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T H E S A F E G U A R D I N T E R V I E W

Safety’s culturalambassador

Don Eckenfelder has left behind a conventional 30-year career in safety

management to become an evangelist for safety culture change.

JACKIE BROWN-HAYSOM finds out why.

Don Eckenfelder: what keeps him going is the look on people’s faces when he talks about enriching safety culture.

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This discovery was that an organisation’sculture - its core beliefs and values - deter-mines staff attitudes and behaviour, whichin turn determines their performance. Theonly way for a workplace to enjoy lastingsafety benefits is by changing its culture. “In the past I was puzzled to find compa-nies that had all the manuals and proce-dures and documents but still didn’t per-form well, and other companies that didn’thave any of these things but were able toachieve excellence. “The fact is that employee attitudes havemore to do with safety performance thanany other single factor, but it is the safetyculture of the organisation that determinesthese attitudes.

“This culture is too important to be allowedto simply evolve. It should be designed andshaped, and I’ve developed ways to helppeople do this.”

EXPERT BY DEFAULT

The values-driven safety package draws onEckenfelder’s accumulated oh&s experience,but the catalyst that brought it togethercame from a series of fortunate coincidences. “As a safety engineer I always tried to lis-ten to what was going on around me. A fewyears ago I heard a lot of people talkingabout values. I asked myself how this re-lated to what I was doing, and started talk-ing to people to try to find out.” When a friend called soon afterwards, ask-ing him to speak about values and safety ata national conference, he was taken aback. “He told me I seemed to be the expert be-cause I was always talking about it, but thatwas because I didn’t know anything and wastrying to find somebody who did.” He agreed to the presentation anyway, and

began reading up on the subject. A few weekslater a publisher who spotted his name inthe conference programme invited him towrite a book on the topic, and Eckenfelderembarked on some serious research. “As I got more involved in the process Ibegan to feel that what I was dealing withwas the Holy Grail of safety. For years I hadbeen dealing with the symptoms - the acci-dents and accident reports - but I realisedthat, if we go back to the root cause of al-most any accident, the real problem isattitudinal. “If we think safety is a technology prob-lem, or a regulatory problem, or a behav-ioural problem, we are never going to solveit. We have to address it as a social or cul-tural issue, and that is what values-drivensafety does.”

TO MEASURE IS TO CHANGE

Working from a simple line diagram whichshowed the cause and effect relationshipbetween culture, behaviour and safety out-comes, Eckenfelder began searching for ameans of measuring workplace culture andchanging it for the better. “I came up with what I call a culture ba-rometer because, like a weather barometer,this predicts whether your overall safetyperformance is going to get better or worse. “It is generic and can be applied to anyindustry, but the really good thing about itis that the process is the product. By meas-uring, managing and realising the impor-tance of culture as you create your own ba-rometer, you are going to change attitudes.” The programme’s success requires a com-mitment to safety that goes far beyond lipservice, however. “It’s got to be something deep within yourgut - something you feel very deeply. Youneed leaders who are passionate about thesubject and committed to doing safety forthe right reason - because they care abouttheir employees.”

NO CONFLICT WITH BUSINESS GOALS

This humanitarian ethos does not mean thatthe programme is out of touch with busi-ness reality. Eckenfelder says even the mostcynical CEO can be convinced that it makesgood business sense. “It doesn’t cost a whole lot to implement,

