“Hi, my name is John and I work in the procurement department. Last year my decision to delay the purchase of the new gloves the business identified were necessary (due to a number of near misses we identified that were causing potential hand injuries) meant that Terry on manufacturing line 4 lost a finger and now can’t play guitar in the band he was in.

I’ve never met Terry. I’ve never even been down to where he works. I don’t know the hazards he faces. I didn’t even know we needed the new gloves due to some near-misses. I was asked by the H&S team to buy them but I’d run out of budget for that quarter so I decided to delay for a few weeks to push it into next quarter.

I didn’t tell anyone due to the flak I’d get so I kept it under the radar until I could make the purchase. The procurement director would not have been happy otherwise.

I know these things are important and I’d hate to think that people would be hurt because of the decisions I’d made. Do I feel responsible for Terry’s injury? I guess in some way I do, but I get so many of these requests through and we’ve only got so much money. What’s the priority? When an accident happens all hell breaks loose anyway and money will get spent.”

Sound familiar?

Getting health and safety decisions right in a business is an incredibly complex undertaking. So complex, that when you sit with senior leaders and look at the dominoes in their organisation and the incidents they see, you can watch the steam escaping from their ears whilst they consider the implications of the culture on decision making amongst different departments.

In fact, it’s this point that illustrates how safety is just another facet of the business that’s being impacted by the difficulty of getting disparate departments and sites to make cohesive decisions. Instead of working in self-interested silos.

One of the things we’ve done very successfully in organisations to overcome some of these problems is to emphasise the importance of individual behaviour amongst those in the production areas of the business. And that whatever else goes on, whatever other decisions have been made – what can you do about that to stop yourself and your colleagues being hurt?

In the case of Terry, despite John’s decision, he still had a choice to make about whether he carried on with the job without the right gloves, or stopped it, or found another method. And in fact, another one of the things you can do to support this situation even further is help the managers in your production areas to recognise and encourage this ‘right to refuse’.

But how do you go beyond just dealing with the end of the chain of dominoes (Terry’s behaviour), and the middle of the chain of dominoes (Terry’s manager’s behaviour), to dealing practically with some of the more remote dominoes (John’s choices in the procurement department).

The key here is visibility

You must make John aware of the situations that occur in an ongoing, practical way, that makes it very clear exactly what the priorities are and the real-life consequences of not doing so.

Obviously this assumes that individuals are motivated to make the right decisions given the right information, but in my experience it’s very difficult for people to do otherwise once they start to recognise the human cost of the decisions that they’re a part of.

How do you address this visibility? Well, there are a raft of communication tools and processes out there but the most effective way we deal with it is through a social dashboard within our Engage software. This dashboard helps people make the situations they face more visible across the whole organisation – making very clear the consequences, and helping peers to promote the most important ones (via the use of a Facebook-like ‘thumbs up’ button).

As you’d expect, this greater visibility sends waves across an organisation by suddenly allowing everyone to see the impact of decision making on people’s safety in a way they just weren’t able to before. Instead of needing a dedicated team that physically drives a particular issue with statistics that only they have access to, Engage’s increased visibility means that issues take on a life of their own, with your organisation’s community deciding the importance. And through greater engagement, they do something about it.

So, alongside all the work you do dealing with the immediate behavioural dominoes – spare a thought for those remote ones. The ones you’ve had to park because of the complexities of working within an organisation. If you can effectively raise the visibility of those issues, you’ll make a more effective and longer-term difference.

You can find Mark Ormond on LinkedIn or read more about our engagement, safety and culture change services.

Late last night I sat in a small meeting room with the guys on the night shift from the shop floor of a large industrial site. They were being interviewed as part of the safety culture assessment we’re doing with their company.

This is always an interesting experience that’s never boring however tired you feel! There’s always a different dynamic with every group; individual characters who may not all work together and try quickly to establish who has the worst job. Or a well-established work group who know each other very well and play off on each others comments. Sometimes they’re very happy to have an hour off from the shift and arrive with their cup of tea and cheery smile. Other times they’ve had little communication about the assessment and may have been dragged off a job they need to get done and they’re quite a challenge to get calmed down and interested enough to talk.

