How a better company culture can save lives

Sponsored by dss+

Organisations that can create the right safety culture can not only reduce risk but benefit from gains in operational efficiency and sustainability

Over the past two decades, we have seen significant improvements in workplace safety, particularly in the number of fatal accidents. In the Benelux region, for example, the latter has decreased by around 60 per cent.

However, there are also signs that progress is stalling. In recent years figures have stagnated, with 82 people in the same region losing their lives in workplace accidents in 2022. Progress in tackling non-fatal lost time accidents – those involving an absence of more than three calendar days from work – has also ground to a halt, and in some sectors incidents are rising. Although the number of non-fatal lost time accidents has fallen by 43 per cent since 2008, there were still 152,000 such events recorded in Benelux in 2022. With regards to other regions in Europe, a similar evolution can be seen.

Figure 1. Fatal accidents at work (all industries), Benelux, 2008 to 2022 (source: Eurostat)

Figure 2. Non-fatal lost time accidents in Benelux, by sector, 2019 to 2022 (source: dss+)

Edwin Vercruysse, director at operations management consultancy dss⁺, attributes much of this recent progress to advances in safety technologies and process automation. But now that the low-hanging fruit has been picked, he believes more needs to be done to create a sustainable culture of safety.

“Technology has had a positive impact on safety, and we have seen improvements through the automation of processes and optimisation of the standardisation of processes,” he says. “But the human factor is still a big root cause for current safety performance. Unsafe behaviour is still considered very normal in many sectors, especially in manufacturing, construction and transport.”

Aside from the human impact, workplace accidents can be devastating for organisations. Each incident costs businesses an average of £30,000 through direct costs (such as lost productivity, compensation and fines), and indirect costs can be as much as three to five times higher than direct costs. The longer-term damage is harder to put a value on, but a damaged reputation can impact employee trust, a company’s image, share price and, in some cases, even the future of the business.

Changing the workplace culture

The challenge for organisations now is to tackle the wider workplace culture. According to Vercruysse, a major issue is organisations not being able to address unsafe behaviour. “We see many leaders either lack awareness of what risk looks like or don’t know how to talk to people about it,” he says. “Improving the leadership capabilities is therefore something that we focus on a lot in our safety improvement initiatives.”

How a business approaches safety is a measure of its overall culture, says Vercruysse – and those that can create a strong safety culture are more likely to have better operational performance and be able to tackle some of the other challenges businesses are facing, such as meeting operational performance and sustainability goals. As a result, safety is increasingly used by investors to understand the broader nature of organisations in which they may want to invest.

“Safety therefore needs to be embedded in a company’s way of working,” Vercruysse explains. “It does not make sense to approach safety differently than operational excellence or sustainability.

“In the end, the same people are involved: the same manager, the same supervisor, the same team member that needs to make sure that his or her work is done safely, efficiently and sustainably. It’s not a case of one or the other. It’s all happening at the same time. As such, many organisations will struggle with this if it is not part of their DNA.”

dss⁺ experience shows that safety engrained into the culture of an organisation creates trust and will allow employees to raise any issues with their colleagues, managers or subordinates, without fear of any consequences, he adds. “There needs to be a culture that treats an accident as a learning opportunity rather than simply a source of blame,” says Vercruysse.

Overhauling safety performance

dss⁺ has a long history of working with organisations to help improve their safety performance, alongside transforming operations and enhancing safety culture to unlock employee potential and boost engagement. It’s a difference felt on the ground, transforming businesses from the inside out.

There are, says Vercruysse, four core pillars which must be in place to enhance safety:

Standards and procedures. Effective technical foundations, such as standards or procedures, to drive focused operational risk reduction and continuous improvement.
Management systems. Adequate governance with clear roles and responsibilities to integrate all elements and drive performance down to the shop-floor level.
Skills and capabilities. An effective learning and development programme to ensure the organisation has the right skills and capabilities for people to perform their work better.
Mindsets and behaviours. The right culture to achieve and sustain business objectives. This is often the hardest one to get right, says Vercruysse.

For the past 30 years dss⁺ has been collecting information on safety culture. This has allowed the company to build a database with more than 4.5 million data points. As a result, organisations can see how well they perform using the dss⁺ Bradley Curve™ (Figure 3), which plots total recordable injuries against relative cultural scores.

Figure 3. The dss+ Bradley Curve™ showing how injuries decrease as culture maturity strengthens (source: dss+)

Using the curve, organisations can move through four phases, starting with the Reactive Stage, where safety is seen as a matter of basic compliance and employees only tend to follow rules when supervised.

This progresses to a Dependent Stage, where safety is reinforced by management through a top-down approach, and then to the Independent Stage, where employees begin to take personal responsibility for safety.

Finally, in the Interdependent Stage, safety becomes fully engrained in the organisation’s culture, with employees working collaboratively and challenging one another to uphold high safety standards.

This also means clients can benchmark their safety culture internally, between sites, and externally with other companies in the same industry, says Vercruysse, and determine where they sit in terms of cultural maturity.

Many clients use the dss⁺ Bradley Curve™ to align on current situation and set their safety ambitions. When it comes to implementation, dss⁺ team consists of experienced consultants, with both technical experience and management leadership skills.

“We are present on the shop floor, training and coaching blue collars as well as operational and executive leadership in solving their day-to-day problems,” says Vercruysse. “We are able to do this through our highly experienced staff.” Almost half of dss⁺ employees have more than 20 years of industry experience, he adds.

In action

A leading provider of packaging solutions for cosmetics serves as a prime example of the businesses that have placed their trust in dss⁺ expertise. The firm had set itself the target of zero accidents and incidents by 2025, and worked with dss⁺ to overhaul its safety culture through leadership coaching.

“There were two main things,” says the operational quality manager. “dss⁺ involvement taught us to use safety methods and tools, particularly by the management, and in parallel they were training and coaching safety advocates and trainers.”

In all, 700 people were trained on the Risk Factor™, while 28 managers were individually coached by dss⁺and more than 100 by seven in-house promoters.

The results were impressive: the number of unsafe reports rose by 20 per cent in a year as a culture of reporting started to emerge, while the number of minor injuries fell by 20 per cent as employee behaviour changed. Employees also reported a much greater openness to discuss safety, which is something they have taken into their personal lives as well.

“We can now talk about safety much easier and closely involve our people,” says the maintenance coordinator. “We consider safety applicable not only in the workplace – we think about it in our personal lives too, in our daily actions.”

dss⁺ is the operational transformation partner for high-hazard and complex industries that embeds tangible, lived experience and proven methodologies across organisations, throughout the Benelux region and worldwide. “Through an integrated, risk-based approach, we partner with organisations to systematically identify, assess and mitigate risks, embedding a safety culture that strengthens both operations and build business endurance,” concludes Vercruysse. “We are proud of the impact we have made in driving our purpose to save lives.”

To find out more about how dss⁺could help achieve breakthroughs in safety, performance, sustainability, and build business endurance, visit: consultdss.com

Read more case studies at: consultdss.com/content-hub/