Safety is a Value, Production is a Goal

Good morning everybody, and thanks for tuning into Digging Deeper. I'm Dennis Engelbrecht with The Family Business
Institute and the CEO Roundtable Program for Contractors.

Today's subject is going to be safety. At a recent one of our roundtable groups, an interesting statement was made as we
were doing employee interviews. One of the people said safety is a value and production is a goal for the company. Well,
this was very interesting because safety and production are most often seen in conflict with each other in a company. So,
I thought, well, that's kind of a nuanced way of looking at it, safety is a value, production is a goal. So, in the end, does
safety get put aside for production when the rubber hits the road, or we don't have to think of those as competing now
because this one's a value and this one's a goal? It was really thought provoking to think about it that way and to think
about whether that actually makes sense or is a good way to think about the two things.

As we went on in these interviews, we did find that for the most part it made sense, but again, when things did get busy
or the project got down to are we going to make it on time or are we going to make budget, it seems like safety actually
maybe did take a back seat to production at those times. Now, we can't say that there were any impactful negative results
or anything like that. The company that we were visiting seemed to have a fine safety program and all of that. But going
back to all of you and what you're doing at home, how do you reconcile safety and production? I think that that can be a
difficult thing to do. That value of safety, and really how do you stay safe on a job site, you have to be thinking about it
and it has to be sort of non-negotiable. Safety, getting your coworkers home safely at night to their families has to be a
non-negotiable. To accomplish that, you really have to be looking ahead at what all the potential hazards are, and that
just has to be a way of thinking.

Now, when you move over to production, all right, production is about doing things efficiently, getting them done, in some
cases possibly moving faster, although faster could cause problems, but moving at the most productive pace in which you
can continue on without making mistakes and having to go redo things to still produce the quality that's required.

We also in that same group have a member that has a different way of looking at production and safety. What he says is
that safety allows production or enhances production. His way of thinking about that was that if you make sure that people
have identified the hazards properly, they're wearing the proper safety equipment, whether it be the glasses, the vest,
the hard-toed shoes, more importantly tie offs and things like that when you're working at elevation, what he said was
that if you have all the safety and you've done all the proper safety work, now you can proceed with your productive work
without being worried. In other words, you've done your safety, so now your mind should be free to actually work at your
best.

So just another way of thinking about it. Again, safety is a value, production is a goal, but maybe they actually do work
together by freeing people, by being safe enough to free people to work at their best. Again, Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging
Deeper. By the way, don't forget our bootcamp. Next bootcamp is starting up in February and hope to get some of you to
join for that. Thank you.