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SafeTalk with SafeStart
SafeTalk with SafeStart
S14Ep3: Flying Blind: Safety Leadership in the Modern Era
What happens when safety leaders don't have accurate information about their own organization's safety culture? In this enlightening conversation with Rodd Wagner, New York Times bestselling author and SafeStart executive advisor, we explore the dangers of "flying blind" when it comes to workplace safety management.
Host: Tim Page-Bottorff
Guest: Rodd Wagner
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
00:12
Thanks for coming back to SafeTalk with SafeStart. I'm your host, Tim Page-Bottorff. Today we've got our special guest, Rodd Wagner, coming in to talk to us about diagnostics and assessments and conducting surveys to better employee engagement. Sit back, relax, take some notes. Some good information here. Let's get to the podcast.
Welcome back to SafeTalk with SafeStart. I'm Tim Page-Bottorff, your host and joining me today is Rodd Wagner, out of the Midwest up in Minnesota.
00:46
Rodd a New York Times bestselling author and Forbes contributor. His books on leadership, employee engagement and collaboration have been published in 10 languages. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, USA Today, ABC News, as well as the Globe and Mail in Canada. One of his books was even parodied in Dilbert. He researches and advises on the best ways to keep people safe and happy. Rodd is also an executive advisor with SafeStart, where he leads the research practice and works with client leadership teams. I've worked personally with Rodd on a substantial project for SafeStart and it was very fun to see him work. The collaboration piece was extremely important to me. So, on deck today, the title of this podcast will actually be A Bad Time to Fly Blind. What Safety Leaders Need to Know Now. Rodd, welcome to the podcast.
Rodd Wagner Guest
01:46
That's a really compelling title Tim, great to be with you man, I'll tell you what.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
01:52
Looking at that title I it is a bad time to fly by. There's so many things going on. But from a safety perspective, how much does a safety person gonna have to know when it comes to dealing with people and all the things they've got going on? What is it they've got to know?
Rodd Wagner Guest
02:09
Well, you know, the reason I use that particular metaphor in one of my Forbes columns a couple weeks ago was that I'm borrowing from an aviation analogy there for times when the weather obscures the pilot's sight, and they better go to instruments quickly or there'll be trouble. Now a few of us are pilots I'm not a pilot, but all of us fly blind. Sometimes we'll invest money on a hunch instead of researching the stock. Well, enough, we'll take a job and find out some weird stuff a couple months in that we realize in retrospect that we could have discovered if we'd done some homework before we took the job. My personal favorite is I'll suit up to go running in the winter here in Minnesota without looking closely enough at the current conditions and then I realized about a kilometer into my run the next four kilometers are going to be miserable because I either overdressed or underdressed. I was running blind. I didn't research where I was going to go.
03:06
But relative to how employees work, every organization has a unique safety profile and the SafeStart Human Factors Employee Survey that you and I worked on that project that you referred to, asks about 40 questions depending on the company, and we customize it.
03:26
We ask about workers' perception of how the work is done and their safety.
03:31
I can use an example, one of the statements, just to grab one as a quick example is this one Managers here explain the reasons behind our safety procedures rather than simply enforcing the rules.
03:43
Well, like all the items on the survey, that one is important to avoiding accidents, because an employee who is just told to follow a certain procedure quote because I said so he's nowhere near as safe as one whose manager has explained the rationale behind the procedure.
04:01
So, before we field a survey, when I ask a leadership team how they think their employees will answer that question, they all say we don't know. And sometimes I'll even ask if they want to place any side bets on the response and the leaders will say well, I don't feel confident putting any money on it. And then I'll tell them well, in fact, you know, you've got money on that riding on that, you've got people's safety riding on that answer and the rest of the statements as well. So, it's crucial for them to know the true state of their safety culture. An organization, to my mind, is flying blind if it doesn't know where to invest to best improve safety, to best improve other aspects of performance. An enterprise that is flying blind like that has a much higher risk of having more accidents, and more serious or fatal accidents.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
04:55
That makes sense to me. Now I kind of fully understand what you mean by flying blind. But first of all, there's a couple of things. You said you go running in the winter. Now that's a little crazy for me, but I have to wrap my brain around that. I saw you running in the winter and somewhere in Canada I'm not going to tell everybody where this was, but I saw you go out for a run in Canada dead in the middle of the winter. Do you find enjoyment in that?
