The importance of robust safety policies and procedures is universally accepted across the majority of industries. What is perhaps less talked about is the fact that safety does not stand alone. At Air Products, where we supply gases to healthcare institutions and many other heavily regulated industries, we see quality as safety’s essential accomplice.
All too often quality is confined to the procedural – inspection checks or final product standards, for example. At Air Products we have committed to approaching quality as a behavioural discipline, one rooted in culture, mindset, accountability and the everyday decisions people make across our sites – all of which of course impacts safety, productivity and project outcomes too.
From audit-ready to everyday-ready
This shift in approach is reshaping how we work. Over the years we have moved the focus from audits as set piece moments – reviewing processes, checking documents and preparing our people – to being everyday-ready. To put it simply, if an issue is identified within an audit, we believe it has been identified too late.
This mindset moves quality from being a tick-box exercise to one embedded in the culture of our business and in the behaviour of our people, and ensures we really keep the focus on protecting our colleagues, strengthening our operations and supporting our customers.
It’s a cultural shift that has required leadership engagement: leaders demonstrating what good looks like, having the right conversations on the plant floor, asking questions that get to the heart of how and why we work the way we do. Documentation still matters, of course, but it no longer carries the full weight of assurance – people do.
Quality is everyone’s job
Our European EHSQ (Environment Health Safety and Quality) team is a central group which has one person assigned to each subregion. We found that one single point of contact responsible for EHSQ, rather than having quality as a separate focus, brings consistency – you have one set of priorities and the same message. However, that doesn’t mean quality is centralised in practice. In fact, the opposite is true: quality – in the same way as safety – is everyone’s responsibility. It shouldn’t be an abstract concept dealt with by specialist teams, nor should it be perceived as something for ‘the quality person’ to fix.
Teams are encouraged to bring this focus into everyday conversations. If an issue is noticed, it is not just about correcting that singular item, but identifying the root cause of the problem. That is how we deliver real and sustained change for the better.
How asking ‘why’ changes everything
One story illustrates this point perfectly. We had a piece of kit failing on a site – a pump requiring replacement every few months. At first we assumed it was a recurring pump failure and we would replace it like for like. It temporarily resolved the issue and work would go on, until the next time. The local team wanted to understand why it was happening at all – what part of the operation was causing this repeated failure and what could be done about it?
Rather than looking at the issue in isolation, they looked at the whole picture. In this case, asking “why” revealed that the pump wasn’t failing without cause. Tight piping was twisting it, making the pump appear to be the problem when it was actually a wider issue.
It is this culture of questioning and curiosity that is the real advantage of embedding quality across our operations, both for our business and our customers. It goes right to the nub of the issue and prevents future problems before they arise. It strengthens reliability and creates a culture where people seek understanding, rather than patching and moving on.
Moving forward from a foundation of experience
With over 27 years of experience at Air Products, and now in my current role of Environment, Health, Safety and Quality Director, I have worked across production and operational areas and witnessed, first-hand, the importance of quality across the board. So much has already changed within that time, but there is always scope for more to be done.
Our goal is now to centralise, standardise, and simplify even further – to take as much complexity as possible out of our operations. For example, our pre-use checklist for forklifts had several different versions in the UK and Ireland, depending on which site they were being used at. Now there is a single version centrally aligned with best practice. This demonstrates the direction of travel: the central organisation will do the research and thinking, and create the frameworks and the tools with input from the operations teams; and our sites will bring them to life.
By removing the burden of each site designing or maintaining their own local versions, we’re freeing operations managers to concentrate on execution – applying consistent quality procedures with confidence and calling out anything that needs to be strengthened.
Bringing people with us
But of course, sometimes, the value of asking questions and delving deeper into issues isn’t immediately obvious to everyone. People who’ve worked a certain way for years may not see why a checklist needs to change, or why a standard has to be rewritten, and that’s completely natural.
We’ve had to bring teams with us – explaining the ‘why’, showing how better standards reduce risk, and demonstrating how shared ways of working ultimately make life easier, and processes safer, not harder. I’ve worked on the operations side for many years including deputy plant manager and plant manager roles – and the experience helps. I’m able to see their point of view which helps embed the change. It has taken open conversations, collaboration, and input from every part of our organisation: EHS teams, quality specialists, subject matter experts, and our site leaders who live these processes every day. And while it hasn’t always been easy, it has been worth it. What’s more, it gains momentum as it grows – people start to see the value and embrace the ‘quality’ way of thinking.
Because if we get it right the first time, we can get it right every time. And that, in essence, is what quality – and safety – are all about.
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