(26b) Dow's Life Critical Standards - Making Them Easier to Follow

Dow Chemical is making it easier for employees to follow our Life Critical Standards.

Dow has eight Life Critical Standards:

1. Safe Work Permit
2. Isolation of Energy Sources
3. Line & Equipment Opening
4. Elevated Work
5. Hot Work
6. Electrical
7. Confined Space
8. Hydroblasting

We know that when employees follow these Standards—we reduce our process safety incidents.

Punishing employees for violating the Standard is not the best way to get compliance. We have large plants, all over the world, usually with 24-hour shifts. We are not going to “police” our way into compliance. And, we know the research: punishment accounts for less than 10% of the variance in employee rule following.

Instead of punishment, we asked: How could we make these Standards easier to follow?

Our solution was to make a cover page for each Standard. That cover page visually communicates the most critical tasks inside each Standard.

To learn these critical tasks, we asked our in-the-field safety representatives: “Inside this Standard, what critical tasks are your employees most likely to ignore or forget?” Once we knew the critical tasks—usually around six critical tasks for each Standard—we represented each task in an illustration.

We want our cover pages to communicate visually. So, the cover pages are mostly illustrations. There are very few words. Again, we knew the research: illustrations have about seven times higher recall than words.

Finally, we made frontline supervisors our first priority in receiving the new cover pages. We know that close to 70% of frontline employees will follow a Standard if their supervisor specifically asks them to do so.

These new cover pages make it easier for supervisors to ask for this compliance.

We know the importance of our Life Critical Standards. So, our goal is to make them easier to follow.

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