Sometimes they can be challenging in another way as they insist this is all a waste of time because ”nothing ever changes however many surveys they do.” This is usually indicative of companies who start new programmes with gusto, but never get the workers involved and don’t get down to sorting out real problems on the shop floor. I’m always honest about the extent of my report and what I hope to achieve with the feedback session. But I stress to them that I can’t do that without their input and their honesty about reality of life on the coal face.

During the hour I go through our sixteen statements from the culture assessment and I listen to their comments and take notes. I don’t judge them and I don’t react with a defensive remark, however far fetched their understanding may be, as this is often a totally new experience for them. No one has ever listened to them or asked their opinion for anything before and they usually really enjoy it.

I do ask for clarification and recent examples when they tell me safety rules are broken to make the job easier, to see if what’s bothering them is current or historic as I need to understand how often this type of thing happens on this site. Over the course of the interviews you meet other groups from different shifts who may corroborate this finding or maybe don’t talk about it so strongly and you can gauge if this is endemic or local to a certain shift because of poor supervisory skills in their line managers. When you interview the line managers you see what pressures they’re under; trying to juggle safety and production and only finding time for one.

The interview process is vital in getting to the nitty gritty of issues behind life on site and without this side of our assessment we wouldn’t be half as enlightened on how to progress.

You can find Lizz Fields-Pattinson on LinkedIn or read more about our engagement, safety and culture change services.

The first situation involved a fellow cyclist crashing more or less in front of me on a cattle grid at the bottom of a fast descent. Roy (for that’s his name) was experiencing a lot of chest pain after the accident and was helicoptered off the fell (southern translation = hill) with suspected cracked ribs. In the event Roy’s injuries proved to be massive bruising all over the right side of his body and extensive abrasions and lacerations. The immediate cause was hard to establish because Roy’s a much more cautious descender than I and there was nothing unusual about his approach to the grid but it was a wet (and cold) day.

Learning points

• The informal cycling rabble on the day in question numbered 13. No one in matching strip, a hotch potch of road bikes, tourers and mountain bikes but everyone wore a helmet. Roy is covered in gouges. I try not to alienate my avid readership but only a numpty doesn’t wear a helmet on a bike. So there.
• I’m a somewhat overweight and, let’s face it, unfit cyclist. This means I’m a slow climber. The knock-on effect of this is that I view descents as a chance to catch up and to gain momentum on the inevitable ascent to follow. I’m a dashing and sporting descender demonstrating considerable flair and machine control as I do so. The problem was that presented with the crash scene I couldn’t stop (ever tried braking or changing course on a bike on a cattle grid?). I missed one of the group by a layer of Lycra, if there had been oncoming traffic I’d probably have hit it. This gives me cause to review my descent policy. What’s the worst accident that could happen…?
• Emergency preparedness. Roy fell off directly in front of a cardiac nurse who immediately took control. Therefore only cycle in a group featuring qualified medical staff. In fact the key point was that several of us had mobile phones and what’s more, they were charged too. I carry mine in case of breakdown but they were vital in this situation.
• As a cool and attractive individual I cycle in all black strip (yes I know, I want my money back) but unusually in Lancashire it was raining (southern translation = water miraculously falling from the sky) so I had my day-glow jacket on. In fact when the chopper arrived the road looked like a Tellytubby convention which made us easy to find. This was just as well given that we were in an area sparsely populated only by odd looking people playing banjos.

Situation two involved sailing lessons on Windermere last week. OK so I capsized on day one, er… capsized on day two and um… might have fallen out of the boat while it was moored on the jetty on day three but I didn’t fall out whilst underway like my better half. But I was wearing a life jacket (and a wetsuit).

This isn’t rocket science of course – a fairly brisk mental risk assessment would reveal any of the hazards discussed above but the important step is to take these possibilities seriously and to take steps accordingly.

Be prepared.

You can find Steve Beswick on LinkedIn or read more about our engagement, safety and culture change services.

I’d like to take this further because there are situations where people operating at the bottom of the triangle may be in blissful ignorance that anything’s wrong until that rare occasion when they do not get away with it. That’s when we get catapulted straight to the top of the triangle. And as a result we have a tragic outcome and the professionals are left scratching their heads wondering where did that come from?

Here’s a great, real-life example of this from when I worked on a behavioural safety database for a utility company client.

