What is “Safety Culture” and how would you best explain it and convey the message to your staff?
Ken Hylander was recently appointed Director of Safety at Amtrak. Given that he comes from the airline side of the transportation equation I would ask others if they think he’s qualified to impart his thoughts and ideas regarding railroad safety in a manner that will have an impact on the industry. Even the most naive among us railfans know you don’t walk in front of a train that is moving, nor too close to one that is stopped.
That said, I started my career in aviation as a “Ramp Rat” and worked my way up from there. The first thing we were told was to never get close to a turning propeller if you want to see your next birthday. Much truth to that, but how does the safety culture in aviation relate to railroading. IMO, it means always being aware of your surroundings and circumstances that may affect you.
Should that culture be implimented from the top down or the bottom up? Do track foremen have an obligation to their employees to enforce safety regulations? I believe so after watching my track foreman correct one of his employees.
Is being safety oriented directly related to the industry in which one is currently working or is it being able to read the big picture?
The fact that US commercial aviation has not had a passenger fatality in something like 10 years indicates that the airline safety people are doing something right.
Edit: Upon further research it looks like 8 years.
There’s still lot’s of work that needs to be done on the “culture” side, beyond orientation and lip service. I find that a “fast paced” work environment often runs contrary to safe work practices. Probably the single biggest thing an employer can do to improve safety is to control the work pace… imho it needs to be slow, deliberate, and measured… not fast paced. In my career most of the accidents I’ve seen have been due to someone working under unrealistic time pressure and taking shortcuts. “Fast paced” might be fine for a law or accounting office but not so much for a transportation company where lives are at stake.
Everyone has a responsibility to themselves and to those around them to operate in a safe manner, and to ensure that those around them are operating safely. That includes the right and the ability to stop an unsafe act. In the white collar world, they call that empowerment.
Management has a responsibility to lead by example, and to allow their employees to do what’s right, without fear of retribution. Many industries now have “close call” reporting - an employee needs to know that if they report a close call they won’t get in trouble for it.
A true safety culture will allow that to happen. People make mistakes, things break. Knowing one can report a near miss and that management (and everyone, for that matter) will take it as an opportunity to improve, and not punish, is the key.
It’s been said, many, many times, that railroad rules are written in blood. It’s interesting that EHH’s decree to stop using “three step” was met with a great deal of incredulity. One can easily believe that even if the words aren’t said over the air, that three step is still being used because the employees know it’s the “safe route.”
While taking photos of a crossing repair my track foreman friend told (ordered) his crew to stand down while the approaching freight crossed his assigned work area. Everyone followed his order. Engineer did his job of “making noise” until the locomotive was clear of the foreman’s protected space.
That was on a single track subdivision with no possibility of opposing traffic.
My question is what do employees on multiple track roads like the Northeast Corridor do. If their boss is not on top of his game and forgets to transfer his protection to the next foreman where does he stand regarding responsibility for any incident/ accident that follows?
It appears that obligations to safeguard employees on Amtrak have been disregarded simpy to get the task accomplished as soon as possible.
Aviators (pilots and others in the industry) seem to have an advantage over railroaders in that respect. Should a pilot or mechanic suspect he has screwed up he can file with NASA an ASRS (Aviation Safety Reporting System) report which is basically a “get out of jail free” card. That information, while confidential regarding the submitter’s name is put into a database so that incidents can be analyzed in hopes of preventing further occurrences of the same ilk.
I believe those who ply the high iron should be offered the same protection if they file such a report in good faith and not be persecuted for doing so.
What happens on multiple track territory is part of the ‘safety culture’. As can be seen from the Chester incident, for a variety of reasons, multiple failures allowed roadway equipment to be on an active track.
On CSX the ‘Flagman’ in charge of the Work Zone has all work come to a stop and all personnel in a safe location before authorizing a train to pass on an adjacent track to the one be worked on.
You ought to look a little deeper, especially on the employee side of the issue, on the ground. (OSHA drives the airline whereas FRA drives the rail side of safety. If one side has a rule that the other does not, that rule applies to BOTH)
The intent, meaning, and practice are entirely dependent on the culture fostered by the senior person, the CEO. In other words, it depends on what impotance is ascribed to safety by the leader of the organization, so it’s a leadership problem.
There is a great deal that is ‘generalizable’ over cultures and workplaces that can be called ‘leadership’. The tone is set by those who seek, identify, and then hire the CEO, and that is probably a Board of Directors. After the seeking, identifying, and hiring come ‘offering feedback’, or what is often called ‘quality control’. Where a CEO is held in high regard and left to her own devices, you get what you pay for. Where a Board is hands-on and vigilant, and offers meaningful feedback to the CEO, you get something else.
It’s not quite that simple, though. No CEO comes into an organization in a vacuum. He inherits an extant culture, including that of safety. He inherits morale, states of trust and mutual positive regard between workers at all levels, and he inherits bogus, fraudulent, and unsafe practices and reporting if they exist.
