Getting Real About Accountability 

Back in the 1980's, author Dan Petersen stated "The greatest safety system failure in corporate America today is a lack of accountability". Some twenty years later, this still seems to be the case with many organizations.  

Accountability is essential for achieving safety excellence. It is truly the engine that drives safety performance. But while it is a hot buzzword in safety, it is often misunderstood. Safety professionals and senior managers seem to struggle with accountability more than any other area of safety management. This article will explore some of the misconceptions about accountability and some solutions.  

Issues with Accountability  

Ask anyone "what is accountability?" and you will get a variety of responses. The most common responses refer to negative consequences for failure to act or perform. The terms accountability and responsibility are often used interchangeably, but they are different. When someone is responsible, they have an obligation to act or perform. Whether the action or performance actually occurs depends on that individual's personal integrity. However, when someone is accountable, they are liable or answerable for failure to perform. In its purest form, accountability simply means the ability to account for or to measure. Many written safety programs have a section on responsibility. Relatively few have a section on accountability.  

Incentives vs. Accountability  

Accountability is most often confused with incentives. Again, the two terms are often used interchangeably, but they are distinctly different in both meaning and structure. Many organizations have a safety incentive program, but relatively few have an actual accountability process. Typical traditional incentive programs are usually based rewarding employees with some type of trinket or money for not having an accident / injury. Sometimes, this even extends to rewarding supervisors for having no employee accidents / injuries in their crew or department. Aside from obvious problem of under-reporting injuries and the inadvertent reinforcement of at-risk behaviors, such programs are relatively ineffective at driving safety performance. In contrast, an effective accountability process is based on measuring what people do to operate a safe work area / site. Based on clearly defined metrics, people may or may not be rewarded depending on performance.

Defining Who Is Accountable  

Another problem with accountability is defining who will be accountable. In many organizations, the safety professional(s) or safety department is held accountable, rather than managers, supervisors and/or employees themselves. This is due in large part to management's failure to clearly define safety roles and responsibilities of everyone in the organization. In most cases, safety professionals should not be accountable for safety outcomes since they cannot possibly see or control every hazard, every minute, of every day, in every work area, of every job. To do so would require a safety person standing next to every employee.  

Another problem with holding safety professionals accountable is that employees work for their boss, not the safety department. People do what their boss wants, not necessarily what the safety person wants. As a result, employees and front-line supervisors are in the best position to control safety and are the ones who should be accountable for it.  

Think of it this way, we don't expect quality assurance personnel to build quality into a job or product. We expect the employees to do that and for supervisors to ensure that it happens. Likewise, an organization should not expect a safety department to build safety into the job. The workers themselves must do that. The job of the supervisor is to make sure that it occurs.  

Lagging Measurements  

The greatest dilemma impeding effective accountability is how safety performance is actually measured. Today, the vast majority of organizations still use lagging outcome measures such as OSHA recordable incidence rates, days away from work, and sometimes accident costs as their primary measures of safety effectiveness.  

Outcome measures are not process measures. They tell us nothing about the presence and integrity of the safety process itself. Outcome measures can be dangerously deceiving. Low outcome numbers do not necessarily mean the work or operation was conducted safely. Low numbers are often simply the result of good luck or the fact that it was a low exposure task / operation.  

The biggest problem with lagging indicators is that they are statistically invalid. In his new book, Measurement of Safety Performance, Dan Petersen discusses the fact that OSHA never intended for such measures to be used at the facility level. They were originally designed as macro measures for OSHA to measure large organizations against each other on a national level. In fact, the smaller the sampling size the less valid the numbers become.  

As a result, the use of such measures at the department or supervisor level for accountability purposes becomes grossly unfair. Every manager knows that a small location with only a few employees that has a minor accident, will have a higher recordable rate than a larger location with several serious injuries. This very fact violates one of the cardinal rules about accountability, it must be fair. It also violates another rule, it must be controllable. Ask any front line supervisor how much control he/she has over the management of the claim by the insurance carrier, or the impact of medical or legal entities. Since traditional outcome measures are highly influenced by the impact of insurance, attorneys and medical providers, the supervisor has little actual control over these numbers.  

