The Risk Takers

Over the last two decades I’ve served as Plant Manager, Division Manager, and most recently as the Company CEO and President. I’ve always considered myself a “people person.” If you care about people, it naturally follows that you’ve got to care that they go home safe at the end of every day. I sure do.

Of course, go down that path and you’ve bound to come face to face with someone who’s not taking safety quite the way you do. Like, Tommy, for example.

I had just walked into the warehouse from our batch production area when I saw Tommy filling 55-gallon drums with a solvent we produced – not wearing a face shield. It was strange to me, frankly.  The eye hazards were well known; the PPE station fully stocked; the PPE Matrix – a board showing the required safety equipment for all the materials we packaged – was on full display.  And Tommy had been working for us for more than thirty years. How could this be?

Tommy and I stepped out of the enclosed area, and I did what I always do…. started asking a few questions. Or as Paul would say, Darn Good Questions.

“Tommy why aren’t you wearing your face shield? You know it’s the required PPE for the job you’re doing. You know this material can hurt your eyes if you get splashed with it, right?” 

Of course, he knew. “So, why was your face shield propped up on your head and not in a position to protect you?”

His answer was unsurprising, but a little more typical than it should have been from someone like Tommy. That only served to increase my blood pressure, like a good 30-minute run.

“I always wear it, Jay, it was just this one time.”  

At that stage of my career, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that one I might have been able to buy something expensive, like a new car.  After my reminder that the rules existed to protect him – not me – and that they were non-negotiable – meaning failure to follow them might lead to him being disciplined or terminated, in the best case, and losing his eyesight in the worst case – I went on my way with his chorus of “It won’t happen again” ringing in my ear.

Back In The Office

I was troubled. I had just corrected an unsafe behavior; that wasn’t the issue.  I believed mine was an effective communication; it was received well: that wasn’t the problem.  It was worse than noncompliance. The plant had 200 employees; we had a swing shift; while I tried to walk the plant every day, I was haunted by the stark thought: should he choose not to follow my coaching, what was the probability I would ever observe Tommy doing that job incorrectly again?  

Seriously, what were the odds?  

Maybe I’d get an hour in the plant per day. That’s five hours per week.  And sometimes I wouldn’t get to every area.  And maybe if I did get to that area, Tommy would be doing a different task, one that didn’t require “special” PPE.  Or maybe Tommy would be off.  

Did Tommy know those odds?

It’s easy to assume on a one-and-done fashion, a well-done interaction would have the full effect of eliminating risky behavior.  With a three-month employee, you can make that assumption, because they are learning. But a thirty-year guy?  

Do you really think that was the only time he’d been told that? I didn’t. So why would someone knowingly put themselves in harm’s way?  

We know the answer.  “I’ve never gotten hurt. I know how to make sure there are no pressure buildups that would cause product to spurt out.” The explanations we’ve all heard so many times in investigations.  

By now, I was pretty certain Tommy knew the odds.

A Drop In Visit

I headed down the hall to the EHS Manager’s office for a pronouncement: “David, we may have skydivers in our midst.”  At this point he and I had worked together long enough that, thankfully, he was used to my insights coming at him in this way. He listened patiently.

OK, so there may have been a “That, now?”, or an “Oh gosh!”, or “Here we go again.” wedged in, but I know for sure at the end came, “What now?” Point taken.

I don’t mean to offend anyone reading this who likes to jump out of perfectly safe airplanes on their days off. I’m not judging your choice. But the undeniable fact is my risk of hitting the ground at a high rate of speed is far less than a skydiver – simply because I don’t jump out of airplanes.  Similarly, my risk of getting hit by a 98-mph fastball – compared to a major league baseball player – is zero.

Please take note: there is a subtle difference between these two examples.  In the first, I choose not to do the activity; in the second, no major league team would ever choose to put me in that situation. 

Thankfully – for both of us.

As to what now, I went on. “David, I believe it’s very likely that in any population there are risk takers: people willing to do things that carry higher risk. They willingly accept more risk in their lives than you and I would.  And if that is the case, why would that inherent characteristic change when they show up here?”

I was on a roll.

“We have talked often that there really shouldn’t be a safety “switch” – something you turn  on when you get here, then turn off when you go home.  That’s why we encourage folks to take the safety lessons we teach at the plant home.  But what if we’re missing something? What if there are folks who don’t have a switch to turn on when they get here?  We have no way to detect them before we hire them, and we have poor ways to find them if they are already here.  

David, there are skydivers in our midst!”

Word storm over, I got that look from David I loved.  He got the point, saw the problem, launching one of those long, late afternoon conversations.  

We tackled the probability problem.  

The Probability Problem

If someone was always taking risks, while we trusted our leaders were correcting the situation, one leader would never know a different leader had corrected the same person, maybe six months ago, maybe three months ago, maybe several weeks ago, and maybe even yesterday.  We had to solve this problem – and did.

David was great with databases and created something nifty, which I rolled out just to senior staff because we wanted to do it experimentally.  It was easy: if you saw an unsafe behavior, you were to correct it on the spot, then log it in the database.  Just the facts:  person, date, job being done, what was communicated.  We asked them to do this for six months and we would not make it visible to anyone; after six months, like a time capsule, David and I would open it.

You already know what we found. Roughly thirty-five interactions recorded, with eight people accounting for about twenty-five of them. The others were a lot of one off’s, including the things expected from new employees: not wearing hearing protection, gloves, etc.  

And Tommy?  I think we had four or five entries.  Even one for not wearing the face shield. Can’t say I was surprised. 

What were the odds?

The Database

After a sobering discussion with the senior staff, we knew we had to incorporate this into our safety repertoire. We didn’t want this to be some secret, nefarious process; it needed to be out in the open.  Of course, we had some very honest conversations with our supervisors, and they were delighted!  They had been on the front lines of this issue for years, but no one had ever figured out how to connect the dots. 

Next, we brought it to our Union leadership: they accepted it as something very well done that should be continued.  The key to the acceptance was the one simple rule: if you don’t first speak to the employee one on one, this can’t be added to what became known as “The Unsafe Behavior Database”.  No secrets, just honest talk.  It became part of our fabric, and everyone knew about it.

It had a great effect, but occasionally, there would be something to make my head shake.

We had golf carts in the facility, and in a previous moment of recognition, added seat belts, then orange seat belts so that compliance could be observed. One day I saw an operator in a golf cart headed to the lab and no seat belt.  

I stopped him, pointed out what I’d seen, and asked why the belt wasn’t worn. I got the standard “I always do, just forgot this time. I marked it down on the index card I used to make notes, carried on in the plant, and added it to the database at the end of the day.

The next day, an incredulous Operations Manager showed up in my office, saying he was entering something he had observed, and saw my entry from the previous day.  (By then we unlocked it so all leaders could see all entries.)  You can imagine the conversation we had with the operator that afternoon, and his Union representative.  

All’s well that ends well, as this moment marked quite the turnaround for that operator, in safety, and other performance areas.  

…………..

You can skydive all you want on your time, but when you’re working in our chemical plant, you must follow all the rules all of the time because, as we all well know, every rule was written in someone else’s blood.


Jay Bizarro
November 2023