In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Zach Pucillo, CSP, CHMM, EHS Compliance Manager at KPA, talks about what makes a safety champion.
This clip is taken from a webinar titled Creating Safety Champions at Every Level, which is available for free on-demand here. The webinar is sponsored by KPA.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
Pucillo: What is a safety champion? So what I do is whatever I have a presentation with a title in there, I try to go in and define what this is. Number one, because there’s a lot of buzz terms out there: Safety culture, safety champions.
I feel like it can be buzz terms and you may define them in different ways. So if you take a look at the Webster’s definition of a champion, and we’re going to the verb version of the champion, it’s about supporting the cause of something or defending something.
So if you think about it, we apply safety to that. Well, we’re going to actually support the cause of safety within the organization. And so if you continue to look it through here on the slide, you’ll see “What is a safety champion?”
These are just kind of definitions that I grabbed from different spots out there on the online web. You’ll see some information in there from OSHA as well. And they put together some packets about how to encourage safety participation and champions.
But just to pick out a few here, they actively promote safe behaviors, help identify potential hazards and encourage others to prioritize safety. They are following safety procedures, encouraging others to do the same. They’re reporting near misses and close calls, attending non-mandatory safety training as well.
So they’re really going above and beyond what they’ve been asked to do as an employee. And that’s usually built off of backing from years of experience that they have had in place and a willingness to promote it within themselves to not get hurt on the job site.
The quote we have here is “Safety champions are people who continue to work safely, and do the right thing, even when no one is watching.”
You know, I tried to figure out where that quote came from, and it’s been modified a few different times. So not sure exactly who the author is of that quote, but they’re the people that are actually doing the right thing when nobody is watching.
And those of you that have maybe studied safety in the past, maybe you’re familiar with the Hawthorne effect. And so the Hawthorne effect is when you’re trying to institute something into a culture and you have usually an experimental group and a control group, and you want to see what the effect is on both groups. Typically, both groups know that they’re being watched.
In a lot of cases, that control group will actually outperform the experimental group because they know that they’re being watched. And so they don’t want to look like the substandard section and therefore they’re going to outperform maybe the people that had better tools to see if they actually work within the experiment.
So when they know they’re being watched, they’re going to perform much better. But if you’re trying to implement something and the watching period is over with, how many of those people fall back into their own habits of, “Alright, I can cut corners, I can get complacent now, definitely be a little bit more frugal out there with our safety spending and make sure that, hey, maybe the PPE, it’s not necessary at this time.”
Nope. The people that are actually doing those things outside of when they’re being watched, those are the people that you want to try to bring into the fold, bring into the flock that you’re trying to shepherd across and make sure they influence others throughout this entire process.