The 5 Guiding Principles for Reliability Culture Implementation

In asset management and across hundreds of industries, reliability culture is becoming more important. While your standards for reliability culture may vary, depending on your type of facility, size, and other factors, the philosophy always has a few common traits.

Namely, reliability culture focuses on keeping your facility as safe as possible, and ensuring a consistently productive performance from your staff. With reliability culture underlying your efforts, not only will you reduce workplace injuries and incidents, you’ll keep your equipment up and running as consistently as possible, and you’ll get a better performance from your employees.

Unfortunately, reliability culture requires a significant amount of work to establish and enforce—and if you want to be successful, you’ll need to follow a handful of guiding principles.

Foundations for Success in Reliability Culture

These tenets are vital if you want your reliability culture to be successful:

1. Underlying cultural values. It’s called reliability “culture” for a reason. Before your plan can be reliably enforced, you need to make sure it’s aligned with the values of your corporate culture. Don’t underestimate the potential influence your culture has on your employees’ work habits and dispositions. Having a set of core values that prioritize safety, future-focused thinking, and attention to detail can make a dramatic difference in the day-to-day actions and decisions of your workforce. Corporate culture is harder to change than standard rules or procedures, but it’s also more impactful, so make sure all your changes originate here.
2. The elimination of silos. The silo mentality starts to form in almost any business of sufficient size, but it’s something you’ll need to fight against. Typically, silos form around departments; your maintenance staff won’t interact with your production staff very often, so they’ll come up with their own ways of doing things, and won’t share insights that could mutually improve operations for both of them. If you want your safety standards to run seamlessly, or if you want to ensure your machinery is taken care of proactively, you need to encourage communication between these groups, and prevent any one group of employees from becoming too detached from the others.
3. Consistent measurement and KPIs. Reliability culture is somewhat subjective, so you may be tempted to let your core values and high-level vision affect reality, but this is dangerous. If you want to be successful here, you’ll need to tie your high-level vision to ground-level, objective results. For starters, you’ll need to take accurate, consistent measurements for everything in your facility, including the uptime of your equipment and the productivity of your staff. Then, you need to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will allow you to determine whether your changes are effective or not. Without KPIs, you’ll have little to no insight to guide further changes.
4. Individual engagement at all levels. For your plan to be effective, it needs to be adopted and followed at all levels. Your team leaders and managers need to fully embrace these changes and practices, or else your employees won’t be invested. And your employees, in all departments and of all experience levels, need to be focused on following the tenets of your reliability culture. Part of this is to ensure you have alert eyes at all times; the more people consistently watching for violations, the more likely you’ll be to catch one before it’s too late. This is also important for your staff keeping each other accountable.
5. Room for growth. Finally, you’ll need some room for growth. No plan can be perfect from the outset; instead, you’ll need to observe how your plan is executed and acknowledge its fault points so you can compensate for them in the future. Try not to write your rules in stone, and instead, allow experience to inform your policies. The more flexible you are, and the more willing you are to grow with your team, the better.

Getting Started

If your facility doesn’t already have a reliability culture in place, now’s the time to get started. It takes significant effort to establish initial momentum; you’ll need to draft a plan, set goals, and possibly enforce changes in an organization that isn’t especially willing to change. If you run into resistance, or feel overwhelmed, try to take things one step at a time; you don’t need a perfect reliability plan in place from day one. Every step forward you take is a positive change, and you can always make your reliability culture more robust.