Are You Building Resilience Into Your Culture for Safety?

“You can’t do better than your best.”  Those are the words I heard from legendary football coach, Bobby Bowden during a recent time together.  I can only imagine Bobby using those words to “settle his team” during or after a difficult time or situation.  Or possibly to help them become more focused and resilient to the challenges at hand over the course of a long and difficult season. In our work, our groups, teams, and organizations will go through difficult times and we need to help prepare them to work through various difficulties.

When organizations are threatened by a challenging economy, downsizing, right sizing or re-engineering, we have to do our best to help ensure that that our culture for safety won’t drift.  Similarly, when a key leader leaves the organization, we have to prepare it to work through a wide-array of challenges, changes, and opportunities for growth rather than regression.  Let’s take a look at the 3Rs that can help you build resilience into your cultures for safety.

Relationships have to be addressed and will help to build resilience into our cultures for safety.  Building upon important relationships requires that we mentor the right people who can help lead the way and to engage even more individuals to move the organization forward.  It also requires that we help the right people build relationships with key leaders in our organizations rather than insulating future leaders from the types people that will be needed to provide ongoing support.  Being political and insular - “protecting your relationships” rather than expanding roles and relationships by including others and creating openness in communications with the right leaders is necessary.   Roles and relationships will change in the midst of challenges, so they must be carefully addressed. 

Resources will be challenged by change and may have to be stretched.  That’s why we have to build-up resources along the way, while things are good, and not “play catch-up” when our organizations are disrupted and stressed.  Whenever possible, we have to consistently plan and budget for improvements that relate to materials, tools, equipment, and facilities.  This needs to be accomplished in a methodical and deliberate manner, without major surprises.  Oftentimes, capital improvements are viewed as quality and productivity enhancements that inherently add value to EHS performance.   Leverage quality and productivity improvements as multi-dimensional opportunities that can be sold and supported as such. 

Reporting Systems and reporting requirements need to be strong and structured so they can be easily maintained and used by others with minimal effort and communications.  Reporting applications and systems are more efficient than ever and big data is our friend – use them to your advantage.  Systems relating to near-miss and accident reporting, ongoing communications, and upstream improvements that are tied directly to your facilities and equipment are a part of this same equation.   

There’s obviously much more that can be done to increase resilience, but you need to be very deliberate in building your cultures for safety to withstand future challenges and changes.  Certainly, these challenges will require a resilient organization that’s well equipped to create opportunities for improvement rather than crumble under the weight of change. 

Are you working in a way to build-up EHS resilience in your organizations for sustained improvement, so you’re a little closer to being better than your best?