Competitive Safety: Breaking the Mold

This is an excerpt from an EHS Today article.

Organizations that compete for market share in products and services tend to cooperate and collaborate on safety. This mindset has led to a cooperative, kaizen environment in which the only winner is the one who can do the same things better than everyone else. Sure, we look for those tiny improvements and efficiencies and we are open to the next big program that can create a step-change, but we basically are all operating safety with the same strategy (or lack thereof).

It is the lack of safety strategy that is concerning. Few organizations have one. They have goals and wishes and programs designed to improve workplace conditions and enhance the cognitive and behavioral factors in workers that tend to lower accident probability. They have safety departments that focus on compliance, training and reactive safety activities. Since these mirror other organizations' safety efforts, there is an assumption that these are the right (and only) things to do. There are very few key processes in business that are managed with such basic lack of strategy.

At the core of this thinking is a more basic paradigm: business is what we do and safety is just a nagging problem that can keep us from doing it if we are not careful. Business is full of strategy. Rolling out a new product or service involves massive strategic thinking and planning. We seek competitive advantage and market share. How can we do things better, cheaper, faster, more fun or efficient than our competitors? We even look for products and services that don't yet exist. We do market research to determine feasibility and we test the new stuff on potential customers before we roll it out to the marketplace. After we enter the marketplace, we analyze competing products to make sure we maintain competitive advantage and look for further improvements we can make in our next generation of product.

The full article is available at ehstoday.com.