Speaker: Samuel L. Smolik, Vice President of EH&S, The Dow Chemical Company
Event: 2nd Annual OSHA Compliance Assistance Conference
Location: Washington, DC
Date: 06/13/2003
Good afternoon, and thank you Lee Anne for the introduction
I've titled my talk today - "Making progress and achieving results" - and I'll be repeating this little message several times throughout my talk. And I'm not here to tell you how to do your jobs. You know what you do better than anybody could ever tell you. But I would like to tell you about Dow's approach to health and safety, and some about my own philosophies. And our approach at Dow is all about "making progress and achieving results". To be more specific, making progress at protecting people and the environment, and adding value for the company.
Now before I get into my subject, let me tell you a little about myself. I attended the University of Texas majoring in Chemical Engineering, and worked summers in the refining industry in the Houston area. My primary reason for working was to make money, but I also gained practical, valuable experience that has helped me throughout my career. I also learned other practical, not so good experiences like playing baseball in the control room with shop towels, where the pillows were hidden in the ceiling tiles, etc…. This helped me later in my manufacturing career - the operators never could figure out how I knew all of their secrets.
Then I hired into Dow a little over 27 years ago. I spent 7 years in process R&D - working to improve operations of plants. Then I spent the next 15 or so years in manufacturing and engineering - responsible for plant operations. Through these years I believe I was a pretty good engineer and manufacturing leader, but I learned quickly that nothing is more important than safety - the safe operation of your facilities and of your people. So my background is well rooted in years of hands on experience - both in the US and in Europe - on safe operations of chemical plants.
Then, 3 years ago, I was asked to take the job of Vice President of EH&S for Dow worldwide. I asked "why me, I'm not a career EH&S professional" - and they said… that's exactly the reason why. Well, since that time, I've seen the good judgement and wisdom in their reasons for selecting someone with my background - because we have lots of outstanding EH&S professionals at Dow, but I'm able to bridge the gap between the EH&S function and our manufacturing and R&D organizations. In the last few years, I have traveled the world with Dow, been able to leverage the very best practices worldwide, and I truly believe that I have the best job in Dow. I can honestly say that we are making progress and achieving results, and I'm personally having a great time.
For my talk today, I'm going to focus on my title "making progress and achieving results". To do this, I'll cover three items with you that I believe contribute most to safety improvements:
1) Leadership Commitment
2) Personalizing the numbers
3) Individual Responsibility for Safety
My first point is the absolute necessity for leadership commitment for workplace safety. Now I know that you hear this all the time, but it's absolutely true. It must be strong at the very top, and be engrained in leaders all the way through the organization. I can honestly say that Dow has had a strong safety culture every since I've been at Dow, and many, many years before that. Through the years we were primarily a manufacturing driven company, and safety was near and dear to everyone's heart.
However, in the late 90's Dow made a major organizational change, and switched to 8 truly global business units. Geography no longer played the primary organizational role, and all functions began to report up through the businesses. So for the very first time, we had a number of business leaders that had risen up through the commercial routes, and took over responsibilities for all aspects of the company in their businesses.
So when I began my job in early 2000, I wanted to make sure that our top business leaders had the passion for safety that I felt they needed to have. So one of the first things I did was to go on a roadshow with each of our global business leaders. We discussed what it takes for flawless operation and profits, and what it takes for world class safety, and the fact that you can't separate the two. In the end, safety just makes good business sense.
Too often people think of leaders as being focused at the top of the pyramid. In my mind, leaders ought to be focusing at the bottom. Let me explain. At Dow, we often use an injury/illness pyramid in our discussions. (Explain the pyramid - fatalities, DAWC, OSHA recordables, Incidents, near misses, unsafe behavior, culture, role of leaders)
Well let me give you a couple of examples of leaders working at the bottom of the pyramid on culture at Dow. We have 50,000 Dow employees globally but also utilize about 30,000 contractors. So contractors make up a large part of our workforce. Now you all know that OSHA only requires companies to report safety statistics on its own employees. So for many years, this is exactly what we did, and this was our focus. However, as time went on, it was almost as if there was a double standard for Dow employees and contractors. Well this certainly wasn't the kind of culture that we wanted in Dow, but it shows how the wrong measurements can drive the wrong behavior.