Rodd Wagner Guest
05:25
I find enjoyment in having run, just like the old bromide about, I enjoy having written. I like the mental state I'm in and the physical state I'm in after running. I never, in the winter, I don't like the first kilometer because that's when your body is adjusting to it. But yeah, if you plan ahead the last, you know, the four kilometers or the five, those can feel pretty good If you don't go out running blind, if you don't misread the weather and make a serious miscalculation. I've come in with pretty cold fingers at various points or I've come in drenched in sweat because I didn't realize that I didn't need as many clothes as I thought I did.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
06:08
So, I'm kind of. I'm not judging you, I hope you know that, but I'm playing devil's advocate because I don't think I would ever go running in the middle of winter. So, since I'm playing devil's advocate based on your last comment, don't leaders and managers already know what they need to do to improve safety at their facilities?
Rodd Wagner Guest
06:26
Sure, yeah, I think so. I mean, some issues are obvious. You don't need to wait for the research to see that there's insufficient PPE, for example. You don't need to do research to know that certain shifts have been working short-staffed and long shifts. That said, I've never done an executive briefing where the leaders afterwards said oh yeah, we didn't need to do research, we knew all of that.
06:52
In fact, it's just the opposite. There's always surprises they're both positive and negative in those patterns. There's times when leaders will tell me hey it's good to see the employees feel like we're moving in the right direction. We've been investing, but we didn't know if it was really catching. It's good to see that it is getting some traction. Other times they'll also say we didn't realize how often our longtime employees are telling the new employees to disregard what they're teaching them in our training program. Both of those are just examples, but both of those are really important facts for a leadership team to know in order to invest across the board in those areas that are going to have the highest return on safety.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
07:41
So, from a flying blind perspective, coming back to that, I don't think that companies doing annual surveys are flying blind, but what is your perspective about that?
Rodd Wagner Guest
07:53
Well, because things have changed so much, I think it's important that the information be current and comprehensive enough. Otherwise, even if you have an annual survey, you could be flying blind. And sometimes I compare this to how well most customer-facing organizations do with surveys of their customers. They tend to have an ongoing track. If they're introducing a new hamburger or vehicle or whatever, they're constantly asking customers how do you like this, so that they can make adjustments.
08:26
It doesn't happen as much on the employee side and it happens less frequently on the safety side, even though we're talking about something that's life and death potentially. So, I would say it kind of depends. If a company's survey was conducted and the survey included very specific safety culture questions, then no, they're not flying blind. But if the survey was conducted in what I listened to Marketplace, David Brancaccio, and he calls it the “before times” so if their survey was done in the before times, it's out of date and if it just asked about safety generally but not really specific questions about PPE, about authority to stop work, about trust in leadership, about work-life balance and things like that, then the leadership team really does not have the information that it needs to target the right areas where the risks are concentrated.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
09:19
Now oh, that's good and I actually have seen some of your questions in regard to what you just said. The questions that you asked, I saw how you tailored them to leadership and then the questions that were asked on the online instrument. They did is they had a paper box, and they filled this thing in, and I remember going into this box and you were folding and moving and then you flipped them through, and I we got a lot of responses that way. But from a question perspective, what are some of the most important questions to ask employees to help keep them safe?
Rodd Wagner Guest
09:59
Well, if you don't mind, I'll just list some of them and then I can cut in short order and that way I can cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. Everything that we ask on our surveys is an area that our analyses and the broader secondary research which massive populations of drivers or oil platform workers and folks like that identify as crucial to safety, and so these are the key areas where we ask questions, and actually I would say these are the areas that define a really tight, high-performing safety culture. Trust in leadership is huge because you just gain yourself all kinds of buy-in from the employees. Continuous improvement in other words is the company moving in the right direction? Speed of response does the company jump in if they identify an issue and take care of it quickly?
10:52
Adequacy of equipment is always a big issue if you're in an industrial environment. Training and mentoring is someone showing me, am I trained well? And then someone shows me how to apply those concepts. Consistency of PPE use because, as you know, take off the safety glasses, take off the respirator or whatever it is, and do it frequently enough, and sooner or later you're going to run into a situation where you're going to need that PPE and you don't have it on biohazard remediation, by which I mean coronavirus and other things that, depending on the facility, could be a risk to people. That has always been an important one, but now is, even so, much more so.
