Norfolk Southern: Case Study

 

When Katie Frazier first joined Norfolk Southern’s Atlanta terminal, she felt it was running well but still felt more could be done to improve operations. She was also concerned about safety issues. As she got comfortable in her new job, she was wracking her brain, struggling with how to help the company take its safety and operations standards from just “good enough” to a higher level.

One day, while in a local bookstore’s business section, she noticed a book with penguins on the cover. Penguins had always been her favorite animal, but she wondered what such a book was doing surrounded by books on management! The book, needless to say, was “Our Iceberg Is Melting” Once she started reading it, she thought to herself, “wow, this is really helpful.

She noticed that behaviors in her company sometimes mirrored the penguins’ behaviors, for example, people would see a complex problem, and then either ignore it or wait for someone else to fix it. Katie thought that if she could get other people in the company to read the book, it might be a big help in giving people perspective on the bigger picture.

Katie, being one of the few relatively young workers around, faced an enormous challenge in getting her older co-workers to buy in to the notion that penguins could help the organization. There were many skeptics. She showed the book to her manager, a former Marine. He told her that the book was something his granddaughter might read, not something he would value as a business leader. Katie persevered and insisted that he read it. After her manager actually did, he quickly began to realize the same lessons could apply at Norfolk Southern. He gave Katie approval to start applying the learnings.

Katie started by trying to create a around a willingness to raise safety and operational standards. Through thorough evaluation of these problems, not only by Katie but also by the broader leadership team, people began to feel that urgency was more than just the latest fad. That process of raising the urgency level inside the Atlanta terminal of Norfolk Southern took about 2 months from start to finish.

After sufficient urgency was raised, a formed made up of a few conductors, engineers & supervisors. Katie’s fear was that the group was too homogenous – she actually wanted to include a few of the company’s more skeptical employees to get their feedback and help strengthen the group’s decision making. The Guiding Coalition began meeting regularly and called themselves “The Iceberg Group.” This group started out small, but eventually grew to have about 9 people, changing over time, from different parts of the organization, meeting regularly to see how to implement the rest of the 8-Steps.

The vision that the group created was designed to change everyone’s mentality and attitude about safety. Injuries could not be treated as an acceptable risk at a railroad – they had to be reduced in order to get the railroad’s efficiency up and costs down. Communicating this vision was a constant battle, since most of a railroad’s employees are on the move at any given time. Furthermore, most of the crew members did not have access to modern communications like e-mail.

As a result, the vision was communicated through a vehicle called “job briefings,” where the days weather & track conditions were discussed for crews about to go out on to the tracks. These briefings happen 3 times a day, at the beginning of every shift. The Iceberg Group started communicating the change vision at job briefings, around the clock, for two weeks straight. Over time, every crew member was touched by the vision multiple times, right at their point of highest awareness – before going out to work on the trains.

The largest barrier Katie felt she needed to overcome were related to the concept of raising the bar on safety standards – how can you make people really care about the highest possible safety standards, when current standards are already high? The way to do it, she said, was to make it personal – get to the heart and not just the mind. They forced people to think about their families and how they would feel about an injury to their loved ones. Over time, the message began to sink in and people started to change their behavior. This created a high level of engagement with the crew.

The Iceberg Group set a goal for a short term win – six months injury free and communicated it broadly. Since the inception of the Iceberg Group’s work, with the exception of a small muscle pull, the Atlanta terminal has gone almost 9 months injury free. Other outcomes resulted as well,for example, because the terminal became so proficient, they’ve never had to reduce the number of shifts running, even as other companies have cut back. With injuries down about 97% over last year, the Atlanta terminal has had fewer missed days of work, fewer injury-related costs and more productive workers, enabling it to gain a critical advantage over the competition.

Even with this success, the Atlanta terminal isn’t content to let up. As they continue to move through the 8-Step Process, they hope to make the change permanent by anchoring these into the culture. The Iceberg Group continues to meet, looking for other ways in which they can help the company improve its operations, and hopefully, spread the Iceberg philosophy to other divisions of the company.