The 5 pillars of caring that save lives

How do you build an organization with a strong safety culture? How do you build an accident-free organization? How do you raise safety performance so that business performance indicators follow? The link is a single word: care. That's right — caring. Now, how do you manifest that care?

"If you're here, you're important. If you're here and you're not important, we made a mistake. Right? And if we brought you here, which was an intentional act, we have a responsibility to you. It starts with treating you with dignity and respect. We want you to be part of a group that takes responsibility for an accident-free work environment."

Something Paul O'Neill practiced are five pillars that ensure you won't just achieve good safety indicators on this journey, your business will also achieve good performance indicators. The first is that every team member needs a good relationship with their direct leader.

That relationship has to be healthy. It can't be a relationship of small favors, debts owed, secret deals, a polluted relationship, a relationship that isn't transparent and doesn't have trust. Leaders and team members need to trust that they're going in the right direction, with the right expectations, and that they're getting proper feedback. Easy conversations and difficult ones happen, and that oxygenates every relationship.

The second pillar: fairness and equality. In dealings, there are no protected ones, there's no hierarchical protection, no protection by gender, nationality, or skill level. What exists are fair and equal processes. Fairness — the same share, equality for everyone.

"Every day I am treated with dignity and respect by everyone I encounter, regardless of any other distinguishing characteristic. I can say I am treated with the same measure of dignity and respect every day, without any qualification."

The third pillar is procedures, standards, and well-defined performance. Procedures that are well standardized, well communicated, so that people understand them, so they're fit for the job. They have to be fit not just in theory; they have to be fit in practice. This is the third pillar.

The fourth pillar is communication. Communication where people aren't afraid. They aren't afraid to have an opinion different from the majority. They know they can express themselves, communicate, and put on the table the pros, the cons, what they actually believe. "We call injuries accidents, which means they could not have been avoided. So when you bring leadership ideas to change the characteristics of an organization, you have to pay attention to language. The word 'accident' is permissive. 'Incident' suggests you can use analytical skills to figure out how to prevent a set of circumstances from happening again."

Now let's talk about the last one: the safety climate. Climate comes before culture. Maintaining a good climate among the relationships between customers, suppliers, and the internal public — that healthy climate where we can work as a team, where there is mutual care, where we work so that we don't have movements within the climate that work against the culture we're building.

Maintaining a climate guarantees a mature culture. These are the five pillars of his philosophy. "I believe that human beings have what I call discretionary energy that they can give you or not. And I don't think they'll give it to you if they don't feel they're treated with dignity and respect every day."

In practice, the five pillars were translated into three questions that every worker had to answer every day. The first question: "Are you treated with dignity and respect every day by every person you interact with here in the company?" The second question: "Do you get the resources, the tools, the training, and the encouragement you need to make a contribution here in your work that gives meaning to your life?" That's what it's about — bringing meaning to people.

And the third question: "Are you recognized for what you do? Do you feel that you're being seen here, that your contribution is being captured?" That's how he led Alcoa to become not just a safe, accident-free company, but an extremely profitable one where shareholders wanted to be.