Executive Summary: managing a safe company that would dare to do better than “industry average” takes new initiatives from top and senior management. These initiatives would include thinking of safety as a business driver; investments in safety may be longer term ways of protecting assets; spreading the actual responsibility for safe operations to the highest possible level. In the first part of the mini series of this topic (see here) we spoke about the benefits of making safety a business driver and understanding that investments in safety protects assets. In part 2 we will explore the significance of spreading the responsibility of safety to the top.
Spreading the responsibility for safety to the top.
“To understand how failure sometimes occurs, one must first understand how success is achieved –how people learn and adapt to create safety in a world fraught with gaps, hazards, trade-offs, and multiple goals” (Cooper et al, 2000 in Hollnagel, Woods and Levenson, 2006: Resilience Engineering. Ashgate Publishing Ltd; p.3)
Explaining an accident is more complex than finding a culprit and giving the action or lack thereof a label, which seems to be the method of choice in today’s accident investigations and risk assessments. Consequently, the success off the workers, their supervisors and managers up to the point of accident is not taken into account.
An accident free shift is the function of how the workers, supervisors and managers have translated the financial and operational goals of the business into specific actions. If however, this balancing act is thrown out of kilter by hidden messages, or faulty trade-offs, then an accident is waiting to happen.
The message of priorities and permissible trade-offs gets communicated by management in a variety of ways. Through the questions asked during operational meetings, the kind of instructions given that prioritise what aspects to pay attention to, how and who conducts safety meetings, are all messages about the importance of safety.
If safety is the step-child to production or efficiency in the discussions, then people will be efficient and productive, but not figure safety as a functional priority into the equation. Safety now becomes the embarrassment that people should have known better to avoid. The footwork starts to find the culprit (typically the person nearest the job where the incident happened) and slap on the appropriate human error label.
In a previous article (Kruger and Van Wyngaard, 2008: “Good Safety is Good Business”) we refer to the research done by Sidney Dekker and his concept of banality-of-accidents. People don’t come to work to create an accident or commit suicide. Accidents are frequently a drift into failure. Little adjustments in work method that was required by new or sudden demands can become a new way of working. “Because it worked then” it becomes the new preferred way of doing things, especially if it leads to higher productivity or better financial gains. Any one adjustment is never the problem, but the sequence or pattern of adjustments “borrows” from safety to the point where the operation is an accident waiting for a place to happen.
The challenge: how did the most senior manager involved contribute to making the right adjustments and adaptations necessary for success, i.e. a productive and safe operation?
Conclusion:
The fact that incidents and accidents are a drain on profits; that an investment in safety is a long term perspective; that people do not deliberately cause accidents and that safety viewed as a business driver all these has a major impact on job design and costing of operations. These ideas are not novel ideas. They do, however, set a serious challenge for the company who aims to implement strategies that takes these factors into account. This challenge is to face courageously that a decision to stop now for safety reasons (and the cost it entails) is, in the very least, an investment into a productive and profitable work method in the future.