Challenging the Safety Quo

Craig Marriott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138558748
• eBook ISBN: 9781351364669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Safety is broken. The people who are responsible for helping you stay safe should be at the top of your Christmas card list, but all too often they are despised, ridiculed and ignored.

But safety management is beginning to be challenged. Businesses have begun to realise that what they have been doing is no longer providing any additional value.

The same issues are repeatedly raised by corporate leadership:

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• How do we get our workforce engaged in safety?

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• How do we improve safety systems to gain commitment from all employees?

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• How do we improve safety understanding to make the case for change?

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• How do we embed safety as an integral part of culture in an environment of ongoing change and cost pressure?

Challenging the Safety Quo makes the case for change based on stagnating performance, identifies areas where there are problems and proposes alternative ways to progress. Provocative but practical, it outlines the business benefits to be gained from putting in place the right approaches to managing safety, although not in the way traditionally presented by most safety managers.

This book translates theory into practice; putting an accessible, practical and usable spin on cutting-edge thinking in safety.

Part I

Introduction

1The problem

On 19 November 2010, an explosion ripped through the Pike River Mine in the South Island of New Zealand. A second followed soon after.

Twenty-nine men died.

Fathers. Brothers. Sons.

In any such disaster, more lives are ruined than those that are taken directly. In a small community such as this, the impact was particularly devastating (Macfie, 2013). The disaster triggered a response that had a much broader impact than simply on this mine or this industry.

The safety record of New Zealand’s industry was already under scrutiny due to perceived poor performance in comparison with other developed countries. In the wake of Pike River, industry scrutiny gave way to a public clamour for change, for improvement and for accountability. The government duly obliged.

An independent task force was established to review industry performance across all sectors. A Royal Commission investigated the Pike River tragedy. The regulator was shaken up, given more independence and more resources. Legislation was changed. Targets were set and promises made. It took five and a half years for new legislation to be enacted and come into force.

Will it work?

Who knows?

Perhaps (and hopefully) it will, but history suggests otherwise. Similar, previous tragedies triggered similar responses and similar issues are playing out all around the world as various governments and agencies attempt to come to grips with the problem. In the UK, Flixborough prompted changes in the 1970s; Piper Alpha prompted changes in the 1980s. Union Carbide’s facility in Bhopal provoked a similar outcry. And there are many others – Texas City, Longford, Deepwater Horizon, Chernobyl, Seveso …

So this has happened over and again, for the last 40 years. Yet here we are, still failing to provide safe workplaces for our colleagues. Nor is this confined to major disasters with multiple fatalities. While general accident rates across industry have been in general decline for some time, serious injuries and fatalities have not shown a similar reduction – either reducing much more slowly, plateauing or, in some cases, increasing.

Why is that? Based on the rhetoric after each tragedy, these issues should be sorted out by now:

‘We must do better; bad practices will be weeded out and poor performers prosecuted under the new laws …’

‘We will look further and delve deeper to root out the bad apples …’

‘We will hold up, reward and recognise good performers; identify best practices and share them.’

But, do we actually know what best practices look like? What if our current view of what is good is completely wrong? What if we’re looking in all the wrong places?

These questions are currently being asked and the safety status quo – the safety quo – is being challenged. Unseen by most of the outside world, there is a debate raging in the safety profession. In online forums, at conferences, seminars and in safety publications, people are beginning to question some of the most well-established principles of safety management. Safety as a profession is going through a mid-life crisis.

Some of the theories behind these challenges are well developed, particularly in academia, but in industry many organisations are very much behind the times and haven’t yet got up to speed. Other theories are cutting edge and leading to howls of indignation from defenders of the safety quo, but are gradually gaining support as a few lone voices become a groundswell of opinion.

This change is needed because the truth is that safety is broken. There are pockets of excellence, there are good-quality people working very hard and with the best of intentions. We have made significant progress since the days when major projects budgeted for a certain number of fatalities. But, by and large, the safety profession is frowned upon. What is the general response across industry (or in your business) when the safety person gets involved in a conversation, or arrives at a site to observe work? Or when a new revision of the safety paperwork is issued? Are these welcomed with open arms? Are they seen as a positive inclusion to keep us all in one piece? No, they are not. There is a general rolling of eyes and resigned shrugging of shoulders, if not outright hostility.

How did we come to this? Everybody at work wants to go home fully intact. Nobody wants to die on the job, or be seriously injured. How did we get to the stage where the people charged with helping to support that most fundamental of requirements – staying alive – are almost universally disparaged? On face value, it seems remarkable. Businesses ask how they can make their workers more engaged in safety. But it is surely the natural state for people to be engaged in their own safety. In fact, it is an evolutionary imperative. The question business should be asking is, therefore, why are they disengaged and what is the business doing to contribute to it? Once that is answered, they can stop those activities that are actively disengaging their workers from safety.

Of course, safety is not the only department that strikes fear into the heart of the rest of the business. Procurement, accounting, IT and legal also tend to have the same chilling effect. But this is largely a function of the bureaucracy of big business and differs in two ways. First, they tend to impact more on the back-office staff who are at least paperwork-savvy rather than the front-line with their almost pathological distaste for reams of paper. Second, disengagement in the process of dealing with these departments usually has little more effect than some delays and productivity inertia. Damaging to the business perhaps, but not disabling to individuals.

To re-balance and to improve our safety performance we need strong leadership – this is something that everyone agrees with. And to paraphrase Peter Drucker, leadership is not about doing things right, but about doing the right things.

About this book

This is not an academic text. It does not consist of exhaustively researched reference information (although there are some references to other reading of interest). It does not even purport to be right. I have included some aspects that I am not entirely convinced by personally, but which are views held by others whom I respect. Its principal intention is to encourage critical thinking about safety by challenging some of the fundamental assumptions we are currently using that don’t appear to be working as well as we need. It also offers some alternatives that may be of use.

It is, however, based on my experience of over 25 years in the safety field, the majority in the nuclear and petrochemical industries – high-hazard industries where consequences of failure are severe and where safety vigilance and performance ought to be (and in most cases are) industry leading.

The book covers a wide range of topics as an introduction to some of the thinking that has the potential to improve our safety performance. It will serve as a gateway to other resources, researchers and thinkers who have presented some of that thinking in more depth in their own work. There is a gap between those at the forefront of safety thinking and those at the forefront of safety doing. Hopefully, we can start a discussion that begins to close that gap. So, think of it less as a training resource and more as a chat over coffee about the state of safety management.

Note that we talk about safety throughout this book. The challenges and lessons apply equally (if not more) to occupational health. Wherever we use the word ‘safety’ it should be read as ‘health and safety’. I am not well enough versed in the intricacies of occupational health to provide a detailed critique, but health and safety are so often put together that I have a working knowledge, although I am as guilty as anyone of forgetting the health in health and safety. The single biggest change we can make to improve occupational health (apart from increasing awareness) is to start treating it as a genuine risk and attempt to manage it at source, rather than our current approach of (at best) monitoring its effects. I encourage anyone who is a specialist in this area to consider the concepts included here and challenge our current approach to occupational health as well.

The book is in three parts:

Part I Introduction.
This is self-explanatory. It introduces the problem and some of the background and context to it.

Part II Truths, half-truths and downright myths.
This is where we challenge assumptions and generally poke holes in things. It includes a selection of aspects that highlight some of our current misapprehensions.

It has become somewhat fashionable to publish business books that don’t need to be read in the order in which they are written. You can jump about and dip in and out. In this case, the chapters within Part II have no particular order to them. They are a selection of approaches used within safety that are worthy of being challenged. But they were written in order, so there may be some back-referencing that you will miss if you choose to be a bit ad hoc. But if there is a particular area that interests you, feel free to go straight for it. I’m sure you’ll work it out.

Part III Your context
Good safety is hugely context-specific. Part III is as close as I get to telling you how to do it. But really, it’s about how to understand your business and where safety fits into it. This is to give you a fighting chance of making sustainable improvements.

So, I’m not here to give you all the answers, but to give you good questions to ask. If you were hoping for a quick fix, then sorry, but that’s the first myth to dispel. The silver bullet doesn’t exist, whatever the claims of that latest system or programme that someone is trying to sell you.

So, read on and respond in any way you see fit, as long as you can logically and objectively support your position. Argue against it, agree with it, vehemently oppose it, denounce or support it …

…but don’t ignore it. There are lives at stake.

Note

You can provide feedback or comments at www.safetyquo.com.

Reference

Macfie, Rebecca (2013) Tragedy at Pike River Mine, Awa Press.

2The cast list

There are three fundamentally important groups of people in the delivery of safe operation:

1management

2workers

3safety professionals.

For the purposes of this book, management encompasses all those people that have some formal degree of influence over the working environment – from the board, through the executive suite, middle management and to supervisory level. When I refer to ‘management’ or a ‘manager’ in a generic sense it can be any of these. There is a difference between managers and leaders, which we will explore in a later chapter, that is the subject of an entire industry of performance improvement through better leadership. But the ‘management’ in this context undertakes both leadership and management activities and is more of an organisational hierarchy definition than a behavioural one.

All employees are workers (well, most of the time), but we are taking them to be those who are the most exposed to the hazards of the workplace, i.e. ‘front-line’ workers, be they miners, joiners, forklift drivers, tree fellers and so on. This means there can be some overlap with certain individuals in both the worker and management category (for example, a scaffold leading hand), but this should make no material difference to the discussion.

Safety professional means just that – those people who earn their living by their safety work, whether as an employee, consultant or academic. Although there are some similarities at a basic level, it is not intended to include a workforce safety representative in this description.

Different organisations have differing levels of safety maturity – as may different departments and teams within a single organisation. The relative importance of each of these roles varies with that maturity and there is a high degree of inter-dependence. The influence of a safety professional, for example, can be minimal if there is little support, or even downright opposition, by management to their attempts. More on safety maturity later.

Management

The role of management in delivering safe operation has been increasingly recognised over the last few years. There are a number of activities that management can undertake that facilitate this. Conversely, not doing these, or getting them wrong, can hinder or prevent safety altogether. Such activities are routinely listed in safety books and training courses and are, when considered at this level, broadly correct. They include:

•setting a clear and unambiguous safety-driven strategy;

•demonstrating commitment to safety;

•supporting a strong safety culture;

•being personally involved in safety;

•getting out in the field and listening to the workforce;

•active involvement in investigations and recommendations;

•encouraging incident reporting;

•rewarding good safety performance;

•providing adequate resources to support safety.

In short, say that safety is important and then show it – always.

If you are reading this and are not a manager, please note that despite what some people (and some successful cartoonists) may suggest, there is not a soul-removal process in the recruitment of managers into industry. Management, on the whole, is not evil. This may come as a surprise, but experience shows it to be the case. I have not yet come across the manager who would accept, let alone welcome, a serious injury or fatality purely in the pursuit of higher profits. Managers can be distant; preoccupied with other matters; unaware of their impact on safety; lacking the knowledge to make it work; uninformed of the risks being undertaken and subject to a whole host...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Truths, half-truths and downright myths
• Part III: Your context
• 24 The Resistance
• Appendices
• Index