I’m sorry to hear about your situation. There are several aspects that go into an effective safety culture, leadership buy-in being one of the more important. They must first understand that a multitude of contextual factors go into changing an unsafe act or condition. They must have a population that is willing, and more importantly able, to have quality interventions to uncover the factors of unsafe conditions before they can ever gather the information and effect change. Once the front line employees provide them that information they must be willing and able to correct those factors before the behavior and conditions can be sustainably changed.

The reason I said that the population must be able to properly intervene is because many times leadership sees employees identifying problems, rather than solutions, to be an attack on their job performance. In hindsight, that is far from the truth, but done incorrectly will put the leadership on the defensive and can be counterproductive.

A quality intervention stops the unsafe act, identifies the critical factors that allowed that behavior or condition to exist, and then some sort of personal, group, or organizational fix to be made. If leadership doesn’t understand the principles of what drives failure, and the intervention (with leadership) is done in a way that breeds defensiveness, failure in the entire system, and that relationship, is inevitable.

I had stellar job performance reviews for years, and had recently won incentive and beyond-duty awards, when I pointed out that we had an unsafe condition. My bosses looked at it and deemed it acceptable. Later during a plant inspection an OSHA representative saw the same problem and asked me (among others) about it. I didn’t lie to the man. OSHA forced that company to look into and correct the problem, and my bosses got reprimanded. My bosses made our lives miserable as revenge. The executives used this incident as incentive for a safety campaign. They sent people out to interview us about our thoughts for improvements. I offered a couple of suggestions. About a week later I happened to be in an elevator with one of those executives (one who had made a big show about promoting the safety campaign) who snidely remarked that my suggestions were going to cost money and that made him look bad. About a month later I was given an early performance review, where I was deemed unsuitable and I was laid off. (Several others got the same treatment.) Now not only do I have to find another job, but my former company is giving me a bad reference.

I am still proud that I stood up for safety improvements, and nobody actually got hurt. I have no respect for my former bosses or that company, so I’m glad I’m out of there. But this is not the way it’s supposed to work, is it?