A Culture of Safety
“Please use the handrail.”
It was my client’s voice telling me and I suppressed an eyeroll as I moved from the center of the wide flight of stairs to the side with the railing. I remembered where I was, Weyerhaeuser Company. “It’s part of our safety culture,” my client explained. I was facilitating a leadership offsite for my former employer, and Weyerhaeuser instills a culture of safety as well as any organization I know.
This story came back to me this week as I read Jeffrey Pfeffer’s post of this Forbes article about The Boeing Company. I’ve had the privilege of learning from both Jeffrey Pfeffer and Sarah Soule in Stanford GSB’s LEAD program. They emphasize the importance of habits and behaviors in understanding what an organization truly values. Boeing can learn from its northwest neighbors if they want to reinforce a safety culture. I thought of examples I’ve seen first-hand.
One behavior Weyerhaeuser has is offering Safety Briefings at the beginning of every meeting. A Safety Briefing is commonplace in a manufacturing plant or on a worksite, but Weyerhaeuser does them for everyone in all settings. A Safety Briefing for a meeting in the corporate offices takes 1 – 2 minutes and sounds something like this:
Thank you for being here. We will begin with a Safety Briefing for this location. If you need to contact emergency services for any reason, use this phone and dial the number on the red sticker. If we hear an alarm, the nearest exit is out these doors and down the hall to your right where you will see a stairwell on your left. Go down two flights of stairs and exit the building. We gather at the north end of the parking lot. In the event of an earthquake, we would all get under this conference table and hold onto the legs until shaking stops. Please raise your hand if you are CPR certified? There is an AED on this floor, follow signs to the cafeteria out this door and to your left. What questions do you have? Thank you.
I once delivered a briefing like this one to a group of about 20 people that included some vendor representatives from a partner in Philadelphia. As I spoke, I watched their eyes get bigger and bigger and saw some looks of concern. “Do you really have that many earthquakes here?” one man said. “Not really,” I said, “it’s because safety is very important to us.”
I will admit that when I first joined the company, I thought the behavior was too much for office meetings. Then, one of our leaders explained that Weyerhaeuser experiences employee fatalities every year because of the inherent risks in the forest products industry. The company had committed to doing everything possible to reduce this number and they made it priority one. Understanding the why behind it made me take it seriously and become an advocate. It also made me feel valued by the company.
The second example I have is from my time working at Starbucks headquarters. In new partner orientation, we were asked not to allow people to “tailgate” at building entrances. Tailgating is a slang word for letting another person enter behind you after you have successfully scanned your badge. “We want every person to scan in to ensure they are permitted to be here.” One example from the facilitator was that in our building of 7000 employees, several of our co-workers could have restraining orders in place against someone at any given time and for a wide variety of reasons. This is not something that would have occurred to me. Again, knowing the why behind the behavior made it important to me and I’ve had this habit ever since, not just at Starbucks.
But, first, let me go back to my involuntary eyeroll. It wasn’t about denying the increased safety of using the handrail. It wasn’t about indignation that I’m physically capable of walking safely on stairs. It was the immature reaction a child has when being admonished or scolded. Even though my client was polite and calm, I had an old response from childhood about being corrected. That’s all, and it was over in a flash. How often do we hold back from asking someone to do the right thing in order to avoid an eye roll or a huff? Many times. I’ve raised teenagers, I know. I praise the employees at Weyerhaeuser because they will ask you to use the handrail every time, they don’t care how you react. And I was happy to be reminded of this simple safety practice that I’ve turned into a habit.