Company management bears ultimate legal responsibility and must always take the initiative to ensure that workplace safety is thorough and successful. This point of view was shared by all of the speakers at the 2007 SSG Safety Conference.
SSG held its third consecutive, and much appreciated, Safety Conference on 27-28 September 2007. This year’s focus was on work environment and safety issues in the process industry. This year’s theme was safety culture and how different companies work to develop it in order to achieve safer work environments.
The first day of the conference, held near Stockholm at Arlanda Stad, attracted 110 participants from the forest, metal, mining and chemical industries, dealt mainly with the concept of safety culture. The second day was dedicated primarily to the work in this field undertaken by the SSG Safety Committee and its working working groups.
Everyone’s responsibility
Mats Pettersson, personnel director at LKAB, presented the company’s experience in introducing new safety consciousness in the mining industry. He also touched on the turbulence caused by safety work in connection with the recent local wage negotiations.
På LKAB har Safety work at LKAB has resulted in low absence rates due to accidents and sickness. The company’s view is that injuries and work-related sickness can be prevented and that all known shortcomings in safety are to be addressed quickly. The company invests in continual safety training for all employees to achieve this goal.
“Preventing work-related sickness and injuries is good for our operations. Every employee has a responsibility in this work and that’s why everyone’s commitment must be clear and visible.”
Moreover, safety is equally important away from work explained Mats Petterson while emphasising attitudes to safety being considered in the recruitment process.
“Working safely is a condition for employment and contracts with us,” he said.
In its ongoing safety work LKAB is now implementing, for example, safety rounds and suggestion box campaigns as well as producing a work environment handbook for the employees.
But, more than anything else, Mats Pettersson emphasised:
“The significance of management’s active involvement, along with the importance of communication, cannot be underestimated in successful safety work.”
Management’s responsibility is vital
Peter Kemi is industrial safety engineer at Eka Bohus. Among his merits is an award from the KEM 2007 recognising his safety work and long commitment to the safety culture in the chemical industry. In his presentation he illuminated the importance of good examples and the value of talking about, giving feedback and bringing attention to safe behaviour.
“Managers need to motivate their staff to work safely by offering incentives frequently and immediately rewarding safe behaviour. Then the employees know that the management sees what they’re doing, cares and appreciates their safety consciousness as much as work performed properly and quickly. However, it is important that the incentives exceed the immediate gains made by ignoring safety,” Peter Kemi explained.
The safety campaign conducted at Eka Bohus by Peter Kemi has resulted in immediate, positive effects.
“Safety campaigns must to lead to safety having a higher priority in the organisation. But, management has to continually show that it sees and appreciates safe behaviour. The way employees perceive how management gives priority to safety is the key to changing attitudes to safety in the long term,” he explained before quoting Eka Chemicals’ CEO Jan Svärd:
“Campaigns are important for raising safety consciousness, but their aim is to make environmental and safety awareness constantly present as a natural aspect of everyone’s work. All management and similar meetings are to discuss safety issues. It is always the supervisor or management’s job to follow up safety work, not least of all the undertakings related to incident reports.”
One way to go
Susan Björkqvist, head of safety and security at SCA Östrand, spoke about the mill’s comprehensive undertaking known as “Safety Year 2006”. She too emphasised the importance of employee involvement.
“Ignorance is not a mitigating circumstance. Violating applicable regulations can be justifiable grounds for dismissal,” she observed.
However, it is management’s duty to involve all employees in safety work.
“Management’s commitment is decisive and it’s important to work across the board – everyone has to be involved! This is why communication is one of the most difficult tasks.”
Following the “Safety Year” campaign SCA Östrand could confirm that safety issues had become a given topic in discussions and meetings. Safety awareness has increased and the employees try to “look before they leap”. Also, incident reports have changed character and are more inclined to preventive observations and suggestions.
Safety work has continued after 2006 at SCA Östrand.
“We’ll never finish. Safety isn’t a destination, it’s a way of travelling,” concluded Susan Björkqvist.
The work never ends
Another well-known and appreciated safety personality is Börje Hauge, site manager at the Norwegian Odda smelter, part of the Boliden corporate group. Based on his lengthy experience he offered several pieces of sound advice for achieving the best possible results from safety work.
“The decisive factors for the end result are motivation, managerial focus, commitment and systematic work,” he explained before ending:
“Count on it taking longer than you think and remember the work never ends.”
Forsmark is safer today
How is safety at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant? This was the theme of Björn Johansson’s presentation. Johansson, who works with corporate development for Forsmarks Kraftgrupp, confirmed that the investigations and evaluations conducted demand a number of serious changed in the company’s safety culture. This has resulted in an extensive action plan to reinforce the safety culture and raise reactor safety.
“Attitudes have to be toughened, quality must be ensured, instructions followed and management has to take the lead,” he explained.
Following the launch of this action plan the organisation has recognized the need for change and shown tremendous commitment to work concerning safety issues.
“We’re safer now than on 25 July 2006, but still not as good as we thought we were before 25 July,” commented Björn Johansson.
Behaviour-based safety
One of the final speakers on the first day was Jan-Sverre Svendsen, a man with experience from the global offshore industry, who is now busy implementing programmes for behaviour-based safety (BBS) in the process industry on behalf of his new employer, Technical Support HMS & Upplaering A/S.
He opened by stating that behaviour is an action that can be observed. An action can be safe or risky. Behaviour-based safety focuses on behaviour filled with risks.
“As many as 90 percent of all incidents are related to behaviour and only ten percent can be explained by external factors and technical circumstances,” he said.
Jan-Sverre Svendsen too established management’s importance in safety work.
“It all starts with the management. Experience shows that if management is also committed then the end results are improved by 56 percent, while the figure is just 25 percent if it is only the employees and the not management who are involved in safety work."
Motivating the management to invest in safety work shouldn’t be particularly difficult according to Jan Sverre Svendsen, keeping in mind the badwill generated by insufficient control over safety issues. In terms of value, safety matters are estimated to account for 20 percent of company’s total appraised value.