Lost money in safety?

I read a 2010 article by Peter Wagner & Associates which was headed “Safety – A Wicked Problem”. Leading CEO’s discussed their views on OHS transformation in Australia, and came up with key insights on what they felt could change and develop better business safety. Peter Wagner & Associates carried out the interviewed-based qualitative research with a selection of chief and senior executives of large Australian companies. Here we are six years later confronting the same issues and still injuring people, where to from here?

In 2016 we are faced with many of the same issues that were raised in the research and it seems we still need to understand how to:

·      Try to get people to be aware of and understand risk relevant to their work activities.

·      Employees having the confidence and trust to raise issues at higher managerial levels.

·      Understanding how and why people take perceived short cuts and finding ways to educate them on such matters as BST doesn’t seem to cut it?

·      Dealing with conflict resolutions during times of disagreement in the workplace.

·      Being over-confident that workers think they can control risk factors when taking minor short cuts. 

·      Better understand what systems are really needed in legal compliance.

The above only mentions a few of the concerns that are in businesses today. Recently meeting with a group of long term business minded people and discussing the HSE situation, really highlighted some gaps in the ways we aim for safety compliance.  Many interesting questions were floated in the air for discussion. Are we in some ways gathering evidence for our own prosecution by trying too hard to ass cover? Do we really need all the checklists and procedures that most of us currently have in business? Are our management systems actually driving a hidden culture of tick and flick and disregard for safety? When these questions are raised by business people, it is easier to see how safety becomes what Peter Wagner and Associates call “A wicked problem” (unsolvable).

Knowing too well we still have these burdens hanging over us, it spells out there is no silver bullet to resolve the current issues. What is the next transformational stage of OHS? Do we want Zero harm as our goal or is it much broader? Is safety an outcome and not a thing? Does it stem back to the broader business strategies, plans and culture, equating to safety outcomes?  What are the ways we can learn new technologies in communication, conversations and engagement when managing risk, if behavioural safety is not as effective as we hoped? Is it lead indicators data that we need more of, or is it more understanding of the unknown ways we humans work together and view risk? What have we achieved with our current safety processes and was it what we expected? In order to take the next big steps in learning new innovative ways, we need to ask the tough questions in ways we are currently doing things and be open to new ways. Safe Work Australia are also trying hard to research better ways and have produced a report called “Mindfulness, is this the start to our new ways to manage strategic business outcomes (safety)?

Getting back to basics is possibly a good place to start. Is there too much fear of taking steps into uncharted waters? Many companies perhaps fear what may go wrong if they go back to basics. Lang O’Rourke have courageously started to take the big steps forward; they have done away with the traditional ways of safety and have removed Zero Harm from their Business. Lang O’Rourke’s General Manager HSE Tim Fleming has said they were a little restless in what the future holds, if we keep doing the same and getting the same results. Lang O’Rourke are somewhat getting back to basics by empowering and entrusting their people to create resilience and help overall business culture.

Many Businesses are tired of injecting money into safety and getting the same results and perhaps, rightly so! Should we be reflecting on our own businesses and asking ‘if we keep doing the same thing year in year out and as our competitors and still have the same outcomes is it not time for change?’. Shouldn’t we be injecting money into business strategies and culture which in turn may give us greater efficiencies with production, quality and safety? Is spending money on outcomes like workers compensation reactive and does that really tackle the causations of risk outcomes? Many businesses are injecting funds into BST (Behavioural Safety) which is another reactive band aid and doesn’t tackle the fundamental causations in a business.

I’d love your feedback on whether you feel there is money lost in reactive safety?

“New proposed Work Health and Safety (Industrial Manslaughter) Amendment Bill 2015! What’s the potential issues for Businesses?

South Australia Greens MLC Tammy Franks wants employers who cause the death of a worker through negligence or indifference to face penalties of up to $1 million or 20 years in jail. These tough new changes to South Australia’s workplace safety legislation proposing to hold employers criminally liable for the death of their employees. The proposed manslaughter bill would see employers who cause the death of a worker fined up to $1 million or jailed for a maximum of 20 years.

