THE VALUE OF SAFETY
A CEO says protecting workers pays off in morale and helps the bottom line.
Brian Fielkow has spent most of his career worrying about safety, first as a vice president at Waste Management, and now as president and CEO of Jetco Delivery, a Houston company with 155 employees and an average of 100 big trucks on the road every day.
Fielkow’s obsession with safety led him to become an expert on how to shape corporate culture to not only avoid accidents, but also boost profitability. He is the author of the 2014 book “Driving to Perfection: Achieving Business Excellence By Creating A Vibrant Culture” and co-author of a new book, “Leading People Safely: Howto Win on the Business Battlefield.”
Q: What is the difference between a safety culture and a compliance culture?
A: Rules and regulations are important, but they are generally the minimum standard. Safety is vastly different.
A behavior-based safety culture is one driven by leadership, and it’s owned by every employee. In any safety-sensitive businesses, manufacturing or health care, it’s about getting employees to do the right thing when nobody else is looking. Everybody’s empowered to call a timeout; there’s no retribution for calling a timeout.
We’re drowning in metrics. Your profit and loss statement, your insurance loss runs, whatever key performance indicators you use, they are all measuring things that happened in the past. You have to figure out how to get in front of it.
We know that 30,000 unsafe behaviors yield 3,000 minor accidents, 300 significant injuries, 30 dismemberments and one fatality. The only place you are going to get in front of it is measuring those behaviors and stopping those, and coaching those to avoid the accidents.
Q: How do you develop that culture?
A: At the foundation there has to be trust. Leadership has to walk the walk, so enough with the signs on the wall. That’s not going to do it. First, people have to hear leadership talking about what’s going to be different. And when I say leadership, I don’t mean the C-suite. I’m talking about the front-line opinion leaders who are out there working and may not have an office or a fancy title.
Then employees have to see it, they have to see that the boss was ready to shut down the facility and lose a half-hour of production to deal with a safety issue. When people start to believe it, that’s when they know it’s OK for them to err on the side of safety.
We asked our drivers to elect a drivers’ committee, and this wasn’t a typical doughnuts-and-coffee, once-a-month drivers’ session. Our drivers’ committee is involved in every aspect of the governance of our company.
Sometimes you still have to make tough, unpopular decisions, but people will support those decisions if you give them the dignity of explaining why.
Over five years, our costs pervehicle to insure is down by way more than half and our workers’ comp insurance is very low.
Q: We’ve seen many cases where accidents came from prioritizing revenues over safety. Is there a trade-off?
A: The antiquated way of thinking is that profitability and safety are in conflict with each other. Safety is not a cost, it’s an investment, and an investment like any other that has measurable payoffs in employee morale, because they know you value their health. And customer recognition, because they know you are not going to produce a defective product.
Beyond that, the fewer accidents you have, the less your insurance premiums are. The less down time, the less missed work. It’s the right thing to do and a driver of the
bottom line.
Q: What lessons can executives take from your experience and apply to their business?
A: You’re not going to find a healthy safety culture in a company with a broken corporate culture. In the book, we talk about the difference between values and priorities. Values are the glue that binds us together, while priorities can, should and do change by the day. Safety is a core value. If I could offer a CEO a little tactical advice, I would say take a little bit of your marketing money and build an internal brand, a brand around safety for your employees. At my company, the safety brand is “Driving to Perfection.” It’s not for the outside world, but it is on every screen saver in the office, it’s on every T-shirt or uniform, and it’s a visual affirmation of your values. It’s a reminder that they can call a timeout, that we put safety first. And it works. It really works.