On your best behaviour

It's likely to become even more expensive to breach health and safety regulations. Subject to parliamentary approval, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) will start its cost recovery scheme, Fee for Intervention, in October of this year. HSE will charge offenders for the time it spends investigating, taking enforcement action and follow-up activity. It's not going to be cheap; the proposed fee is £124 per hour. Birmingham Chamber of Commerce's vice president Steve Brittan is outraged. "This could incentivise the HSE to find fault," he protests. "It could also put workers at risk by discouraging businesses to approach the HSE for advice for fear of incurring massive costs." The rejoinder of HSE's programme director Gordon MacDonald is succinct: "It is right that those who break the law should pay their fair share of the costs to put things right – and not the public purse. Firms who manage workplace risks properly will not pay." The fact remains that, despite years of regulation, there were 17,599 injuries, 32,000 new cases of work-related ill-health and 1.9 million working days lost across manufacturing in 2010/11. Even worse, last year 27 deaths were directly caused by work in manufacturing. Despite the government's evident belief there is too much red tape, it is an inescapable truth that people still get hurt at work and – without legislation – even more might suffer. But it is equally true that accidents sometime happen in places where every effort has been made to "manage workplace risks properly". No one ever sets out deliberately to act unsafely – injuries usually happen through thoughtlessness or ignorance. So how do you change the way people act to take better care of themselves and others? There's another inescapable truth here: you can't make people work more safely just by laying down the law or – equally prevalent – simply shouting at them. Of course legislation is complex and people need to learn the mandatory dos and don'ts. But the maxim that "culture is what we do when no one is looking" applies just as much in health and safety (H&S) as it does in other working practices. You can't watch people all the time and if they don't understand why it is important to stick to certain rules, they'll take short cuts or just ignore them. Take a very simple example – the need for sleep. Healthcare services company Vielife studied 40,000 workers in Europe. Almost one in three is sleep deprived or fatigued at work. It makes them less productive, more likely to get sick or to experience – or cause – workplace accidents. HSE reports that fatigue costs UK employers £115-240 million per year in accidents alone and points out that employers have a legal duty to manage the risks of fatigue. There are programmes from specialists like Vielife to help employees deal with sleep issues but how is the average manager to spot the sufferers? Under-eye satchels aren't always self-evident: it's far easier if employees themselves recognise their exhaustion is dangerous and ask for help. And that will only happen when the entire factory is so tuned in to safe working practices that it becomes second nature to spot and stop risky behaviour. The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) takes this need very seriously. Its food and drink group recently ran a project to find out how the biggest names in industry – Heinz, Dairy Crest, Twinings and Allied Bakeries among others – encourage their staff to act more safely. IOSH food and drink group vice chair Simon Hatson, who co-ordinated the project, said: "The food and drink manufacturing industry has made great strides in the last 20 years, with the number of deaths falling by a quarter. But there's clearly a lot of work to be done and we believe that engagement programmes such as those that look at behavioural safety are important, as they are designed to change the way people act to take better care of themselves and others." There are now 15 projects available to view on its website, pulling together good practice ideas as a resource for the whole industry. Dairy Crest ran a coaching programme for managers in leading behavioural safety so they could, in turn, work with their teams to observe and promote practical, safe ways of working. Andy Melachrino, head of group H&S, reports that this scheme has cut reportable accidents by 52%: "Going home safe to your families was the key message we delivered right at the start of the programme. After all, this is about real families, real lives and real incidents." A pilot project at Heinz's Wigan-based Kitt Green factory – the largest canning factory in Europe – ran a 'Best Be Safe' scheme on its snap pots product line. It encouraged workers to find their own solutions to safety issues which included them designing signage and limiting forklift truck speeds. Allied Milling and Baking used videos featuring case studies of real accidents to reinforce key messages about leadership, engagement and behaviour. The company's lost-time accidents have fallen from 195 to 43, and reportable accidents from 87 to 22, in less than five years. "Using real accidents is not about blame; it's about recognising that dealing with hazard and risk is part of everyone's job. Personal risk management is about people understanding risk and looking after themselves and the people around them while they are at work," insists Jak Thomas, national health and safety manager. Personal responsibility is clearly not going to be achieved by diktat. Hill Solomon works for manufacturers looking for new ways to engage the workforce. MD Clare Hill is convinced of the need to 'sell safety': "Often managers concentrate so much on getting the rules and regulations in place that they forget about how they are going to communicate these to the workforce." This reinforces the poor bureaucratic image of health and safety – dull safety notice boards full of lagging indicators, death by Powerpoint, supervisors reluctantly giving toolbox talks to their team from an A4 sheet of paper crammed with six-point text. Instead, a recent back-to-work training programme for a defence company used films of workplace accidents ending in cliff hangers, asking the audience to consider what could happen next. A spin of the 'wheel of misfortune' revealed one of three possible outcomes. The training was delivered the first week after the Christmas shutdown (historically a time of accident spikes). Accidents decreased by 50% in the following year. That's pretty good but it has some way to go to beat Linpac's achievements. In just over three years, this food packaging manufacturer has shrunk the number of days lost to accidents by more than 90% – and that's across 16 manufacturing sites and 23 sales operations internationally. According to health, safety, hygiene and environment (HSHE) director John Jones, the start point was a fundamental realisation that "business as usual" – with year-on-year incremental improvement – was not enough. He pulled Mark Reynolds, with 20 years' experience of Linpac's manufacturing processes, into head office as group HSHE and energy manager. His brief was to understand what was actually happening and report back. "From an operations perspective, I saw a lot of things that could be done differently," recalls Reynolds. "I asked to give some new ideas a whirl and they agreed." Reynolds envisaged a step change, combining coaching in new behaviours with a variant of the systematic, team-based approach that had already paid dividends in improving Linpac's manufacturing processes. The concept – based on the standard plan-do-check-act model – is deceptively simple. Just like conventional lean improvement programmes, a group is set up to deal with a persistent problem, co-opting engineers, safety specialists, operators and team leaders as needed to find a solution. Then that solution is defined, documented and disseminated as best practice to every plant across the world. On the surface, it could look arbitrary but there are two safeguards. First of all, the fixes come from the workforce itself which carries a clear guarantee of practicality. Secondly, they are only implemented in other plants if they are agreed to work better than anything in operation locally. In the last two years, over 300 best practices have been adopted, contributing hugely to the falling accident rates. Reynolds says that the crucial element in inculcating personal responsibility is simply understanding how people think: "Before this programme, 90% of our people would have done the equivalent of touching the wet paint on the park bench to see if it really was wet. We've struggled with that across the world. Now they stop and question first." It boils down to educating people in a different cast of mind and then setting standards. "The standards protect you from the dissenters. They aren't just arbitrary; people are trained, coached and mentored. It takes time and effort. If there is any deviation from standards, we ask what can be learnt from it. It's not just a case of saying that will never happen again because it will. We have to understand what made them do it. The same applies to machinery – what can we do to make sure that failing never happens again?" Linpac calls this the 100-year fix: "Most of the ideas for this come from the employees. What we have done can be done in any industry in the world – it's not rocket science; just a basic understanding of who we are and what we know." Think before you act The new approach is underpinned by an important technique: the 30-second risk assessment, aimed as much at cultural change as hazard spotting. "It's not complicated – we do the same thing when we cross a road," explains Reynolds. "So why not do it at work? It is all about getting people to think about any task, even if they've been doing it for years. It makes you stop and think 'what if …'". Assessments are collected, analysed for patterns and can trigger improvement teams. They are also part of Linpac's appraisal process: "People are not judged by volume – it just shows they are driving the standard. If there is a near miss, there is a question on the record: did you do a 30-second assessment and, if so, what did you identify?" Reynolds says that one corrective action from an assessment can save tens of thousands of pounds around the world. Take a couple of examples: while maintaining a thermoformer, the operator replaced two missing screws from the terminal box to prevent moisture getting in. It was picked up and all other similar lines were checked for compliance, preventing potential power trips and lost production across the division. The same process also pinpointed a deviation from SOP (standard operating procedure) that turned out to be an improvement in both productivity and safety. As a result, everyone was retrained to work the same way. The fast, informed assessment has now become a standard across the world. Interestingly, Reynolds says some European countries found the new approach harder than South America and China, who leapt on board once they were trained. "It's all about coaching and cajoling to get buy-in," Reynolds reflects. "You won't get it with everyone but if you do it right, the result is a new safety community, even though we are split across the world." All-round improvement In Linpac, the impact of the employee engagement programme is felt way beyond H&S, as Mark Reynolds (left) comments: "We are not just improving the health and safety standards and the well-being of our employees, we are also driving continuous improvement. We are upskilling our employees and enhancing the manufacturing areas. By making machines safer, we also make them run cleaner, better and more productively. It's all part of the CI snowball."