“I’M AN AMATEURAPPLIED SOCIALSCIENTISTTRAPPED IN THEBODY OF A SAFETYENGINEER.”DON ECKENFELDER

IT IS NO SURPRISE TO FIND THAT AMERICAN SAFETY

exponent Don Eckenfelder is a man withdeep religious roots. It takes more than a touch of missionaryzeal to make a successful health and safetyconsultant devote years of his life to a “fi-nancially disastrous” crusade, promoting afresh approach to workplace safety, just be-cause he believes it will help people. “I feel I’m sort of a messenger for this stuffand it’s going to do some people some goodsomewhere,” he says. “In the beginning Ithought in six to 12 months this would bethe hottest thing in the world, but I’ve spentfour years on it now, earning little or no in-come, because I’m committed to the idea. “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t carewhether I’m the ultimate benefactor or not.What keeps me going is the look on people’sfaces when I talk to them about it.” Back home in up-state New York,Eckenfelder is a bishop in the Mormonchurch. He makes no secret of where he’scoming from - religious allusions drop eas-ily into his conversation, and there is a Bibli-cal quote in his Powerpoint presentation -but values-driven safety is the only philoso-phy he’s pushing, and he has taken pains tomake his programme accessible to those ofany, or no, religious persuasion. “This is about values and beliefs, but Ididn’t want anything in it that could stig-matise the message by relating it to any par-ticular dogma, so I read some books on com-parative religion and examined the social anddoctrinal teachings of the world’s 12 majorreligions. “I found the doctrines varied, but the so-cial teachings were exactly the same - thingslike honesty, chastity, fidelity, integrity, con-stancy and the importance of family. Val-ues-driven safety builds on the teachings ofall these great religions, as well as the beliefsof all right-thinking people, whether or notthey subscribe to a particular doctrine.”

CHANGE IN CAREER DIRECTION

Eckenfelder was some thirty years into a dis-tinguished oh&s career when he identifiedthe relationship between values and safety.As a chemical engineer, he had worked inhealth and safety with a number of US cor-porations, served as president of both theAmerican Society of Safety Engineers andthe American Society of Safety Researchand was the youngest person to be made aFellow of the ASSE. But the dawning reali-sation that conventional approaches couldneither explain nor prevent some accidentssent him searching for new answers. “I realised that to a large degree I hadn’tbeen all that successful. Accidents seemedto keep happening, and I didn’t seem to getwhy. Then, about four or five years ago Istumbled over what I think is the truth anddecided at that point I was going to delveinto this area for as long as I lived because Ithought it was something that could pro-duce real change.”

Don Eckenfelder speaking about culture

change at ACC Worksafe Expo 2001.

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L E G A L V I E W P O I N T

and once attitudes are right the behaviourslook after themselves. That saves money,because when people incur injuries it seri-ously affects the bottom line. “If a CEO is only interested in stockholderdividends and increasing stockholder equity,as he or she probably should be, you have toappeal to their self-interest. Get them to re-alise that their profitability is tied to the per-formance of their employees, and the per-formance of their employees is tied to theway they are treated. “Once they begin to see that good safety isgood business, it all gets real simple and theculture will change.”

AN OVERUSE EXAMPLE

At Cheseborough-Ponds Eckenfelder hadfirst-hand experience of winning over a scep-tical CEO when he was summoned to theboss’s office during his Christmas vacationto find solutions to an escalating workers’compensation bill for overuse injuries. “Our compo payouts had gone from $3million to $13 million in a couple of yearsand were projected to be $18 million in thenext year. The CEO thought the answers layin changing the rules, but I pointed out thatif we didn’t have any injuries, the ruleswouldn’t apply to us, so instead of chang-ing them we should stop having incidents.”

Over six months he won his boss’s full sup-port for a new approach to safety, and sawthe culture of the whole organisation undergorapid change. “I didn’t do that alone. I did that by goingover all the plants, finding champions, en-listing people. There were hundreds of peo-ple involved. “In the past we had tried all kinds of ergo-nomic solutions, but they hadn’t worked.We tried to get the employees to do exer-cises, but they wouldn’t. “What worked was changing the culture.We educated them so they came to see thatthese exercises were in their self-interest, anddid them voluntarily. Then the middle man-agers who had thought the people were allmalingerers realised most of the problemswere real and started to take them seriously. “In the end it had quite a lot to do withplain old dollars because the self-interest ofmost senior people is to create profit, but itworked and everyone benefited.” One of the best attributes of values-drivensafety, Eckenfelder says, is that it is self-perpetuating. “With most of the other things you can doin safety, when you go away, they go away.But if you change the culture, it sticks “Not only that, but with most other pro-grammes, if you don’t do the whole thing

