#6 Excellent Safety = Excellent Business. Yes, but is it Cause or (just) Correlation?

First however, to establish the current thinking, he canvassed speakers for their take on whether excellent safety and excellent business, whether correlated or causal in their relationship, should be treated as linked at all.

Who better to ask than companies that have achieved both safety excellence and top business performance?

As usual, candid insights were forthcoming on how safety excellence relates to business performance:

• “If you don’t see the correlation then there is something seriously wrong in your organisation”, says Ahmed Khalil (Director of Health and Safety, Bahrain Petroleum Company).
• David Bianco (Global SafeStart Program Manager, Epiroc) concurs, saying “the correlation piece is a bit of a given”.

The panels then considered could we build on that correlation to find causation:

• To start, it is necessary to define what “good business is”: “Is it only financial? Unidirectional?” asks Salman Abdulla (Executive Vice President, Emirates Global Aluminium).
• Or does it also involve “the wellbeing of the people, reputation in the market, reputation with investors, or the wellbeing of the plant and planet?”. If so, then “yes, it’s a very direct causation”, he says.

Larry developed the discussion to explore whether leadership had made the connection between human error and injury causation on the one hand and human error causing quality problems or production problems on the other: do they see the direct link?

In a nutshell, do senior leadership understand that reduction of human error is the reason excellent safety equals excellent business?

• Arun Subramanian (Senior Associate Vice President & Head – HSE, Coromandel International Limited) believes that a grasp of causation is very clear at a higher level in management, but has yet to set in at lower levels.
• Anupam Bagchi (AVP/Head of EHS – Mines and Minerals, Hindalco Industries Ltd) shares that, at Hindalco’s monthly safety reviews, any perception that an individual is not seeing the cause-and-effect relationship triggers counselling and observation until causation is understood.
• Though some might not see the causality, Peter Batrowny (President & CEO, PB Global EHS, Inc.) explains that leaders definitely see the value of integrating safety practices into their business processes. For example, many companies have separate incident investigations for production and quality upsets than for safety, whereas many of the best performing organisations integrate them.

Are ‘performance errors’, such as delivering an inappropriate consignment, being caused by the same things that cause or contribute to the ‘injury errors’? Can we assign them to rushing, frustration, fatigue and complacency? Or a combination of these states?

• The panellists all agree that both performance and injury errors have the same kind of antecedents.
• Bipin Sharan (Manufacturing Operations Defence Vehicles, Tata Motors) adds to this by explaining that they have created a tool called “human error root cause analysis”, which, while initially created for safety incident investigations, is now being used for all activities and errors in the organisation. (Incidentally, this indicates an understanding of “cause” rather than mere “correlation” coming into play.)

Nonetheless, the understanding of the link between safety practices and excellent business remains unclear unless the human aspect of error is grasped:

• Pierre-Jean Paumard (EPC HSE Manager, Besix/Hitachi Zosen Inova Consortium) explains that while “we really believe that business performance comes with good safety performance, when we went a bit deeper and I asked, ‘what are those relations?’, we rarely talk about human factors [and] human error”. “We talk about equipment, methodology, light, ventilation… we do things towards eliminating human error, but we don’t talk about it directly”.
• SafeStart’s Teg Matthews agrees, saying that “there’s that belief on an intellectual level, but when you start drilling down and looking at it from a practical perspective people don’t really know what it looks like, unless they have [passionate] leadership that makes it crystal clear throughout the organisation”.

Scrutinise the inputs: Alex Carnevale emphasises the need to look at the drivers of good business performance rather than just the outcomes. 

• “If you really understand what drives the business performance for your company, it’s your people. People make mistakes. Mistakes cause problems, the worst of those are serious injuries. Once everyone can see it from that perspective, everything becomes much easier”.

Yes, the goal is good business performance but belief in the shared causality of excellent business and safety excellence leads you to understand the drivers in play. Identify what they are and you will know which levers produce good or better results.

Why settle for correlation when you could be leveraging the cause? Why aim for Good when you could be getting Great?