11:32
Employee input is crucial in any context. Sometimes it's called employee voice in the broader research. Comfort in speaking up. I mean that's a big deal given the number of eyes and ears that you have among all the employees. If they feel comfortable speaking up, well, that means you have the benefit of all those eyes and ears. Do they feel empowered to stop the work if they see something that's dangerous? What about their managers? Do their managers? Are they on the floor frequently and interacting with people?
12:02
I'm always very curious, because it's so connected to safety, about energy and sleep levels, because that's so crucial to self-awareness and to situational awareness. We look at scheduling Can people change schedules to make sure that things are safe and they're not overrunning things? And then, in a large facility, we're usually looking at interdepartmental collaboration. If something is communicated, does maintenance come in and take care of it? Do they talk about what they need to do and come up with a good fix? Now, which of those is important at a given company or facility. I don't know until we survey and analyze the results. That's the whole reason why we do it, but every time we do research in an organization, each of those that I mentioned are substantially correlated with employee perceptions of safety.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
12:56
The thing I don't know going in is which of them is going to come to the top of the list. I love the questions Well the one that you gave on the list here but from an employee perspective, do you find that they're always willing to participate? Even the one we did together? It just seemed like we probably got 20% of involvement. It seemed like maybe more. I want to say it was around 50, but is it possible to get 100%? Anyway, do employees, are they willing to participate in these kinds of surveys?
Rodd Wagner Guest
13:25
Generally, yes. That doesn't mean that we can get to all of them, particularly if we're talking about third shift. I think in the particular project that you and I are talking about we did get approximately 50%. That's an around the clock operation and I think, if there was some difficulty in getting to some of the outlying areas and to some of the third shift people, but generally yes, but it's important Any researcher knows this at this point in the relationship between companies and employees that in most industrial settings we do find a certain level of skepticism, either about the company's intentions or in assurances of confidentiality, where people are worried that.
14:04
Well, they know that. I'm the one that said that. That's why it's one of the reasons it's important to have an independent research firm like SafeStart conduct the survey, because we can reassure the workers that none of their individual answers will be communicated to the employer, because they're not. I also make sure there's a couple of things that we do. You mentioned that, that one uh organization where we did paper and pencil surveys, and there's a lot of creative things that we can do to make sure that we invite people and that they to make it as easy for them as possible. But now, as standard practice, I make sure that employees do not have to answer the question, actually don't have to answer any, any of the questions.
14:45
Every question is optional, but the ones I find that they decline to answer frequently are which department they're in or how long they've worked for the company, and sometimes they write notes on there on the paper survey that they say well, I'm not going to tell you this because then you'll know who I am, which I suppose.
15:04
Yes, if I really wanted to look it up, I could find out who that person is. But as professional researchers we've signed on to a code of ethics that requires us first and foremost to protect employee anonymity on the surveys, and that's really important to making sure we get a good response rate. As a consequence, you know, particularly if you let people opt out of the tenure question or opt out of the department question, they'll tell you some really hard truths in there that the company needs to know, but they would not hear if they asked directly of the employees, and so I'll take all the information I can get from an employee and they feel uncomfortable with a particular question. Fine, just tell me as much as you feel comfortable with, because when we put that together that allows us to be able to tell the leadership team as much as we possibly can about those employees' perceptions.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
15:59
Yeah, that's good that you say that. I was thinking about the strategy behind it too, because we had to get the union on board and a lot, of, a lot of different moving parts in that. But let's just hypothetically say your, your survey goes well, you get a really good response rate, and now you've got all of this data.
Rodd Wagner Guest
16:19
What is the team going to do with all of that data? Well, that could be a really long answer, and I could go into everything I learned in statistics class, but that would that. So, I'll give you the cliff notes version. Essentially, we're looking for patterns. We want to know which of the aspects of working at the facility do the employees rate high and which do they rate low. Do they tend to answer in similar ways or is there a large range?
