During my management career at a Fortune 50 company, we were taught to treat quality and safety as top priority. They were considered essential and everything else was secondary. This duo of core values was constantly under review and intended to be steadily improving. 

I recall several discussions among top managers in my division arguing which of these were more important. Finally, it was decided that they should be treated with the same vigor and importance. 

Every excursion was examined. It was not permitted for a manager to blame an employee’s actions (or inactions) as the root cause in a safety or quality incident investigation – even if there was an employee violation of a rule. 

At first, not everyone readily agreed with the policy, but in time most everyone came to appreciate it. I recall an incident which was used to drive this point home. An employee was grinding metal without wearing safety glasses and was injured when a metal fragment became embedded in his eye.  

In previous similar situations, the accident investigation would have recorded the cause as being due to the employee not wearing protective equipment per the safety rules. However, the investigator had recently been trained in new root cause investigation techniques, so he continued to dig deeper. 

Not following the safety rule was the cause of the accident, but it wasn’t determined to be the root cause. The accident’s root cause was that the employee was not motivated to follow the safety rules. 

The accident investigation became much more meaningful when the investigator attempted to find the deeper root cause in the work environment that motivated the grinder operator to do something unsafe. Tackling this issue with a different perspective led to more effective corrective actions. 

People stray from following important safety and quality procedures because management has created, over time, an environment where people become motivated by factors other than safety and quality.  

In our case, one change was that all employees, including managers, were instructed to always be aware of their surroundings. We were never to walk past someone doing something unsafe (like not wearing appropriate safety apparel) without bringing attention to the matter and immediately correcting the situation. 

How about your organization? Are employees more likely to be rewarded for meeting a challenging shipping date or satisfying a customer? Are people rewarded when they ‘hold up’ a shipment rather than sending product out with a nonconformity? When releasing new products, does your organization celebrate the completion of exhaustive quality testing or do they celebrate shipping the first product to meet a delivery date? 

There are those who say that despite what management says, some employees violate safety and quality procedures because they don’t consider them the highest valued operating principles. If true, that is wrong. It is wrong from an ethical perspective and from a business perspective. However, who is ultimately responsible for that environment? The late Dr. Peter Drucker said “…management is ultimately responsible…for the culture of the company.” 

Let’s shift the focus. Instead of being the quality manager, you are now in the customer’s shoes. Would you rather receive a defect-free product a day or two late or a defective product on time?  

Certainly, the decisions are not always easy when a defective product is sitting on the loading dock on Friday afternoon with an urgent ship date. It’s a little comical, but true, when Philip Crosby described such a situation in his book, Quality is Free.  

Crosby was right, quality is indeed free. It takes the same energy and resources to do something right as it does otherwise. If the right decisions were made further upstream, maybe the situation on the loading dock would be different.  

As someone who’s been in many similar situations, it's a struggle to understand why other factors are allowed to creep into some management’s mindset to displace quality and safety but it’s not difficult to think of two reasons.  

The first is that many businesses have a culture of thinking short-term. They are often motivated by stockholders who want good revenues and profits, right now! Their approach is to collect the money now and deal with quality problems later. Part of the cause is contained in Dr. W. Edwards Demining’s Seven Deadly Diseases that Management Must Cure. At least in U.S. industries, management tends to ‘hop around’ so they’ve often moved on after the damage has been done with no accountability for poor decisions. 

As for the second reason, management is reluctant to blame themselves for the root causes of quality and safety issues. The employee who did not follow the procedure is a great scapegoat to hide behind when the quality and safety culture that management is responsible for is put to the test. It just could be that management has not yet learned about the power of the two core values – quality and safety.