The prevention of serious injuries and fatalities is one of the primary goals of workplace safety professionals. What recent strides have been made, and what does the future of SIF prevention look like?
Safety+Health asked a group of experts to weigh in:
- John Dony, vice president of thought leadership, National Safety Council
- Thomas Krause, co-founder and partner; Kristen Bell, co-founder and partner; Rob Hoyle, vice president and executive consultant; and Dennis Jackson, vice president and executive consultant, The Krause Bell Group
- Rajni Walia, vice president of client engagement and SIF prevention leader, DEKRA
- Don Wilson, chief client officer, SafeStart
Sometimes they agreed; sometimes they didn’t. Here’s what they had to say.
How much progress, if any, has been made in SIF prevention in the past few years?
Dony: As with many organizational environmental, health and safety initiatives and areas of study, progress on SIF prevention has slowed somewhat as attention turned fully to keeping people safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That said, it certainly didn’t stop entirely, and the interesting variances we’ve seen across industry on safety performance (sometimes positive, sometimes negative) have reignited conversations within the EHS field around what truly drives performance in preventing injury and death. EHS leaders appear primed for another step change in SIF prevention going forward.
Walia: Progress has certainly been made. Although companies have been on the path to SIF prevention, much of the focus has been on the reactive side when it needs to be more of a sustainable model that balances analysis and action.
The Krause Bell Group: It varies by organization. Twelve years from Dr. Krause’s 2010 study, we would have thought more organizations would be further along. But recent SIF maturity assessments across organizations show that many have only just started to focus seriously on SIF prevention. Among the rest, there’s wide variation in understanding, engagement of senior leadership and strategy for change. Ironically, the new thinking about SIF prevention can appear too easy, leading to efforts that end up making it worse rather than better. “Oh yes, we’ve done SIF.”
Still, there’s reason for optimism: When well-informed senior leaders partner with their experienced safety pros to take on the challenge of SIF prevention, great progress can be made in a short period of time.
Download an excerpt from 7 Insights into Safety Leadership, a 2015 book by Thomas R. Krause and Kristen J. Bell.
Wilson: Quite frankly, there hasn’t been any progress at all on SIF prevention. Workplace fatalities actually rose from 2017 to 2019 and, when the pandemic hit in 2020, it offset any progress that was being made in other areas.
With regard to workplace SIF reduction, the expression “the more you do for someone, the less they do for themselves” comes to mind. Are the safety pros looking for SIF potential on their own, or are they soliciting the help of workers in looking for SIF potential? There’s a big difference! This is one issue that human and organizational performance and the Toyota Kata philosophy (in essence, practicing improvement routines consistently so the process becomes second nature) have gotten right. SIFs can’t be solved by management intervention alone, and any sustainable progress requires employees to be active partners in SIF reduction.
The Krause Bell Group
What are some key innovations you’ve seen during that time?
The Krause Bell Group: Data analysis and technology have advanced rapidly, and so has the understanding of what it takes to rally an organization behind SIF prevention. Even within the past two years, we’ve seen organizations make advances in identifying precursor situations and defining their SIF-critical controls.
However, the biggest advances we’ve seen – even since the pandemic began – relate to leadership decision-making and its effect on the culture of the organization. Decision analysis methods have provided a much deeper understanding of the crucial role of senior leader decision-making in SIF causation and prevention. Showing senior leaders data on the effects of their decisions changes their perspective. Not surprisingly, culture then emerges as the key linkage between SIF prevention and game-changing business results.
Associate Editor Alan Ferguson discussed this article on Episode 29 of Safety+Health’s “On the Safe Side” podcast.
Dony: Two major innovations or evolutions have occurred in the past few years. The first is the convergence of the SIF conversation with the human and organizational performance conversation. These two topics have long had a relationship; in some ways, SIF prevention can be looked at as an operating approach, while HOP can be viewed as an overarching philosophy or lens through which to view EHS generally and fatality prevention specifically. The second is the increased attention we’ve seen to topics such as psychological safety; mental health; stress; and diversity, equity and inclusion – all of which have a role to play in SIF prevention. Both of these evolutions offer up some exciting paths for exploration and integration in the years to come.
Wilson: The message is slowly getting out that traditional approaches (including behavior-based safety and the Hierarchy of Controls) won’t effectively solve SIFs in the workplace. And they won’t move the needle at all for incidents outside of the workplace, which is where 96% of worker fatalities occur. If employees are truly an organization’s “most valuable asset,” then a different approach is needed – and companies are increasingly recognizing this fact.
People need to be given the skills and knowledge to recognize when SIFs might happen, as well as the ability to make real-time adjustments to reduce their risk. More and more, safety pros understand that helping employees develop better situational awareness is an avenue for long-term SIF reduction.
There’s also been more emphasis placed on psychological safety, employee engagement and workplace culture – all of which are critically important for getting people to speak up when something doesn’t look or feel right. Often, technical systems are in place, the hazards are known and multiple layers of redundancy have been developed – all geared toward preventing SIFs. But these measures fail to have a lasting effect unless additional steps are taken to identify and correct gaps in systems as they arise. You need people to be actively looking for and communicating about potential issues all the time, and management needs to respond positively and quickly to fix these issues.
