By Eric Irwin, Predictive Success Corporation
It’s not what you want to hear, but when it comes to occupational safety, we’re missing the mark. In Ontario, accident claims are on the rise. Recent estimates from the Ontario Workplace Safety Insurance Board (WSIB) show a 15 per cent increase over last year with the filing of 229,000 accident claims. The Power Workers Union also notes that each year in Ontario some 200 – 300 workers lose their lives as a result of workplace accidents and occupational illnesses.
Working in the power generation industry can present potentially dangerous situations on a daily basis. In addition to worker injuries, and in the worst-case scenario a loss of life, business impacts also include increased liability insurance costs, higher Workplace Safety Insurance Board (WSIB) premiums and ultimately slower response times for customers due to more frequent government inspections.
So how do we turn these stats around and start increasing employee safety in a sustainable way? The good news is that there are some power generation companies that are adding innovation into this equation – and the initial results are significant. A safety study on power industry employees conducted by the Predictive Success Corporation confirmed that there is a direct link between certain employee behavioural traits and safety. These findings are similar to studies conducted in the mining and trucking industries. In fact, Predictive Success’ study of 383 drivers at a major national trucking firm found that drivers who fit the established profile and were managed by supervisors with a safety-first focus, had zero preventable accidents over the duration of the study.
Focusing on the power generation industry, SaskPower stands out as a stellar example of how an organization is working to reduce the number of workplace accidents by making safety a matter of corporate culture. Created in 1929, SaskPower has become Saskatchewan’s leading power supplier with a team of more than 3,100 full time employees that serve nearly 522,000 customers. For SaskPower, safety is not only about hiring safety conscious employees, but also about how these employees are managed day-to-day in the field. With the help of behavioural assessment tools like the Predictive Index, SaskPower is creating a culture of safety throughout their organization in three phases.
Define the behaviours that encourage safety
One of the first steps SaskPower management took was to seek out and analyze field employees who had the highest safety ratings. Scientific behavioural assessments, such as the Predictive Index, allow managers to validate the natural behaviours of employees. Performing this first step creates an accurate safety profile specific to the organization, and to the industry in which it operates. SaskPower’s leaders found that safe employees tend to be thorough, methodical, risk averse, diligent and not aggressive. The ideal hiring or internal promotion scenario would be that every new field hire undergoes a behavioural assessment that is compared to the organization’s safe employee profile. If the two profiles are highly correlated, then that safety conscious worker should act more safely than the average worker while on the job. Building a workforce that is naturally inclined to be safety conscious is the first important step.
Manage employees according to what motivates them
To effectively manage employees with a safety focus, supervisors must first understand their own underlying motivating needs. Learning how their own behaviour profile interacts with, and drives, the motivations of direct reports, allows a supervisor to communicate more effectively by tailoring their interactions with each team member.
One of the discoveries of the safety study conducted with SaskPower was that field employees were perceiving pressure from supervisors to meet deadlines. This pressure was unintentional and caused by supervisors not knowing how to interact with individual employees. If left unchecked, this type of pressure could lead to employees rushing or skipping steps to get the job done, increasing the risk of workplace accidents.
For SaskPower, supervisors with the ideal safe behaviour profile were detail oriented, concerned about their employees, protective, and focused on getting the job done by following proven procedures. By hiring new supervisors and training existing supervisors to this scientifically defined behavioural profile, SaskPower’s management team was able to improve communication and help supervisors to effectively manage direct reports without applying undue pressure.
Make safety a part of the daily conversation
The safest employees are naturally detail focused and tend to work ‘by the book’. So, any form of ambiguous communication from a manager or supervisor could create doubt and stress over proper procedures, resulting in employees making unsafe decisions.
To encourage communication about safety throughout the organization, SaskPower conducted workshops to help supervisors understand the scientific and measurable relationship between behaviour and safety. A thorough review of all employee behavioural assessment data helped to identify team members who were “hard wired” to exhibit risky behaviours. By discussing the motivational drives behind these risky behaviours, employees became aware of their natural dispositions and learned to embrace their natural behaviours. At the same time, supervisors were able to work with them to develop risk mitigation strategies.
“For a safety-first attitude to permeate throughout the organization, it has to start with the senior leadership,” says Brian Ketcheson, Vice President, Distribution & Customer Services at SaskPower. “In fact, we’ve created a motto that everyone throughout the organization knows: ‘We may work in a dangerous industry, but we don’t do dangerous work.’”
SaskPower’s executive team are firm believers in measurement. They have implemented systems that measure productivity, customer service and response time. With these metrics, SaskPower is able to address any issues in real time and focus on continually improving their service. They looked to scientific behavioural assessment data to help bring the same accountability to safety.
“We’ve got an incredible safety improvement program that we are implementing in this company and the Predictive Success Safe Behaviour Analytics Program is an important component of that,” says Ketcheson.
Like many other companies that require a focus on safety, SaskPower learned that the only sure way to mitigate risk is to eliminate unsafe acts by employees. Using behavioural assessment tools helps identify engaged, detail oriented, attentive employees so they can be celebrated as examples throughout the organization. The example that these employees set also improves the safety of other employees throughout the organization.
Eric Irwin is a Managing Principal with Predictive Success Corporation (www.predictivesuccess.com). Predictive Success leverages the Predictive Index to optimize organizational development that promotes safety throughout the workplace. In terms of using the Predictive Index for safety, Predictive Success has worked with SaskPower, Eassons Transport Limited, Carmen Transportation, a well-known mining company, and others. Eric can be reached at 416-994-8396 or