We all know that in the industrial gas business, safety is an issue of utmost importance and most distributors have a safety program. In working with distributors on improving their businesses, however, I have found that while a safety program is important, a safety process is much more effective in preventing accidents and, therefore, in improving your bottom line. In this article, we discuss safety as a process.
Let’s start with the difference between a “program” and a “process.” If your employees feel like they are involved in safety only when they participate in a monthly safety meeting or a training event, you have a program. If safety is the sole domain of your management team, you have a program. If participation in achieving a safe environment is limited to a suggestion box or the collection of data, you have a program. A safety program encourages compliance with preordained standards; it focuses on accident avoidance over active prevention. Safety as a program is static, and I have found that people have difficulty committing to a program they only infrequently participate in, a program that positively influences their work only once in a while.
Safety as a process, on the other hand, looks at the whole safety issue and includes finding ways to prevent accidents. The process is characterized by a series of actions directed at obtaining a particular result. Daily actions and/or interactions are seen as an opportunity to make the work place safer. Safety as a process is active and requires a commitment to regular thought and actions to both improve safety on a daily basis and prevent accidents. Commitment to the safety process means doing something regardless of the feedback and is the opposite of compliance.
The Safety Process
The accident triangle (or pyramid), shown here, is based on a study of thousands of accidents reported to the insurance industry. The study found that a major accident is not usually an isolated event and your safety process should address this fact by focusing attention on the prevention of activities linked to accidents. Your safety process should promote one primary goal—incident prevention through continuous management of the safety effort.
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