You Be the Manager

The forest-products business is definitely not about glamour. Paper mills, sawmills, and plywood factories are dangerous places, full of constant deafening noise, gargantuan razor-toothed blades, long chutes loaded with rumbling tons of lumber, and giant vats full of boiling water and caustic chemicals under tons of pressure. People working around all that stuff tend to sweat a lot.

They used to bleed a lot, too. At one time, the 241 plants and mills operated by Georgia-Pacific, the Atlanta-based forest products giant with $13 billion in annual revenues and more than 47,000 employees, had an unenviable safety record, pretty bad even for a notoriously hazardous industry. There were nine serious injuries per 100 employees each year, and 26 workers had lost their lives on the job between 1986 and 1990.

If the cause of these accidents and injuries was the equipment, then the problem would have been easy to fix. However, most mistakes in any industry are not caused by the nature of the equipment itself ? such as the 55-inch knife blade that, whirling like a giant's pencil sharpener, peels a 30-year-old tree down to thin air in just eight seconds. Rather, the trouble comes from people's attitudes and behaviour ? for instance, hauling that blade around without wearing protective gloves or trying to clean it while it is running. Workers routinely attempted both procedures in the past, often with bloody results.

Georgia-Pacific people are a little sheepish when they talk about it now, but a macho factor operated in the past as well. Before 1990, workers whose parents and grandparents had toiled in the same mills and factories sometimes took deadly chances as a way of proving their mettle. The biggest challenge, therefore, was to change people's old habits and assumptions. But how? You be the manager.

Questions*

*In order to gain maximum benefit from this exercise, you are required to make a whole-hearted attempt at answering these questions before looking at the answers on the next page. A rough guide is to spend at least about 30 minutes to answer each question.

1. What are some learning practices that Georgia-Pacific might use to change employees' attitudes and behaviour toward workplace safety?

2. What effect might changing employees' behaviour have on safety at Georgia-Pacific?

Source: Fisher, Ann (September 1997), “Danger Zone”, in Fortune 9, pp. 165 ? 167 (Courtesy: Time Inc.).