#3 Zero Harm: Is it a Mindset or Reality?

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Throughout the panels, there were essentially only two different answers. Sometimes, an unfortunate incident at the workplace occurred, such as two fatalities resulting from a fire, as Ahmed Khalil, Director of EHS at Bahrain Petroleum Company, said happened at BABCO, or in the case of P&G – an outbreak of occupational asthma as a result of certain detergent enzymes, which spurred the adoption of a Zero Harm objective. Otherwise, it was usually an initiative brought on by a “visionary” leader or group of leaders – like Michael Cooke of ABB, who standardised Zero Harm globally within the company, according to Ed Stephens, Global HSE/SA Audit, Assurance & Senior Lead Investigator at ABB, or as also was the case with Ian Thorpe, Vice President Health and Safety at HMEL, who brought in the “Zero Incidents and Injuries” programme to Mittel Energy in India. There was also one example from the largest aluminium smelting operation in the world, where they “inherited it”, as Salman Abdulla, Executive Vice President at Emirates Global Aluminium, put it: “Zero Harm was part of the ethos from day one, it was carried over from the people who built the plant”.

“Zero Harm was part of the ethos from day one, it was carried over from the people who built the plant”.

Nevertheless, what listeners and Larry really wanted to know, was… did it work? Did the people buy into it, did it help in terms of actually getting to zero, and would you recommend it? The answer was yes and no. Unanimously, all the panelists agreed that working towards Zero Harm is definitely helping reduce incident rates across the board. However, everyone also understands that maintaining zero harm is statistically impossible. Even at a company like P&G, with some of the lowest incident rates for a company of that size in the world, there are occasional SIFs and recordables. Anthony puts it well: “Are we perfect? Absolutely not. We don’t achieve zero, but we remind people that our value is to do everything we can to keep the supply chain and our people resilient and safe”. Or, as Mr. Abdulla said, “are we there 100%? No. Are we working towards that, are we creating the culture that will protect our people, environment, and community? Yes.” As a company that works with many contractors, he explained that annually they rate the companies the way a financial risk company would – with the aspiration that they move up the ladder (towards 10) every year. “If you are continually moving up the ladder”, Mr. Aravind says, “then you can dream of having a Zero Harm company”.

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Mr. Abdulla shared that they often see the graph coming down and down until it hits zero… but then it always bounces back up. He also shared that HSE practitioners will often explain this by saying something like “an incident is bound to happen in this industry”. But, when studied deeply a pattern emerges where somehow, inadvertently, some of the safety resources are taken away, and injuries start happening again. “When your focus is on letting people go or market conditions, the frequency rate goes up”, he said. Thus, we cannot only look at the shop floor but also the top floor and recognize the impact that senior leaders’ decisions – whether they seemingly pertain to safety or not – have on the bottom line. To this end, Ed also explained that “as your incident rates get below 1.0 or less, the signals you rely on to get those rates that low also change, so you have to learn to look at these leading and lagging indicators in a different way.”

If you are continually moving up the ladder, then you can dream of having a Zero Harm company.

So, it appears that Zero Harm is more than just another slogan or KPI – it needs to be a “deeply embedded value” in each employee and the whole organisation, even if maintaining zero long term is improbable. As Larry says, “if you want your employees to take safety home, or to think that driving safety is really important – that’s almost an impossible message or communication challenge if your goal was only a 30% decrease in recordable injuries”. Thus, zero harm helps to eliminate that discrepancy, by showing employees that you care about them, their families, the community, and the environment – 24/7.