"Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast": How Safety Restores Production Targets

In heavy industry, occupational health and safety management systems and operational efficiency initiatives often develop at different speeds. An enterprise can build a strong safety vertical and reduce injury rates, yet still face declining output because production itself operates in constant firefighting mode. In her presentation, Ekaterina Rogova, Project Manager for Production Culture Development at Metalloinvest, examines a case study on integrating mature occupational safety practices into the management of production processes at a mining and metallurgical holding.

The Gap Between Safety Maturity and Operational Performance

By 2023, the implementation of a risk management program enabled the company to reduce severe and fatal injuries by 70% over two years, while an external assessment showed that its safety culture had advanced two stages along the Bradley Curve to the systemic level. However, an evaluation of the production system revealed the opposite picture: production management remained at a reactive, firefighting level. Mutually exclusive KPIs across adjacent departments, learned helplessness among personnel, and poorly developed action plans led to a decline in operational performance.

Instead of introducing complex lean manufacturing tools unsuited to a reactive environment, the team removed premature practices and built upon occupational safety mechanisms that employeesalready knew well. Using these as a foundation, they established three pillars of production culture: safety, reliability (covering both equipment reliability and keeping commitments within the team under the "said and done" principle), and efficiency. Specific role models and digitized metrics were defined for every management tier, from the CEO down to shop-floor workers.

Transforming Tools: From Risk Control to Operational Efficiency

Gemba Walks and Combating Meeting Overload

The transition to systematic shop-floor management began with a review of managerial workloads. A schedule audit revealed that department heads sometimes had up to 70 hours of online meetings booked per week within a 40-hour work schedule, preventing them from visiting actual work sites. To bring managers back to the shop floor, the company introduced "quiet slots"—fixed hours from Monday to Thursday completely free of any meetings.

The practice of management safety walks, used since 2021 solely to assess safety, was expanded to cover six areas. A unified checklist for plant managing directors and shop superintendents now includes occupational safety, contractor management, equipment condition, workplace organization (5S), performance management, and inventory control. Each area is scored on a scale from 0 to 2, and action items from the walk are logged into the 1C system within 10 minutes for strict deadline tracking. The accuracy of these assessments is verified quarterly through supervisory audits by the management company.

Open Dialogue: From Everyday Issues to Goal Setting

Building on safety dialogues, the company launched "open dialogues"—monthly meetings between managers and groups of up to 15 workers without podiums or formal reports. The manager speaks for only 20% of the time by asking questions, while spending 80% of the time listening to employees and recording issues.

The rollout took place in three waves. The first six months focused on resolving everyday welfare issues: repairing air conditioners in quarry machinery, replacing crane operator seats, and delivering meals to remote conveyor levels. Addressing basic needs without major budgets restored employee trust. In the second stage, dialogues focused on preparing for ten-day major overhauls and analyzing high-potential incidents. The third wave made it possible to move toward eliminating operational losses: for example, an in-person agreement among dispatchers from three departments and the release of a simple standard operating procedure reduced vehicle loading wait times by 51%. In total, more than 720 meetings were held, reaching over 8,000 employees.

Extended Pre-Shift Briefings and Shop Floor Ratings

To establish direct communication with personnel across three plants, extended shift handover briefings were introduced. Once a week, the shop superintendent attends a shift handover (covering four crews over the course of a month) for 15–20 minutes to discuss target fulfillment, review equipment failures or near misses, and present letters of appreciation for identified hazards or technical suggestions, with copies sent to the workers' families.

All practices are consolidated into a quarterly department rating system. Safety, reliability, and cost efficiency carry equal weight (33% each), where hazard mitigation speed, cost compliance, and holding open dialogues are evaluated on an equal footing. Any workplace injury or missed production target automatically disqualifies a shop from competing for the challenge cup, while underperforming departments implement a rapid improvement program.

What You Will Learn from This Presentation

• How to adapt safety culture tools (committees, A3 incident investigations, stop-work authority) to reduce equipment downtime and failures?
• How to free managers' schedules from excessive meetings and build a six-point management walk system free of box-ticking formalism?
• Why is it important to start the "open dialogue" practice by solving workers' everyday welfare issues, and how can these meetings be turned into a loss-reduction tool?
• How to organize checklist verification and action tracking in 1C so that shop-floor assessments reflect reality on-site?
• What criteria are used to build a quarterly department rating that combines occupational safety, reliability, and production cost metrics?