The Safety Guy

I'm not really used to sharing any of my thoughts on any of the social media portals, but today I think it's worth it.

At the project I am currently working at, there was an accident two days ago. When I was informed about it, I literally jumped out of the office and went to the scene. 20 Tonne crane ballast fell of the truck during transport. Luckily noone was hurt and "only" the road and truck were damaged. Long story short, everyone blamed the truck driver for using damaged securing straps, that weren't able to withstand the weight of the cargo on his trailer.

At first even I fell for this explanation of what happened, but then as per company's procedures I started my own investigation straight away.

Aaaaand...

Whenever You hear someone investigating anything, You have this image of a person locked in a room, like in a cage, and there must be a table and just two chairs, with the suspect sitting on one of them, waiting for his "Investigator"to finally come and start interrogation with this weird sense of superiority over the suspect.

But, to be honest, I can't even imagine myself being this bad cop, trying to squeeze answers out of anyone. And this is why from the very beginning I made sure that he is simply comfortable, and assured him that nobody, especially me is blaming him for anything.

This guy is 63 years old, he only has 2 years before his retirement - imagine how freaking stressed he must be because of this entire situation. He is worried if he keeps the job, and if he will have to cover the cost of repairs. I don't know what about You, but this sounds like a trauma to me.

Now, during our first meeting, he was scared to death and no matter what would I say and how calmly would i behave, he wouldn't belive me, bacause after all I'm the bad guy - THE SAFETY GUY(!). During this first meeting he told me exactly the same thing as I heard from pretty much everyone who wasn't even there. And basing on his statement I started to do the root cause analysis, to make sure that this kind of situation will not happen again in the future. So guess where did I start? What was the direct cause in my analysis? The securing strap that broke due to the damage of course - and in different analysis methods like RCA or 5 WHY's you ask questions "WHY?" until You find the root cause, the true cause that actually started the chain of events that led to the accident. Me and my team were asking ourselves why, and why, and why. So we started creating all of those potential scenarios of what could have an impact on development of this situation. And to be honest we came up with the root cause using the 5 Why's method.

But this was all wrong... Why? Because when I showed this Driver, that I'm really not blaming him for anything, I was simply showing my concern about him, and treated him with dignity, today he came up to me and literally said: "You know what, If You are treating me like a human being, I will do the same thing with You. What happened, happened not because the straps were damaged, it was because I forgot to put anti-skid pad under the cargo. If it would be there the straps would resist".

When I heard that, I was speechless. He opened, and literally gave me the answer I was looking for, for the last 2 days. Not only he trusted me because of my attitude, but also helped me in finding the true root cause. If he didn't, most probably I would just put the previous findings in the report, and advised to put totally wrong control measures, that would have no real impact on the safety of work.

I will make sure that he faces minimal, or no consequences, because after all, we are all humans, and we make mistakes. Think about it for a minute, is it really worth it, to be the stereotypical SAFETY GUY? Work on Your attitude, make sure people know that You understand them and can count on You.

After all, isn't it the point of being an HSE advisor?