Tammy is suggesting that numerous parties may share liability and it will be up to the courts to determine which party is responsible in the unfortunate event of a workplace death

 “Multiple parties may be on site and potentially responsible, so a court will need to ascertain where liability exists,” they say.

 The key changes under the proposed bill would be to boost the penalties for an individual who causes a workplace death from $300,000 or five years’ imprisonment, or a combination of both to 20 years’ imprisonment.

 Under the new law the penalty rate for officers or business owners would be raised from $600,000 and five years’ prison to $1 million and a sentence of 20 years.

 “A person can only be liable if they have responsibility for health and safety (decision making power), such as an Operations Manager or Health and Safety Manager,” is the way it reads. Under the bill, an employer will be guilty of an offence if he or she breaches the duty of care, knew or was recklessly indifferent that the act or omission constituting the violation would result in a substantial risk of serious harm to a person, and if the breach resulted in death.

What are the outcomes of such fearful penalties to businesses in industry? Another question that comes to my mind is, “what learnings do we really get out of penalties such as jail terms and large sums of money? In my experience and through some research, very little, if any information is published or available to public, so how do others learn from this? I felt when the Harmonisation Laws came in, the fear of jail drove most of us in safety and business management down the line of legal compliance “ass covering” from possible litigation. I also felt it compelled our safety world to go down the dictation, and blanket rule road of compliance and systems to again cover backsides. Rather than consider and focus on our people in our business we treat them like robots and give them no choices, the by-products seem to be things like, tick and flick of documents, disgruntled employees who feel worthless and not trusted or capable of making adult decisions. Is this what safety is supposed to be all about in business?

It brings to mind a time I spent in the Coal Seam Gas Industry in QLD where we were trying to manage risk of explosion during a combined construction and operations commissioning stage on a compression station. All Safety people and most managers were more worried about signing off a dispensation document to shift responsibility of risk ownership rather than mange the risk, the legal fear and doubt it drove was very real. Seeing how the fear of prosecution influenced people to think that a dispensation paper was going to make the risk all better just blew me away, I remember thinking, “this isn’t how we manage risk in business, is it”? This wasn’t the first time high risk activities in a business were driven by legal compliance and fear of heavy fines or jail, I wonder how many have actually been prosecuted through the mentality of legal compliance?    

In the Behavioural safety world, they thrive/d on this kind of legal stuff, through the fear itself they would leverage off to gain work, which I used to question. The one thing we were taught in Behaviour Science Technology (BST) was the old ABC analysis “Soon Certain Positive”, where is the soon certain positive in jail and prosecutions? I thought jail and prosecutions would be “Later Uncertain Negative”, which would mean that this is in no way going to influence or change behaviour in anyway. Over the 20 plus years I have been in the safety game I have learnt that we never stop learning and we don’t have all the answers and nor can we.

Is it perhaps that we need to re-think the idea of punishment for safety management failures and think of ways the legal system can perhaps help the industry learn from one another’s mistakes?

How can the regulators, safety legal system and Work safe and health industry help one another out with shared learnings and great ideas of innovation? would this be something that could perhaps work in our industries Safety? I remember an inspector I had the pleasure of working with in industry who was trying hard to cross-pollinate safety ideas from one company to another, what a great initiative, I just hope it spreads!

Should we be re-thinking the way we interoperate the act and reg’s and respond to it with our people people in the forefront of our mind?

Should we be refining our systems and focusing on the value add that they do or do not give our people and ask, do they really understand them? Is there too many policies and procedures, that they physically can’t remember them all because we have flooded them? Are our systems simple enough that they are mirror reflected in practice at all levels?

Should we get back to basics of empowering our people and removing blanket policies like mandatory gloves and not allowing the use of fixed blade Stanley knives? What by-products have you experienced through our Safety, rules, laws and potential prosecutions? And do they worry your business? How can our businesses become more resilient to risk, and create collective mindfulness?