When you dial into the Safety Culture Revolution site on the Internet's World Wide Web, a historic painting of American revolutionary fife and drum players marching into battle appears. The image is an apt one. The web site (http://www.llnl.gov/pe/exsc) was created by the worker safety committee that represents nearly 1,000 people in the plant engineering department at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., to share the success of their safety culture change.
The revolution at Livermore got its start in 1990 when the plant engineering safety circle was introduced to Steven Simon, Ph.D., whose company, Culture Change Consultants of Seal Beach, Calif., helps companies launch organizational and behavioral change. The safety circle, established in 1983, was frustrated: too much time was being spent on fixing tools and broken ladders instead of addressing workers' attitudes, and accident rates weren't improving. The circle needed an identity, says sheet metal worker Clay Pendley. So plant engineering manager Bernie Mattimore asked Simon to come in and talk to the committee.