Quality and Safety as the Spark for Employee Engagement

Abstract

INTRODUCTION In 1987, when PaulO’Neill became chief executive officer of Alcoa, the company’s plants reported at least one worker sustaining an injury per week. Although the safety record of the company was on par with industry competitors’ and considered acceptable given the inherent risk of working with molten metal, O’Neill found this injury rate appalling. On his first visit to the company’s Tennesseebased aluminum smelter, he met with management at the plant and said, “From now on we are not going to budget for safety. If someone identifies anything that could hurt someone, I want you to fix it, and I will figure out a way to pay for it” [1]. Over the following years, O’Neill used the idea of safety to transform Alcoa’s entire culture, encouraging workers at every level to identify potential safety problems and work to prevent them from causing injuries. As Charles Duhigg [2] described in The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, he used the concept of “safety” to engage his employees in the process of improving Alcoa, harnessing previously untapped technical expertise and personal ingenuity and establishing the habit of excellence. Engaged employees transformed Alcoa by making the workplace safer; reducing waste; increasing productivity; improving recruitment, retention, and morale; and improving customer service. By 1999, when O’Neill retired, the injury rate had declined from the 1987 figure of 1.86 lost days per