I have spoken with a number of people about my blog on counter or counterfeit measures and I realize how often people miss the mark on this topic. Leaders misinterpret walking through an area and generating action lists for true countermeasure management. When you create a true countermeasure culture the benefits are synergistic. Before you read the message below, how do you think your company is doing with successful countermeasures?

I had a discussion with a person that was in charge of safety and maintenance for a large company. Safety always came first. When the company or corporate leaders spoke on the state of the business or at any company meeting, safety was always the first topic. Every kaizen event had safety goals and there were a number of safety programs/promotions in place. Not surprisingly, the safety record improved but accidents still occurred.

Fast forward 400 plus days later; zero accidents. What changed? The leadership changed. While the previous leadership took safety seriously, a backlog of safety-related items accumulated due to the resource requirement to implement all of them. The list continued to grow until there were literally hundreds of items in the backlog. The new leadership held an offsite safety meeting and asked what was needed to improve. He listened and then resourced the effort to clean up the safety item backlog.

Today, there is almost no backlog and new items are quickly addressed. The result is that not only has the plant gone over 400 days without an accident, but there is an overall plant-wide productivity increase of around 5 percent.

Do you think the simultaneous improvement in safety and productivity is coincidental? My guess is that it isn’t. When I worked at United Technologies Corporation we had a saying, “watch my feet’. People see what get’s done and what doesn’t. Associates decide whether or not leaders are listening to them based upon the leaders’ ACTIONS and not his or her words. People take notice and the culture changes. Even more powerful is when associates participate in the countermeasures, creating even greater ownership. When a company culture changes for the positive, results are compounded.

What have you done to improve countermeasure effectiveness? What are you actions communicating to others? If you were to poll your associates, how would they rate your ability to get things fixed?