Continued on page 2: More SIF questions and answers
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How much did the COVID-19 pandemic interrupt any progress?
Walia: It might be argued that the pandemic increased the velocity of progress when it comes to SIF pre-vention. What we’ve observed is that the pandemic allowed organizations to make significant advances in thought leadership. It forced leaders to develop creative and varied approaches and delivery methodology, especially with respect to remote collaboration.
The Krause Bell Group: In one sense, progress in SIF prevention was severely stalled by COVID-19 when production stalled (or went into overdrive). Generally speaking, significant attention and resources were directed toward business continuity and implementing new safeguards to protect workers from the disease.
In another sense, great progress was made. During the pandemic, organizations discovered the capability they have to address complex health and safety issues. Relationships were strengthened between safety pros and organizational leaders. Above all, leaders experienced firsthand how their workforce responds when they lead with care and concern for worker well-being.
Wilson: Because things were already moving in the wrong direction, it would be difficult to say COVID-19 could “interrupt any progress.” What the pandemic did was shine a spotlight on safety and health issues as 24/7 problems that require the use of influence strategies instead of relying solely on control strategies. Safety pros learned quickly that keeping COVID-19 out of their facilities required them to influence employees to adjust their lifestyle and use tools and techniques to avoid the virus everywhere. The same strategy applies to SIFs, which are a 24/7 problem.
For organizations interested in SIF prevention or improvements, where or how should they begin their efforts?
Walia: Historical data analysis and a clear understanding of the organization’s SIF exposure profile is a good place to start (but only the start). A data-based approach to action and mitigation efforts yields quicker and stronger results.
The Krause Bell Group: Start with a definition of SIF so that everyone is on the same page. Next, start classifying events as either having SIF potential or not.
As for how, find an executive sponsor who’s passionate about SIF prevention and can help engage the rest of the executive team to lead the changes that need to take place. We see too many safety functions working in the safety silo without the support and understanding of their colleagues and leaders. Safety leaders invest a great deal of time and effort before running into the brick wall of resistance to change.
How do you engage leaders? The best place to start is to work with them to answer the “why” question. Why should anyone do anything different than they’re doing today? Why is it worth it to engage the organization in this change? Yes, lives are at stake. And so much more. If done right, they can transform the business. Done wrong, they add layers of bureaucracy to a bureaucratic system and everything becomes harder.
Find ways to help senior leaders make the connection between their decisions and SIF potential.
For smaller organizations that may not have as many resources, incidents or data, etc., what can they do for SIF prevention?
Dony: For smaller organizations, the key aspect of SIF prevention is increased understanding of and attention to risk. Not all work is created equal – and the same goes for all work-related incidents. Smaller organizations would be well served to start with reviewing their higher-risk work (examples: at height, con-fined spaces and lockout/tagout-related), as well as better understanding the key controls in place and their adequacy/effectiveness. A close next step would be reviewing and modifying pre-job assessments and post-incident investigations to include concepts related to risk and (natural) human error.
Wilson: Preventing SIFs doesn’t require a massive budget or Herculean effort. Even tiny companies can offer employees and their families safety awareness training based on a 24/7 human factors approach.
Alternately, because the greatest SIF danger most employees face is their daily commute, offering to pay those employees to attend a free defensive driving course would be another great first step. Including family members in this training has also shown incredible results.
And bringing in outside expertise doesn’t have to be limited to large, mature organizations, and can lead to long-term savings when you factor in the cost of injuries or the internal costs associated with trying to create solutions in-house. Most training programs are priced in scale with the number of employees, so smaller companies should be able to access training and consultants who will aid them in reducing SIFs and managing human factors.
What are some of the possible future innovations in SIF prevention?
Dony: Technology continues to play an interesting role as a disruptive/innovative force in SIF prevention. In particular, artificial intelligence and algorithmic analysis offer exciting opportunities for organizations to un-derstand and react to increased risk or operating disruptions in real time or in a proactive manner rather than after the fact.
Walia: 1) Further development of the role of exposure reduction teams. 2) The application of exposure reduction plans focused on a single or limited element of the organization’s exposure profile. 3) Exploration of the role of AI in data analysis.
Wilson: Most attempts to reduce SIFs focus on improving the workplace environment or getting people to make better decisions. Both of these approaches have serious limitations, as most injuries happen away from work, which is outside the purview of the safety manager and often aren’t the direct result of conscious decisions.
Instead, safety pros should direct their efforts toward developing how people subconsciously recognize and respond to hazards. Virtual reality offers some interesting opportunities. It allows people to participate in an immersive experience that can condition them to respond to real dangers in a variety of simulated situations. Think of it as sending workers to the school of hard knocks, but without the hard knocks. This can help rewire people’s real-time responses to stimuli and, in turn, lead to the development of stronger safety habits.
Other technology improvements, such as wearables that can monitor proximity to hazards, worker location, physical fatigue and other factors, can also help. But nothing will ever compete with the universal human capabilities associated with managing human factors in any situation, especially when you consider the amount of risk people face outside of their working environments.