“THE FACT IS THATEMPLOYEEATTITUDES HAVEMORE TO DO WITHSAFETYPERFORMANCETHAN ANY OTHERSINGLE FACTOR.”DON ECKENFELDER

it’s a big failure. It just doesn’t work. “The neat thing about the culture changeprocess is that everything you do is a gain.If you move your culture in the right direc-tion, even a little bit, you’ll get better.”

BEHAVIOURISM A BLIND ALLEY

Behaviour-based safety, an approach thathas had widespread acceptance in theUnited States, comes in for harsh criticism,however. An early supporter, Eckenfelder haschanged his mind. “We have become obsessed with it in the

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US, but it has some really serious negativeaspects. It is not enduring, it is manipula-tive, and it runs counter to management bestthinking.” The foundation of behaviour-based safety,he says, is the command and control man-agement model of the 1950s and 60s, anapproach which does not sit well with theconcepts of empowerment and self-correc-tion favoured by today’s top performingcompanies. “BBS is about watching people, keepingscore on them, looking over their shoulders.It’s expensive to install, expensive to main-tain and, probably worst of all, when youstop doing it the people go right back towhat they were doing before. “It’s a bit like having children - if you canwin them over to your way of thinking you’refar more likely to have enjoyable results thanif you just watch them all the time.”

FROM SAFETY TO SOCIAL SCIENCE

Parenting is another area where Eckenfelderhas had plenty of experience and he admitshis family - four adult children and 15grandchildren - along with his ecclesiasti-cal leadership, have transformed him froma chemical engineer to what he now describesas an “amateur applied social scientisttrapped in the body of a safety engineer.”Since completing his book, Values-DrivenSafety, published in 1996, he has continuedto explore the potential of the culturalchange model, and now believes it has ap-plications for more than just business prob-lems. “After watching people around me experi-ence pleasure, joy, terror, unhappiness, prob-lems and what have you, I’ve come to therealisation that, in life as in safety, what webelieve and value predicts our performance,both individually and collectively. “Tell me what somebody believes and I’lltell you where they’re going to end up, andthe same is true in business. The basic tenetsbehind values-driven safety apply just asmuch to the pursuit of business excellence.”

A SOLUTION FOR WIDER PROBLEMS?

Even world conflicts, he suggests, would beeasier to resolve if they were regarded not asreligious or political or territorial problemsbut as cultural ones. He tells of the man in Maine who, for someyears now, has each year brought togetherfifty or a hundred Israeli and Palestinianchildren and put them in a camp. At thebeginning the two groups don’t want to beon the same bus or sleep in the same bunkrooms, but by the time they go home aftereight weeks they’ve become friends and thinkthe things their people are doing to one an-other are terrible. “Obviously we can’t take every Israeli andevery Palestinian and bring them to camp inMaine, but it is an exercise in cultural change,and it shows what can be done.” If Eckenfelder is a visionary, he is also apragmatist. “Sometimes I ask my wife: Why me? Whynow? Why hasn’t somebody else come upwith these ideas that are not just safety-changing, but possibly world-changing? “I believe they will make for safer, betterworkplaces and I’ll do whatever I can to makethem happen. I hope they will end up doinga lot of people a lot of good, but even if theydon’t, I’m still having fun doing it.”

Safeguard is bringing Don

Eckenfelder back to New Zealand

in late January/early February

2002 to run seminars on

measuring and enriching your

safety culture. Visit

www.safeguard.co.nz for details.

Don may be reached at

deckenfelder@yahoo.com, and

his book Values-Driven Safety may

be ordered from

www.govinst.com