The National Safety Council's Dave Herbert on Tuesday challenged Laboratory managers to reduce by 50 percent the number of safety-related injuries over the next two years. The safety training for managers is part of Laboratory Director G. Peter Nanos' "Taking the Next Steps" safety initiative.
Safety expert Herbert addresses Lab managers
Echoing Director G. Peter Nanos' demand for improved safety performance at the Laboratory, the director of the National Safety Council's Occupational Safety and Health Division told an all-managers meeting Monday, "You will achieve only the level of safety you demonstrate you want.."
Dave Herbert, who has spent about a week at Los Alamos almost every month since 1996 when he joined the council, labeled the Lab's safety level as "good," when compared with comparable institutions. But he asserted that's not saying much for either this institution or the others when the fact is that more than 300 workers at Los Alamos have been injured in the past year, 171 of them so seriously they lost work time or were restricted from normal assignments
"I am issuing the challenge to you to achieve at minimum a 50-percent reduction in work-related injuries over the next two years," he told Lab managers convened as a next step in the Lab's "Taking the Next Steps" safety initiative.
In a two-hour, how-to-do-it session, Herbert said safety is a combination of strong management processes and procedures combined with active involvement of workers at the line level.
A key, he said, is getting workers involved in all the aspects of safety planning and reporting. That includes being involved in hazard control plans, safety meetings and the executive safety committee process, and defining the standards required to do the job well and safely.
"After all, who knows more about the job and its potential hazards than the person who actually does the work?" he asked.
Workers should also be involved in incident investigations, and reports of those investigations must be communicated broadly. "Workers know what happened," Herbert said. "They'll wait to see how honest management is in communicating the facts broadly and accurately." Failure to do so, he said, will promote a decline in morale and an increase in unsafe conditions.
Herbert used viewgraphs to illustrate how managers can improve safety by observing employees on the job, interacting with and reinforcing positive safety behaviors. Photos by LeRoy N. Sanchez, Public Affairs
Herbert is a chemical engineer who spent 31 years with Dupont, a company once focused entirely on chemicals but now diversified into a number of different industries.
He will spend the balance of this week in management walk-arounds, mentoring [managers] on best inspection practices. He will return periodically for more such training before the end of the year.
"Process improvement is crucial to safety and it must take place at the lowest level of work possible," he told the managers. Involved are improving hazard-identification and control plans, improving meaningful processes already in place, applying improvement at specific task-levels and strengthening worker involvement, he said.
A model procedure to protect against work hazards should also serve as a tool for telling a worker how to do a job. "And it shouldn't be more than two pages," Herbert said. "No one is going to read a 78-page manual on a simple equipment installation process, nor will they ever be able to retain that much information."
Even with the best procedures in place, tested and proven, there is always the opportunity for change to develop that can lead to accidents. Herbert described his pride in putting a new chemical plant on line, with every bolt properly specified, every exhaust hood properly tested. "And when did things change? As soon as the plant opened and someone first changed out a single pipe connection."
Being prepared to manage change represents a factor crucial to safety. Most major plant and industrial catastrophes have been attributable to change, he said. For that reason, it is imperative for managers and workers at the line level to review processes and verify engineering controls before starting any new job, even though it may be in the same facility as the most recent job.
"Institute, charter and utilize worker subcommittees to the Nested Safety Committee," he said, adding that managers should be certain subcontractors are also involved in the process.
Herbert said employee surveys show that what workers really want from management is involvement in:
- hazard control plans
- safety meetings and the executive safety process
- defining the standards required to do the job well and safely
- on-the-job training and mentoring
- safety audits and inspections
- and as part of incident-investigation teams.