I recently worked in the Alberta oilfields (tar sands) and found that, probably because of all the potential safety hazzards, safety awareness has become a culture:applause: whereas quality often got shoved under the carpet.:(
During routine safety meetings I started making statements such as "a safety program is not worth very much if is does not have a quality element in it":truce:
Every time I started down this avenue, I got sideways glances from upper management:cool:. This happened a few times until the rate of incidents started creaping up.:mg:
I had to tell them again that the existing safety program may no longer be effective and that they should apply the same rules to their program, as I would in the Quality program.
The outcome.... an audit was scheduled and the problem was revealed and rectified..... incidents crept down.:agree1:
Why is it so hard to instill the same kind of awareness of quality requirements when it is accepted as routine to have an the safety culture?:confused:
A good quality program has safety build in it already.....and visa versa
My rant for the day.....:thanx:

You need to tell those folks that under Canadian and Alberta law safety isn't an option and that people of a supervisory/managerial capacity have great potential to become non-paid employees of the penal system.

Give your folks this link because it has all kinds of neat stuff. http://employment.alberta.ca/SFW/307.html

Violating the Act, the Regulation or the Code, or failing to follow an order given by an officer, may result in prosecution. Conviction on a
first offence can lead to a fine of up to $500,000 or a prison term of up to six months, or both. Conviction on a second offence can
result in a fine of up to $1,000,000 and/or a prison term up to 12 months.

Safety is Safety and it's non-negotiable (I've taught safety and quality in Alberta so I know whereof I speak)

Safety is no realy the issue up there, in fact, as I mentioned, safety has become, through meetings, training sessions etc. a culture of awarness.
Quality on the other hand seems to take a second place, whereas I feel that the two cannot be seperated....
Safety, if not of any real quality, is of very little use. Likewise, quality, without a safety element, is also not complete.

OK, sorry, I misread your post.:uhoh:

For the quality you really need to get the customer satisfaction thing across and that safety incident costs can be factored in to product cost to offset loss of profit. Also customer requirements may mandate positive safety performance as a deliverable

I hear you.....
I found it very frustrating working there as it seemed that quality was very often overlooked for the sake of production.... especially when the price of oil was sky -high.:mad:
Needless to say, I was very happy when my contract came to an end,..... just before the bottom dropped out.:notme:

My question is still: How does one instill the same awareness to quality as there is for safety when the two.... to my thinking... cannot be seperated?:2cents:

I have operated in the reverse situation, where quality is engrained, but safety was not. I agree that quality and safety goes hand in hand and worked with the safety folks to discuss how our tools can work together. 5S, suggestion systems are examples.

Perhaps you can start there to build waste reduction awareness.

Better thought. Start with a process audit. Look at customer complaints, defects and waste. Quantify the problem and justify the need to pay attention to quality!

My question is still: How does one instill the same awareness to quality as there is for safety There is no sustainable cultural shift without the organization's top management buy-in.

So the key is to develop a business case for top management to understand why it is critical for an organization to have robust management systems. You have to think the WIIIFM factor, from top management's perspective.

The Canadian culture, in general, is more akin and concerned with Corporate Responsibility issues than many other countries. If your top management is concerned with stakeholder perceptions of the organization, you have a good shot at this. On the other hand, if they seem blindly focused on the price of a barrel of oil and the implications about the viability of profitably extracting oil from the tar sand fields, you have an extra topping of challenge.

Actually, I find it easy to hold an organizations feet to a fire for safety (ISO 9001- 2008 clause 6.4):whip:.... however, Safety programs are not as well controlled (in my opinion):topic: and quality becomes less of an issue..... however, I still maintain that a good safety program must have an element of quality:agree:, otherwise it is not very effective.

You will not have quality if the worker is disabled by a workplace injury! Even though I am in Quality I continue to say safety-quality-production.

Health and safety lie at the heart of quality management :2cents:

...
...Why is it so hard to instill the same kind of awareness of quality requirements when it is accepted as routine to have an the safety culture?:confused:
A good quality program has safety build in it already.....and visa versa
My rant for the day.....:thanx:

If I had to guess based on my experiences I would say it is likely that your top management does believe that quality is just as important. And many would say quality needs to be a given. The sideways looks you get may come from not understanding what good quality processes look like, and a fear of what you may be trying to do.

They may have had past life experiences where they were concerned about outgoing product quality nonconformances, and were left with a bad taste because they had to answer questions about why they had copies of a rev C procedure in their binder instead of rev D.

The solution of course is patience and time and doing what it looks like you have already done very well. You showed them how a good quality focus can lead to identifying root causes to issues which leads to an improvement in the metric they were concerned about. Well done. :agree1:

Thanks for that little :agree1:. It isn't often that one gets a possitive spin on something that seems very negative at the time.:bigwave: