Safety Leadership: Five principles for creating a risk-based decision-making culture

Editor’s Note: Achieving and sustaining an injury-free workplace demands strong leadership. In this monthly column, experts from global consulting firm DEKRA share their point of view on what leaders need to know to guide their organizations to safety excellence.

One of the most troubling and persistent worries of today’s leaders is the potential for catastrophic occupational and process safety events. These devastating events reverberate throughout an organization – with lasting impacts on all stakeholders.

Catastrophic events are difficult to predict. Traditional safety approaches tend to focus on outcomes and not potential, and can provide misleading and incomplete insights. This tendency can cause organizations to work on activities that don’t represent the highest risks.

Our experience has shown that applying the following five principles broadly supports a comprehensive risk-based decision-making process.

1. Develop targeted activity plans based on risk. Create a “risk register” that inventories and analyzes the exposures and risks in your organization. Your facilities already have this information, which can be collected and synergized. It includes process hazard analyses, job safety analyses, audit reports, incident reports and investigations, and insurance company inspection reports. Once this information is collected, conduct reviews with various stakeholders to confirm the accuracy of the information and establish buy-in.

2. Anticipate points of failure and manage proper safeguards. Identify the critical safeguards you have in place to control the hazards identified in Step 1. Those safeguards will be a combination of engineering and administrative controls. In addition to providing an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the controls, this analysis will identify critical controls that must be governed and routinely inspected and audited. You’ll also be able to identify specific hazards with insufficient controls that require additional focus and improvement.

3. Catch minor deviations early and respond appropriately. High-reliability safety aims to improve the identification and response to early warning signals. Early indications of weak – or improper – control of hazards must be reported, analyzed, addressed and corrected. This is essential to establishing a culture of risk awareness from the C-suite to the front line. When most major incidents are studied, we discover that dozens – if not hundreds – of early warning signals preceded the major event. Had any of them been addressed and corrected, the event’s severity (or occurrence) would have been significantly reduced (or avoided). We must create a culture that routinely identifies and responds to these opportunities.

4. Enhance operational discipline through human performance reliability. All our risk control systems –engineering and administrative – rely on human performance and are subject to the challenges of human error. As we strive to ensure correct actions the first time, we must incorporate modern views of human performance reliability into our safety programs. Fundamentally, we must recognize and address the many risk factors that affect even our best-performing employees.

5. Use effective governance to develop in-process metrics that evaluate performance. Governance of your risk-based safety management approach is essential to ensure effectiveness. Although effective risk management practices will produce long-term and sustainable reduction in traditional lagging metrics, it’s critical to identify additional in-process metrics that track underlying organizational risk performance.

The great news is that most organizations already have some form of information collected for the first two steps. The remaining three steps can help you establish an effective risk management approach.

Implementing a risk-based decision-making approach will help your organization move beyond compliance to control your most serious risks effectively.

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