So we switched about 7-8 years ago to measuring Dow employees and contractors together in only one injury/illness metric. When we began, the contractor rates were about 2-3 times higher that Dow rates, but today I'm proud to say that they are about the same on average globally - better than Dow at some sites, and a little worse at others. This is a prime example of commitment by leadership, and then action taken to change culture, and to "make progress and achieve results". Our biggest challenge today is with transient, or new contractors to Dow facilities. They aren't used to the safety culture that we have, and the expectations for an injury free environment. They tell us time and time again that there is a major difference between places where they work.
So one message that I have for you today is to encourage the company's you work with to keep records on both their own employees and their contractors as one common total. I guarantee their entire operations will improve.
Another example of leadership commitment at the bottom of the culture pyramid is with new employee orientations. A lot of people start at a company and are just buried in work from day one. But how often do they get buried with safety expectations from day one? Not very often.
However, at Dow it's different. We want that indoctrination to occur from the very beginning. When a new employee repeatedly hears about safety from subordinates, co-workers and your boss, he or she eventually gets the message. One of our new research and development scientists said that he heard more about lab safety in one day at Dow than in 7 years of school.
We're also just beginning a new program which we call pre-employment orientations. Beginning with our new hires during 2003, we're sending them pre-packets and homework on our safety messages and expectations. We feel that they are most impressionable after they have accepted their job offer, and before they have reported for work. We want them to show up on day one with a head start on the new safety culture that they are about to inherit.
So to conclude with my first point - it all begins with a strong leadership commitment focused on action that changes culture at the bottom of the pyramid.
Second, you must have measurements to make improvement, but you also have to personalize the numbers. People always want to know, "what's in it for me". Dow is a company full of engineers and we love to talk about data and engineer-speak. But the bottom line is that you have to win the hearts and minds of each individual in order to gain commitment and to change behavior.
So let me talk a little about data. As I mentioned, we have always had a strong focus on safety and have always been one of the industry leaders. However, in 1995, we had some very enlightened leaders, and they set a variety of EH&S 10 years goals on a variety of EH&S performance measurements. Now understand, we already felt we were pretty good, but our leadership wanted to drive a clear message of the need for a paradigm shift in performance. These goals are called our EH&S 2005 goals, and they cover topics such as safety, process safety, motor vehicle accidents, spills, chemical emissions, water use, energy, and many more. We have made these goals public, and report our progress quarterly on our website at www.dow.com.
One of those goals was to lower our injury/illness rate by 90% in 10 years. In 1994 - our baseline year, we had an OSHA rate of 2.57. Now this is good even today relative to national statistics. But we set a goal to reduce our global rate to 0.24 by 2005. At the time, I was working in Europe and I felt that our leadership had lost their marbles. Well, how have we been doing towards that goal? In 2001 we proudly crossed the 1.0 OSHA rate, and ended the year at 0.86. Last year, 2002 we improved by another 20% over the previous year, and ended up at 0.71. Remember this is for both Dow employees and contractors - 80,000 people worldwide. We're extremely proud of this progress, but it's still not zero. We're not perfect and we unfortunately still have injuries. But, you know, the closer you get to zero, the more passion you have to get there. So I don't think we'll ever let up in our quest to eliminate all injuries.
However, we're pleased with some accolades that we've been receiving. Just last week, we were honored by the American Chemistry Council with the Responsible Care Sustained Excellence Award in Safety Performance. This is the second year in a row that we have received the top ACC safety award and to be recognized as the leader by our peers.
We've also been recognized recently in Occupational and Health Magazine as one of the 16 safest companies in the United States. We are also proud that we are receiving similar awards and recognition all over the world.
But that's not the whole story, and most people aren't very analytical in nature. So, sorry audience, an OSHA rate of 0.71 just doesn't resonate with most people and get them very excited. So we have begun tracking our safety performance in more human terms. The injury/illness rate is only a measurement of safety. But the intent of the measurement is to keep people from getting hurt. And so we've turned the measurement around. We now measure how many people we have kept from getting hurt.
Let me explain….Working with our EH&S 2005 goal for safety, and building off of our 1994 baseline, we calculate that over 8700 people have avoided an injury or illness because of the improvements we've put in place. If all goes well, we should pass the milestone for 10,000 avoided injuries and illnesses sometime during the 4th quarter of this year or early in 2004. 10,000 real people being kept safe as a result of your efforts. 10,000 people that went home to their friends and families the way they showed up that morning. That's a message that goes beyond the numbers and gets folks excited.