Edgar Schein posited that a culture is a set of assumed values and practices shared amongst members of a group that are meant to foster the aims of that group, even if it’s just to co-exist relatively peacefully. An organizational culture is a group’s way of dealing with both external and internal problems, and of finding ways to work in synch and in harmony. It’s a mutual effort, but it gets its resourcing from the top…and that’s very important to keep in mind. If safety is given little shrift, it doesn’t take a genius t
In many organizations safety is “compartmentalized” like… sales…ops… marketing etc when it really needs to be front and center among all functions. The sales person who makes unrealistic promises to get the business is as much responsible for safety as the dispatcher and train crew are. The safety “culture” needs to permeate all areas of the business and it needs to be the primary consideration when decisions are made. Most of us (well maybe not the railroads) are only one bad accident away from being obliterated… one bad accident would put most of us out of business and would likely ruin our lives personally as well. Thus, safety first on all levels is the only way to go…
As part of our “On Track” program, employees can file a good faith challenge. That will be reviewed by management. As I don’t know of one actually being filed, I have no idea how one would turn out. A verbal challenge can be “here and now,” with a paper document filed later.
I’m in the process of setting up our annual “OSHA refresher” training for the fire department. This year’s program will emphasize workplace violence, hazmat, right-to-know, and blood-borne pathogens, among other topics.
Firefighting can be very unpredictable. Much is made of “situational awareness.” As the old saying goes, when you’re up to your *** in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your mission is to drain the swamp.
Firefighters have been lost because, from their point of view, the fight was worth fighting and kept pushing in. Meanwhile, those with a better view of the situation knew it was time to step back.
We had a thread on this specific topic a while back that described some of the different flavors of the rule: use the ‘search community’ box to the right and look for “A Little Blue Light.” Reading that would be better than a brief and incomplete recap now.
Meant to be an effective way to keep a train from moving when someone needs to ‘get out and get under’ where any part of the consist might hit or imperil them. The analogue of blue flag protection for shopmen, or lockout/tagout for utilities.
I’d be prepared to swear we had a comparatively recent thread on EHH that covered his objection to nominal three-step, whatever it was, but darned if I can find it with the search tool.
With respect, the most likely safety ‘leadership’ you should expect from a board or its chosen CEO is going to be peripheral, secondary to fiduciary responsibility to stockholders more likely than stakeholders. Where you see ‘safety’ will be in response to perceived insurance costs and other monetizable liabilities. This is not at all the level, or the mission, of typical corporate leadership.
A safety culture, like good quality management, requires first a ‘constitutional’ establishment of a need for formal procedures, and then ‘championing’ by the level of executive management tasked with a particular operating division or part of the organization. There is a specific concern that isn’t always observed, even in good organizations: there can be no reprisals for fair use of safety concerns, or refusal to follow instructions when based in reasonable safety policy. Often hundreds of man-years of good design and safe operation can be undone with a few seconds of expedience - Challenger being one case in point, EHH’s requiring in essence running when kicking cars being another.
It’s easy to go overboard with rules-based safety backed up by hard consequences, usually taking already-hard-worked railroaders and giving it to them in the neck. (That version of The Night Before Christmas with the “Three Wise Men” comes to mi
I think we agree here. I meant that the buck stops at the very top, so if a culture goes bad, those at the top, a Board selecting a CEO, have only themselves to blame. We could call it a Type I error. Most of them would start their remediation with either sanctioning the CEO or firing him outright. I disagree that corporate leadership has little or nothing to do with a safety culture in their business any more than they’d think the same way about materiel supply, operational costs, capitalization, efficiencies, or anything else that could charitably be related to safety and its import.
Very briefly (Overmod’s suggestion is a good one, though) - the three steps are setting the brakes, centering the reverser, and shutting off the generator field. All of which serve to make the locomotive, anyhow, essentially unmovable. There are other names for the practice, like “red zone.”
The idea is to protect a crew member who has to go into the envelope of the train (say, to connect the brake hoses) from unwanted movement by temporarily disabling and securing (with air brakes) the locomotive…
That’s a very good question. I don’t know that anyone (other that EHH, etc) knows…
I know it’s cliche, but a good safety culture requires buy-in from everyone, and the primary goal must actually be safety, not punishing those found to be unsafe. I believe that (in the railroad environment at least) peer pressure is a far more effective incentive for safe practices than the fear of punishment by management, all that fear does is create a “us vs them” attitude which distracts from the true goal of safety.
But to establish enough peer pressure everyone needs to be on the same page, which means EVERYONE (management and employees) needs to have the same understanding of the rulebook. Every manager having a different interpretation and little (if any) real-world experience does not cut it. And that is the reality on many railroads today, including Amtrak.