16:41
So, we ask on a five-point scale, from strongly agree to strongly disagree. You can have one statement, for example, where the average response is three, you know, neutral. Well, that could be formed in a number of different ways. That could be that almost everyone answered neutral and so the whole company kind of feels neutral about it. Or you can go in and find that essentially half the half of the employees are on the agree side and half of the employees are on the disagree side. That's a very different pattern, even though the average um is the same.
17:15
Uh, where there is a range, I'm looking to understand what explains it. Is it, the department? Do answers differ by job function? Do they differ by shift? Do they differ by the tenure of the manager or anything I can find out about the managers, or is there some other question on the survey that is predictive of why they answered that particular way? And then, most important, we simultaneously analyze for how high employees score an area and how important that area is to their perceptions of safety. When you chart that on a scatter plot, it allows us to kind of see a fingerprint, you will, or a radar screen of the safety culture, allows us to identify the areas that have the highest connection to safety but are also soft spots in the safety culture. And from that radar screen and from analyses that we combined with it, we write a recommended strategy for the leadership team, grounded in the evidence, for them to concentrate in the areas that are most important to keeping the employees safe.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
18:25
Well, obviously you have a great deal of experience. I got a chance to see you work firsthand. It was kind of interesting to see you put the instrument together and then roll it out and then, on top of that, get the results back. So, you've been doing this for a little over 20 years and you've actually written books based on conducting this type of research. Are you ever surprised by the results that you get from a survey that you've conducted?
Rodd Wagner Guest
18:51
Yeah, all the time. In fact, it's one of the motivating factors for me each time we do a survey, because I know there's going to be a number of surprises or things I would not have guessed going in. In fact, you know, if the results were so consistent every single time we did a survey, then I'd write another book and say this is what we see every time we go in. And, by the way, we don't have to worry about the research too much, because it's highly unlikely that your pattern is going to be that much different from anyone else. So, here's the book and just let's get cut to the chase and start intervening on behalf of the employees. But every situation and therefore every company strategy is unique. I can give you an example One of your and my colleagues and I did a series of focus groups earlier this year among workers at one facility where I was really impressed with the number of physical hazards they had.
19:39
There was hot metal, there were sharp edges, there were moving parts, there were forklifts and heavy, potentially body squashing weight that was lifted over pedestrian walkways that had to be gated off when the stuff was overhead. There are a lot of ways to get hurt, maybe even fatally. Now, to their credit, the leaders and managers at this particular facility made sure that we could talk with the frontline workers by ourselves. They said we're just going to leave the room, and you can talk with them, because we want them to be able to speak really candidly with you. We conducted those focus groups and then later that afternoon we met with the leadership team. Actually, it was the next day, sorry.
20:18
We met with the leadership team after the focus groups and they said okay, what did you hear? And I said to them you do realize, right, the inebriation problem you have. And they sat up and looked at me like, what are you talking about? Which was exactly what I intended. I wanted to get their attention. And I said, all right, nobody in any of the focus groups talked about drinking on the job.
20:42
But when we ask about how much sleep they got last night or the night before, we got so many answers of five hours of sleep and four and a half hours of sleep. And that level of sleep in the research, that level of sleep deprivation, it's equivalent in accident risk to being too intoxicated to drive safely. And so, then we started talking about how to address that issue now going, I said to our mutual colleague. I said, man, that's a surprise. Going into that plant I would not have guessed that that was such an issue, and the leadership team certainly didn't realize that they had that kind of an issue. But that's just one example. Unearthing this kind of information is the most important work that my team and I do to find the biggest risk to workers' health and safety, to bring them to the attention of the leaders there and, in the process, keep people from getting badly hurt.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
21:39
I'm just laughing at the sleep deprivation versus the drinking and inebriation problem. I just can't imagine going through a situation like that and trying to figure out oh so, now that you're talking about it, here's the reason why. Yeah, well, and you?
Rodd Wagner Guest
21:54
Know dead is dead. It's not like there's a particular flavor of dead for sleep deprivation and a particular flavor of dead for working while intoxicated. I mean they're equivalent levels of risk and if you get yourself killed or seriously hurt, levels of risk. And if, if you get yourself killed or seriously hurt. You just did and so yeah, it's, it's. It's just a risk of a certain magnitude and those magnets the magnitude of the risk is essentially equivalent between the two.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
22:26
So, thanks for bringing that example up. I appreciate it. We're kind of coming to a close here, so I got a last couple of questions for you. How do things change once a company has gone through the assessment and diagnostic process?
