Results Delivered: Awakening Safety as a Key Element of Company Culture

Responding to serious injuries, a regional electric utility awakens safety as a key element of their culture.

The Challenge

A major, well-respected regional US electric utility was seeing an alarming increase in serious injuries and fatalities and was not able to stop them through their customary approaches. Functional stress and communication breakdowns between front-line and in-office employees intensified failures in safety. The company’s response was a restructure of the organization to prioritize a culture of safety.

According to one of the co-leads of the effort to address this challenge, “I had been at the company for 15 years and, as an engineer, worked across departments from transmission to planning to operations. In taking on a cultural challenge, I was navigating the complexities of the uncharted and the intangible. Leading a shift in an embedded corporate culture was not solvable using my traditional engineering go-to approaches. Pulling out my Gantt chart to manage scope, schedule, and budget would miss the mark entirely. “

Genii Earth was engaged to partner with a group of cross-functional leaders in addressing the leadership and cultural contributors to their safety performance.

Genii Earth’s Solution

We conducted extensive interviews and surveys to reveal a holistic picture of the different systemic influences on safety and determined that, while the employees were very committed to safety in their own ways – and the company had a variety of safety systems in place – there was not a shared culture of ownership and resilience to power.  the safety effort and turn this individual commitment into consistently safe work.

Genii partnered with managers to understand the cross-functional barriers they needed to address. We created a safe space, bringing together various departments in deep conversations to get to the heart of the matter. Open dialogue revealed the true operating realities, including a breakdown between the front-line and management.

Genii established a cross-organizational safety breakthrough team to begin addressing the key findings of the discovery process. Through an action-learning process inside of their different departments and roles, they got to the heart of the matter of a number of different organizational impediments to safety. And through interactions and inquiries with many employees began to enliven a groundswell of ownership and generative solutions.

Genii worked with senior leadership to ensure that these employee-generated solutions got the support and engagement needed to help them succeed.

The Results

Today, as this utility forges a leadership role in developing the power infrastructure of the future, they do so with a strengthened sense of empowerment and collective commitment for safety. Their newly enhanced skills are enabling cross-departmental teams to solve the hard issues together.

On Genii’s customized and conversation-centered process, one leader reflected, “In an execution environment, you are pressed to get into action. To do something – and do it now. I found that having the conversations and building the relationships are the actions. I discovered there is an abundance of possibility when more people are brought into the conversation.”

Another executive said, “The biggest value was understanding the cross-functional issues and getting the various departments speaking together and solving the issues together.”

And a Senior Maintenance Manager added, “The process was not something we could have learned in a 4-day training seminar. It was something that you must experience to feel the energy and then notice the culture shift in support of your goal. Once you see this shift and build momentum, you can feel the culture starting to move in the direction we wanted it to.”