Clearly, the continued use of lagging indicators as primary measures of effectiveness is a mistake in safety management. They are not only ineffective, but by nature, they are measures of safety failures. Organizations do not achieve excellence in anything by measuring failures. I once heard it said, "Measuring safety with lagging indicators is like driving a car while looking through the rearview mirror". I completely agree.  

Most managers agree that leading indicators (or process measures) for safety are needed. In fact, safety is one of the few performance areas left in business and industry that still relies purely on lagging outcome indicators. In most sales and production environments you will find bulletin boards with leading indicators that measure the presence and integrity of sales or production process. Often, you will also see a sheet of "safety results" on the same bulletin board that display only lagging indicators that are clearly  "out of synch" with other performance measures.  

Some Solutions  

Measuring safety performance first requires defining safety performance. Safety is defined by the prevention of injury or harm. Performance is defined as the execution of an action or something accomplished. That being said, the question becomes what actions or accomplishments go into preventing injury or harm in the workplace?  

In developing leading indicators, a good guideline to go by is this: "The absence of injury is not the same thing as the presence of safety". In other words, instead of measuring safety by the absence of injury, we should be measuring it by the presence of safety. That also means we have to define what it would look like if safety is present to the optimal degree. Think about that for a moment in your own organization.  How would you define the presence of safety in your workplace? What would managers, supervisors, and employees be doing to prevent injuries? What actions or accomplishments would be taking place? Based on the answers to those questions, to what degree is it currently present? 50% -- 75% -- 90%?

In our culture change practice, we assist our clients with the development of a "dashboard" of performance metrics. The dashboard contains both accountability and non-accountability measures. The primary metrics are delineated between Presence of Safety (POS), Quality of Safety (QOS), and Leadership of Safety  (LOS) scores.  While measuring the presence (actions) of safety is vital, it is also important to measure the quality of those actions. In other words, a safety meeting can be held, but how productive is it? A job safety analysis (JSA) can be conducted or it can be "pencil-whipped". What is the quality of the doing? The degree of leadership exerted by those in positions of power is also a critical measure. Again, people do what the boss wants, not what the safety department wants. How well safety is being led is more of an evaluative process but one that can certainly be measured on a weighted scale.  

In developing your accountability process here is an acronym to consider: GMP  

G = Goals Measurable safety goals should be established preferably with input from the individuals being measured. Goals must be fair, controllable, and achievable.  

M = Measurement A measurement system should be established that provides continuous performance feedback to the performers. It is important for people to “know the score" if they are to adjust performance. The system should be easy to understand and easily accessible.  

P = Pay Where possible, compensation and career path should be impacted based on performance. This does not mean only negative impacts for failure to perform. Effective accountability programs are balanced between positive, neutral, and negative performance. Performers who exceed goals should be rewarded accordingly.  

The Advantages  

An effective accountability process drives performance. Often, simply the act of measuring the right things and the knowledge that someone in management is reviewing the metrics is enough to increase performance rather dramatically. Accountability also clarifies what we want people to do for safety at each level of the organization. Simply saying we want zero injuries sounds good, but it does not tell people what they are supposed to do to achieve that outcome.  

For safety professionals, accountability is magic. It can quickly change an organization from reactive to proactive. It repositions safety with the workforce (where it should be) and automatically elevates the safety professional's role to one of an advisor, consultant, resource, and evaluator.  

The job of senior management in any organization is to set a strategic vision, determine the values that will guide behaviors toward that vision, and to drive the vision and values through accountability.  

The willingness of senior management to implement an effective accountability process is one of the most important messages that can be sent throughout an organization to anchor safety within the culture as a core value.    

Mike McCarroll, CSP
President & CEO
PROSAFE Solutions, Inc.