So my second point today is to "personalize the numbers". This, I can assure you helps to win the hearts and minds of people, and helps to "make progress and achieve results".
My third point is about "individual responsibility for safety" or as we call it - IRS. At the end of the day, safety is one of the few items I'm aware of where it takes 100% performance by each person to establish a long injury/illness free record. If one person gets hurt, it breaks the string. We can provide world class facilities and equipment, but individuals have to exhibit safe behavior every day, every hour, every minute.
So we work hard and spend a lot of time talking about this concept to establish the right culture and behavior among our employees and contractors. We work hard to maintain a culture of continuos learning, and not punitive. We utilize our root cause analysis process (in the past we called it investigations) to learn from unfortunate incidents and then to implement corrective actions to prevent reoccurrence. At Dow we're fortunate to be a world class, global organization. Through our internet and communications capabilities, we are leveraging learnings and best practices on a daily basis from around the globe. I personally have participated in hundreds of root cause analysis session through the years. For injuries, I always ask the question - if you had this task to do again, what would you do to prevent an injury. 90% of the time - the answer is "I'd be more careful". And that's the way it is with most of us - we know what to do, we have the proper tools and processes, but we let down our guard sometimes.
So two of our most important processes that we feel help our folks significantly with their individual responsibility is 'pre-task analysis" and "intervention and observations". Our employees and contractors use pre-task analysis cards to spend just a few minutes thinking about the task that they are about to do. I am absolutely confident that this simple activity has saved countless injuries and perhaps lives.
And second, in our daily lives, we all get distracted and sometimes have other things on our minds than the task at hand. This is what leads to accidents and injuries. How many of you have ever been driving somewhere and then realized that you had missed the turn. (Show of hands….). The simple answer is that you were doing one thing, and thinking about another. This is the primary cause of mistakes and accidents. We have a saying at Dow "Do what you're doing". If you're doing a job, concentrate and think about that job. But if you catch yourself daydreaming or thinking about something else, take a break - think about it for a while, and then go back to work with full focus. "Do what you're doing" - it works.
However, we all have distractions in our lives - whether it's a bad night sleep, upcoming vacation, trouble with spouse or kids, you name it - and we all need to help out each other.
To deal with this, we have an active "observation and intervention" program. We've established a culture where it's ok to intervene with someone if you see him or her committing an unsafe act. In fact, we expect it and we all need it at one time or another.
We also talk with our people about what is a reasonable expectation for injuries during a lifetime career. Let me see a show of hands - how many injuries do you feel is reasonable during a career - 2,1,0?
Now, when most people first come to Dow - feel that it is most likely and, in fact, reasonable that you are going to have one or two injuries in a career. But then we explain what a 1.0 injury/illness rate actually means. The official definition for a 1.0 rate is 1 injury for 200,000 work hours. Now that doesn't mean much to people, so we've simplified it and it's about the same as one injury for every 100 work years. That means that for an organization of 100 people, a 1.0 would be one injury during the year. And we're already doing better that this at Dow on average.
So to personalize this, it means that each person (each one of us) would need to work 100 years with only one injury just to have a personal 1.0 rate. Most people don't work 100 years - but say they work 33 years, for simplicity….. One injury in a 33 year career would give them a personal 3.3 injury/illness rate. So it becomes easier for people to see and understand that we truly mean and expect a workplace of zero injuries and illnesses.
So my point number 3 today, is "Individual Responsibility for Safety" and making it clear for people to understand this and giving them the tools and processes to help them be successful.
I began my talk today by saying it would be about "making progress and achieving results". Too many people are busy doing things and activities, but they aren't focused on the end results. Today, I've covered three simple elements which I feel have helped Dow to make progress and achieve results, and they are:
1. Leadership Commitment
2. Personalize the numbers
3. Individual Responsibility for Safety
I hope that some of this may help you as you work with many other companies across the United States. At the same time, we're a learning organization at Dow and are always looking for better ways to do things
This is one of the reasons that we signed up for the national Alliance with OSHA earlier this year. It's a way to learn from someone else. It's all about sharing best practices and best approaches. So I'm looking forward to a successful alliance, and am sure that both Dow and OSHA will benefit from the relationship for many years.
Thank you very much for allowing me to be with you here today.
