction or other contract work where they are subjected to frequent client orientation programs have probably heard all of these and a few more. All these slogans are intended to show that we are serious about safety and that for you to be able to work for that organization you will have to embrace them. We tend to believe that safety is a state of mind and if we tell you this a number of times it will become ingrained in your brain and by believing it you will become a safe person. 

While safety professionals, with no fault of their own,  live in their own world, seemingly being their own entity with their own culture (don’t we speak so often about the safety culture, as that is something separate from the rest of the organization?), the reality is substantially more complicated. In our organization, there are other departments, such as quality, operations, etc, each with their own slogans and, supposedly, cultures.  These departmental slogans are sometimes so unsophisticated that they are indistinguishable from the other departments' slogans, save for substituting the department name’s in the slogan. For quality, for example, now we could have something in these lines: 

• Quality is our #1 priority
• Quality is paramount
• All defects are preventable
• The key to quality is in your hands
• Quality is a choice you make
• Quality rules are your best tools.

And, to compound the problem, most employees don’t work in these departments and are expected by the organizations as a whole and by the department heads to live by all these slogans. Now they are bombarded with confusing and contradicting messages. If safety is the number one priority, how come quality is also the number one priority? If I choose safety can I also choose quality? If the key to safety is in my right hand, do I take the key to quality in the left hand? Are the safety rules or the quality rules the best tools? 

While these slogans might be well-intentioned, they are really that, slogans! A slogan is a convoluted way of saying that you care about health and safety (or quality, etc), without any demonstration that you actually care. A slogan is a weapon deployed against our employees when the organization is not delivering on that promise, a way to move the blame on the employee and absolve the organization.  There is no learning in a slogan and a slogan does not improve the system and does not provide direction on a concrete way of action that would extricate us from our predicament. 

The reality is pretty sad. We are subjecting our employees to so many messages. We expect our employees to live by all these slogans, but we provide so little support for them to be able to actually know what they mean and how to apply them. Because slogans are not programs! Even when slogans are backed by programs, because each department has its own priorities and approaches to solving problems, the result is still complicated and confusing. Slogans are a bad idea and produce no results.  

I know some of you would disagree and might say that your slogan has been useful and improved your organization. You had it for 10 years, let’s say, and ever since your organization just got better and better. To this I have two things to say:

• Other organizations that are not doing as well as yours have a slogan, too, maybe no different from yours. If indeed you did better, it is not because of the slogan. 
• Slogans create expectations and as such, in order to conserve goodwill with the organizations, employees will be willing to do some creative recording to show to management and other stakeholders that they achieve what was expected of them to achieve. When, in reality, they did not. Think of the “Zero Injuries” slogans so many organizations have. Then think how many organizations you know have really achieved and maintained zero injuries. Demings said: “Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the workforce “

The reason why slogans do not produce results is that not being grounded on facts they are opinions at best.  And, we should say, even when sincerely held, these beliefs are plain wrong. The reality is that all safety slogans are reducible to “safety is #1 priority” and this is not true, has never been and will never be true. And this is not because organizations do not care about the health and safety of their employees, but because no organization has been built by design, from its conceptual stage, to be the safest organization in the world.  As I noted in my study about the effectiveness of zero injury goals, the organization’s management is subject to role conflict. While most organizations state that safety is their first priority, the reality is that management is responsible to shareholders for turning a profit. Arguably, the more we invest in safety, the safer we are, but also the less profitable, so a cost-benefit approach is often adopted by management. In a cost-leading strategy, frequently employed by many organizations, controlling the costs, including safety costs, is a path to competitive advantage.

While there might be many solutions to this slogan conundrum, it is clear that telling the employee that the key is in their hands is not the same as equipping the employee with the said key. 

Sometime early in my career, I came across a material regarding patient safety.  The material was fairly good, but what caught my eye was a little logo that was branded on all the pages of the document. It showed an eye, a loudspeaker and a wrench and below it, there were the following words: See it, Say it, Fix it! 

Though the slogan had a concrete meaning in the context of the article, it struck me that it could apply not only to any industry but that even inside an organization it can be applied to every single department and still conserve and convey a value that would be desirable. 

While each department might have to see, say and fix different things, it would convey to all departments the same message - look around you for opportunities for improvement, talk about these opportunities and feel empowered to initiate action to improve our organization. After all, all departments and organizations should strive to improve through continuous learning, so that the organization maintains or improves competitiveness. The “See it, Say it, Fix it”  logo was not a mere slogan, but an organization-wide value. And the value was continuous learning. 

This value can be acted upon and would be in alignment with all levels of employment, from CEO to the employee in the lowest hierarchical position. A value providing answers to the “What’s in it for me” question for all of them, without placing them at competitive odds with each other.  For the CEO identifying and fixing organizational issues will lead to better profits and new contracts, which resonates highly with him/her, but not that much with the employees. For operations might mean faster turnover of a project, for quality the certitude of a better product, for safety and all employees the knowledge they are safe and will go home unharmed and pain-free to the family they love and the hobbies they embrace. These seemingly different goals are actually congruent because of organizational learning. The key we need to pass to our employees is uninhibited learning and transforming our organization into a learning organization. 

How do we become a learning organization? Well, this is a long and complicated topic that we might address in a different post. But, to keep in line with where we started (slogans),  the essence is to drop the (competing) slogans, forget about departmental silos and “we always did it this way’”, and encourage your employees to continuously question the status quo, even when everything works fine. No, let’s reword that - especially when everything works fine. Because waiting for things to go wrong, for us to learn something, is not only reactive but also a rare event with a limited scope. Learning from things that go right is an empowering continuous endeavour with limitless scope. 

I have to admit I am a bit infatuated with the “See it, Say it, Fix it!” concept and tried to integrate it in the organizations for which I worked (with more or less success, depending on management’s fixations on slogans) in order to improve health and safety performance.  But I am sure there are countless different iterations and wordings that you could identify and embrace for your organization. And, regardless of the wording, your value has to be real, to transgress departmental borders, encourage learning and cooperation.  

Paul Coelho observed: "The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion." Drop the slogan (which is your opinion) and “meet the moral challenge of the day” (Jesse Jackson), become a learner and help your organization do the same.