The title of this paper is a paraphrase of Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote, "Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying." These words have always been important to me because I think they get to the heart of what really matters to people. What defines who you are? What you do and how you spend your time reveal what's truly important to both individuals and organizations.
I work for NOVA Chemicals and we value continuous improvement in safety. We are members of the American Chemistry Council and Canadian Chemical Producers Association, and both organizations are committed to Responsible Care. Responsible Care is a global industry performance initiative that helps companies go above and beyond government requirements and share our results with the public. Our employees develop and manufacture plastics and chemicals for customers worldwide that produce consumer, industrial and packaging products. There are hazards associated with these processes and as such, "safe, reliable operations" is a fundamental value of our business. This value led us to develop a tool that has improved safety in our company and can do the same for your company as well.
So you can see that talking about being committed to safety and sharing ideas are the first steps, but spending time and effort to improve safety is what really makes the difference and demonstrates a much higher level of commitment- in both our work and personal lives. Safety actions, demonstrated by leadership, should energize employees to seek ways to reduce rather than accept risk. We want all employees to "walk the talk" and do the things that keep each other safe. That's why it's so critical for leaders to set an example and ingrain safety values into the company culture by influencing others through their commitment to safety. Quite simply, employees care about what their leaders care about. When everyone is paying attention to safety, the result is the reduction of incidents.
A safety professional's ability to reduce incidents is limited unless we influence leadership to expect and demand safety excellence from all. The key is for the safety professional to convince leaders that their efforts will make a difference with their workers, that their activities and commitment will be measured and noticed, and ultimately worker safety will be improved. Once "the boss" invests their time and effort to achieve safety, the rest of the organization will follow their lead.
To help achieve these objectives at NOVA Chemicals, we have developed the Safety Leadership Perception Survey (SLPS). This survey is a simple, efficient tool that provides a measurement indicator for leaders' proactive safety efforts as opposed to the traditional reliance on measuring failures (incident rates). The goal of this paper is to share information about our SLPS process and to teach others to develop a Safety Leadership Perception Survey tailored for their organization.
Four years ago NOVA Chemicals conducted a safety culture survey that was very enlightening.