Rodd Wagner Guest
22:37
You mentioned that my title at SafeStart is executive advisor. My job is to give really good advice to leadership teams and help them formulate a strategy that's going to help the performance of the company, which includes safety. And that's not an easy thing to do, necessarily because leadership teams are made up of people with disparate personalities, who have separate functions, and they tend to have different hypotheses as to what's going on inside their organization. That is a challenge. When they have those different hypotheses, it's difficult to get themselves on the same map to move in a direction that's really going to help the employees.
23:19
One of the most things that's most professionally rewarding to me, one of the coolest things, is to replace that guesswork with reliable, empirical information, to essentially replace flying blind, if you will, with a fully lit up radar screen. I love to see leadership teams switch from conjecture about where they should focus their time and actually sometimes disagreement about where they should focus their time and their attention and investments, to a common, cohesive, informed strategy for keeping their workers safe. The short version is that this assessment and diagnostics process synchronizes the various leaders and the leadership teams operations, EH&S, HR communications and focuses them towards the areas the employees, through their aggregated responses in the survey have identified as having the highest safety return on investment. So, it both becomes a more efficient and strategic process, but also becomes a more effective process to making sure that people don't get hurt.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
24:29
Wow, that sounds extremely personal to you.
Rodd Wagner Guest
24:33
Yeah, yeah it is. I began my career as a journalist, and I was. I covered emergency services, or courts and cops, as it's more commonly referred to, and one of the you get to. You get to ride in fire engines. You get to meet some really cool people who are looking out for people, but one of the one of the distasteful errands that you have is you end up being the guy who would report the circumstances of someone's death in the newspaper if they died in an accident on or off the job. You know that stuff makes an impression. It's really.
25:13
It bothered me. I didn't like the idea that for a story of mine to be on the front page, someone had to have a really bad day. It's actually the reason why I got out of police reporting eventually. But you know, now in this stage of my career, my team and I are in the position of helping keep people's names out of the newspaper for the wrong reasons, and so I feel like there's a certain balance for there. Personally, and just like any group of safety professionals, you know we never know whose lives we help to save, but we know by the numbers that they exist and, like I say, it's helping balance out the kind of grisly job that I had at the beginning of my career, with now being able to maybe help prevent some of those tragedies at this stage of my career and yeah, it's very personal to me.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
26:06
Safety professionals in the world can take note to me. Safety professionals in the world can take note the passion that you drive. Using something like a diagnostics and assessment survey can help find that data and that information, and that's extremely important. I know it's important to you, but what's important to safety professionals and to help them to find out systemic issues, problems Even in the world that we're living in now. We always refer to something like systemic issues and we can make many. The world that we're living in now. We always refer to something like systemic issues and we can make many references to what's going on in the world even in the United.
26:35
States, but having passion to drive something like that, that's important to me and I appreciate you talking about why it's personal to you, because you can drive down injury rates, you can drive down the fact that people can prevent serious injuries and fatalities, and I appreciate that from you, Rodd, and that's extremely important to me. And so that comes to our time. That actually went pretty quick. I just I can't believe the 30 minutes is up just like that. So, I want to say thank you, Rodd, for coming on and spending your time with us and talking about diagnostics and assessment even though our listening core are SafeStart customers, there might be even customers out there that aren't a current SafeStart user and take your information and be able to go wow, this is extremely helpful. So, thank you for your time today, Rodd. I appreciate it.
Rodd Wagner Guest
27:24
It was a privilege, thank you.
Tim Page-Bottorff Host
27:26
Hopefully you'll come back and visit us again. There's several things that I'd like to talk to you about Journalism. You could probably tell us a ton of stories about what you've seen out on the road. So again, thank you for your time and that concludes this podcast. Today for SafeTalk with SafeStart and we'll see you down the road. Thanks for joining the podcast. If you need more information on Rodd's team, check out advisory services at safestart.com You'll find it under the training tab or reach out to your account manager. You can also reach Rodd at roddw at safestart.com. We'll see you down the road.