Making Safety Difficult
Yes, how can we make safety as difficult as possible? Joke. I am sure no influencers set out to make complying with legal and company requirements hard work. I wonder how operations end up with so many layers (controls & bureaucracy) and is it needed...really? I guess your internal voice is asking, be specific, so I will. When I horizon scan, I see plenty of opportunity to remove waste from the safety architecture. In this article I am going to focus in on the management of safety risks, specifically our bedrock the risk assessment.
By the way, I do not see the management of risk being over baked in any particular sector, its been the case in the eight sectors that I have worked in. To truly understand this issue we need to cast our minds back to when the health and safety related EU Directives first hit our statute books and were translated into domestic law. My recollection of those days was of a little confusion at first, then what emerged was a pragmatic playbook. In real terms it meant we had a folder of generic risk assessments and if needed, these were topped up by a dynamic risk assessment at the point of work. Oh what a beautiful era, we used generics because the Regulator gave us the green light to prevent overburdening operations. Some years later Dame Judith Hackett (then Chair of Health and Safety Executive) spotted things were going off piste and used her position to correct the course. In 2013 she launched a *Myth Busting Panel which put 'Elf and Safety Myths' in neon lights. Judith had a strike rate of two H&S myths debunked per week. This was needed because her organisation and I assume safety folks, leaders, shareholders etc were implicitly alleged to be at fault for wrapping employees up in cotton wool. Her campaign was unprecedented in the health and safety world.
Dame Judith Hackitt continued with her common sense challenge and went on to co-author a book called 'Mind Your Own Business' with former IOSH President Andrew Sharman. A heady mix of authoritative authors, right. I believe this book is a must read, albeit targeted at the C suite, to tell you what your MBA should have taught you about workplace health and safety. Its on my go to list because its an easy read, is direct and empowers the reader to decouple/change.
Kicking off in their book with **Myth 1 : comprehensive proformas which cover every possible risk in every possible scenario are designed by experts to be helpful to the uninitiated and unfamiliar. Sharman and Hackitt respond with : no doubt created with the best of intentions, but it turns out they're not very helpful and can be confusing and tedious. They become a box ticking exercise full of irrelevant questions which don't apply to the situation being considered and where real risks may get lost or many not even have been considered.
领英推荐
My lived experience ? Over a number of years what Sharman and Hackitt sought to avoid has crept back in. With boots on the ground, my typical experience plays out as follows. I ask to see the risk assessment pertinent to the task at hand. It goes one of two ways. Either a highly conscientious supervisor will furiously search in the cab of a vehicle for a paper copy risk assessment and a bunch are thrust into my hands. By the way, this always feels terribly transactional, like he breathes a sigh of relief, because he and his employer have met all legal requirements, just because that piece of paper has been printed. Alternatively I will be shown a tablet, containing a link to a standardised point of work risk assessment with circa 4 to 6 pages of drop down hazards that should have been selected prior to work commencing, controls deployed. Off the record, I rarely have confidence in this approach because the users are overwhelmed with a form stuffed with hazards, presumably you could even launch a person to the moon, that's how comprehensive these forms are. It would bore/cheese off the most die hard safety follower.
What's the bottom line? This belief that paper based safety will protect the author and body corporate, is actually exposing all of the above. I am not alone with these reflections. The safety disruptor Professor Sidney Dekker explains in his book ***Compliance Capitalism A Paradox - free markets have led to unfree, over-regulated workers. The number of (internal) rules, the amount of Compliance workers have all risen over the past two decades. Internal organisational compliance and business to business compliance together now account for some 60% of all compliance demands (Saines et al., 2014). Governments typically impose only 40% (average figure).
Is it time now to focus and get rid of waste? Focusing resources where there is merit. Remove user apathy towards safety because its long winded, confusing and irrelevant? What's stopping us from adopting a more basic approach? Not all risk assessments need to be written down. How about the blunt end trusting the workers at the pointy end a little more?
What a refreshing piece! - it just needs to be built in and simple, like LEAN error-proofing in some ways. All too often there's a cottage industry of documentation full of cross-references and links that no-one can sensibly follow - and like any long-winded process write-up, it just isn't read, isn't engaging and so doesn't work when it is needed. Bravo for for this crisp approach!
Deputy Director of Nursing Liverpool Heart & Chest NHS Trust
4 个月Total agree Deb, you can have all the paperwork you want but it won’t necessarily reduce the risk, what you need is people to understand the risk and the consequence to them and others and do what they can to make that situation as safe as possible. In trying to tick every box we take away the autonomy needed to make safe decisions! I’m not saying there shouldn’t be procedure to ensure safe work but balance is needed to make it accessible and achievable.