Original Post - LinkedIn August 3, 2014

Are you ready to free your employees to make change and move to the next level of performance? Many companies are not aware that applying the right thinking and facilitating motivation, through a vehicle such as health and safety, affects across the board performance in quality, safety, health, productivity, cost, and the environment to provide incredible value (aka save more lives - make more money – get happier customers).

Safety, it’s not a cost, it’s a value.

Most health, safety and environmental (HSE) practitioners focus on compliance. Compliance – auditing against regulation is real, tactile, something you can show. Compliance will get you to a level safety culture level called Calculative, where you have a system in place to manage all hazards. We are planning a move to British Columbia so let’s use that beautiful province as an example. If you are a manufacturer in British Columbia and you comply fully with the FIOSA-MIOSA safety association’s OSSE accreditation program requirements (aka COR), I believe you would be at solidly at that Calculative level. You would have a great HSE management system. Companies that achieve that level of performance should be commended.

To be more competitive though, compliance benchmarking won’t cut it. That is just the entrance fee into a world class safety culture. A company needs to bring their HSE culture to life to move forward; to move up the safety culture ladder. That means they need to move into that non-tactile world of employee engagement and that fuzzy world of motivation.

Companies at a Calculative level of safety need to move beyond a solid HSE management system to a Proactive cultural level, or if you are really serious, to a Generative (high reliability) safety culture level? At the proactive level, safety leadership and value drive continuous improvement. At the generative level, HSE is how we do business around here.

To boost that performance imperative, I support the motivational workplace ideology ofmastery, purpose and autonomy that Daniel Pink, talks about in his book Drive. I created an onboarding training program that has these three values imbedded; it works. Safety culture leaders, E. Scott Geller and Bob Veazie, in their book, When No One’s Watching, use a similar vernacular of competence, community and choice as an imperative to affect a positive safety change.

Like in Drive, and in When No One’s Watching, Shell’s Hearts and Minds HSE culture change ideology, supports three key elements. Their three elements are Personal Responsibilitywhere (“we understand and accept what should be done and know what is expected of us”),Individual Consequences where (“we understand and accept that there is a fair system for reward and discipline”) and Proactive Interventions where (“we work safely because we are motivated to do the right things naturally, not just because we are told to”; and “we want to make interventions and actively participate in improvement activities”).

Shell’s Hearts and Minds documentation notes, “Weaknesses in any of these Three Key Elements inhibit behavioural and cultural change. We must balance our resources and efforts such that each element receives the necessary focus.”

Want to know where your company is on the culture change ladder? Join the Energy Institute at http://www.eimicrosites.org. Purchase the Understanding Your Culture packet and the Understanding Your Culture scoring pads. I recommend you purchase enough for ten people at a time and complete the Understanding Your Culture presentation and have groups or all of your employees complete the culture assessment. It will give you a good idea of where you are on Shell’s safety culture ladder.

From there, you can begin your journey to move to the high reliability and highly profitable generative level of safety culture. If the profit thing isn’t driving you how about hurting less-people and hurting people-less. Want help doing that? Then drop me a line on the contact page at http://dalesyrota.ca

I have one more imperative to share. My mother, after I would lament about not doing something or other, would say, “coulda – woulda – shoulda – didn’t”. I advise you to take a page out of the Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson’s book, REWORK. Not a page really just an idea on page 77. “Whenever you can, swap “Let’s think about it” for “Let’s decide on it.” … Decisions are progress. Each one is a brick in your foundation. You can’t build on top of “We’ll decide later,” but you can build on top of “Done.””

Do it now. Make that customer call. Press that button. Contact that guy, now. Don’t let, “coulda – woulda – shoulda – didn’t,” echo in your future.

Dale Syrota is just a regular guy the gets off on work that brings out his creative soul and supports his personal mission. To facilitate individual and business success by propagating mastery, autonomy, and purpose as a vehicle to engage every employee every day and to enlist the psychology of the mind to help individuals self-improve at work and at home.

Dale will soon be on the move looking for a new roost in a warmer part of Canada, the West Coast. He wants to make work WORK in that part of the world, too. He has yet to accept that perfect position or work BC yet, but he is optimistic. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Isn't life grand?