Reaction Summary: Workplace Safety at Alcoa

In your opinion, what will be the key challenge to Alcoa's strategic effort to meet its goal of improved safety performance? Explain.
There are many obstacles in front of Alcoa in its improvements of Safety. First of all, aluminum operations throughout the US had high injury rates. Alcoa has no peer models in the industry to follow. If Alcoa wants to improve its safety rates, it has to make extra efforts all by itself, despite the fact that peer companies are using different rules.
Also, objections from line workers add a lot of pressure on implementing safety policies. However, different coworkers have distinct reasons to object. Some of the line workers are afraid of being laughed at by their coworkers when they follow new safety regulations. Workers don’t all understand the necessity of a new regulation at the beginning, so they feel easier to reject new rules. Some experienced workers refuse to follow new regulations because they are using their experience to judge all kinds of possibilities in work. They’ve never had accidents in the past, so it’s hard for them to adopt new regulations. Besides these two reasons, there are cultural norms and emotions. Workers may know it’s easier to get injured when they wear rings. However, cultures and emotions hold them back from safety concerns. Alcoa’s management also needs enhancement to meet with its safety expectations. Merton found workers have lax attitude within the plant. Workers selectively follow some rules while ignore others. Also, higher-up people need to bring their concerns down to the lower level managements in preventing mixed messages delivered. Behavior inventory processes might induce more unsafe practices.
Industry customs, cultures, management unsatisfactory all drag Alcoa’s safety performance