I was preparing for a meeting later that week by reviewing the behavioural data captured from SUSA discussions at my client’s business. I ran a breakdown of all safe vs unsafe behaviours across all their ‘headline’ behaviour categories. And there I spotted an unexpectedly high proportion of unsafe acts against ‘confined space working’.

Naturally I needed to find out more.

So I drilled down to look at  more specific ‘storyline’ behaviours and noticed that roughly half of ‘testing the atmosphere’ were showing as unsafe. In other words, people were entering confined spaces without following the correct procedure of using a gas monitor to check the atmosphere before entry.

How many injuries, incidents or near misses do you think had occurred in this organisation as a result of this type of behaviour?

Of course the answer is none at all. So on the face of it you might be forgiven for thinking that all was well in confined space entry.

The problem with this type of behaviour is that we almost always get away with it. But on that one occasion when we don’t, the result won’t be a near miss, minor or even serious injury – it jumps straight to the top of the triangle: someone dies. And by then it’s a bit too late to start learning important lessons.

Armed with this trend, I brought it to the attention of my client who initiated a major safety campaign to address the situation. Even more encouraging, a few months later I spotted something similar in a different client’s data, only this time my contact told me that he’d already seen the trend himself and had the situation in hand.

We’ve recently upgraded our well-proven Engage database to help you track exactly this kind of behavioural recording and tracking before accidents happen. Find out more in Steve’s free breakfast webinar on 17th May 2012 at 0800 BST.

How do you track the bottom of the accident triangle?

Do you stop at the near-miss level or have you found innovative ways of drilling down to the underlying behaviours? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below so that we all prevent people from getting seriously hurt or killed.

You can find Nick Wharton on LinkedIn or read more about our engagement, safety and culture change services.

But however well-intentioned your survey is, it still faces tough competition for your recipient’s time from productivity targets and miscommunication on your quest for honest feedback.

Su Black is Group HSEQ Manager at Swire Oilfield Services, the world’s largest supplier of specialist offshore cargo carrying units. With over 700 staff working at 36 sites in Europe, the Americas, West Africa and the Asian Pacific, their culture assessment survey called for careful planning:

“You’ve got to know where you are to know where you’re going. So we wanted to ask the right questions in the right way to understand what we do well, as well as what we could do better.”

Instead of racing ahead with their survey, Swire took a pragmatic approach that increased workforce involvement and gained a 90% response rate with honest and valuable feedback.

Survey success starts with how you ask your questions

How you pose the questions you need answering is a catalyst for better survey response rates from your workforce:

“People respond differently when they’re asked questions in their own tongue… with the right intonation and in terms they recognise.”

Swire had a translator convert their survey into Angolan and Brazilian Portuguese dialects, but this principle still applies in English. People working at the front-line of risk feel more comfortable if you communicate appropriately in terms that they identify with. Like using the correct expressions to describe their equipment or job roles for example, instead of formal language that sounds corporate and out-of-touch.

Swire’s local business unit leaders also had early involvement. They approved the survey before it was published which improved the questions and promoted local commitment too.

Putting extra effort into your choice of words and adding more layers of approval might feel superfluous, but it’s a pragmatic step to improve your likelihood of more relevant responses.

… where you ask your questions

People can’t respond if they don’t know or forget about your survey in the first place. This calls for well-placed and timely reminders with plenty of advanced notice on posters, in meetings and wherever else people congregate:

“We reminded people with a ‘launch countdown’ that grew more visible as the survey approached and tried to reduce the chance of people saying they weren’t aware of the deadline.”

By planning mitigation you actively address the risk of people not responding. It’s a sensible approach that sets realistic expectations when you design your survey awareness campaign. So your message is consistent and appeals to the maximum number of people:

“We helped people realise that the survey is their valuable chance to say what they really feel – anonymously and without redress.”

… and when you ask your questions

Pressure’s always on at the front-line, so how do you position your survey amongst people’s other commitments? Again, pragmatism is your ally:

“We made sure people had the time and access to equipment they needed, to capture as many people’s responses as possible.”

Especially when it comes to structuring your questions:

“…people are enthusiastic at the start of filling in a survey. So that’s where we put the questions about the highest priority issues… because other things would soon come along to steal their attention.”

By being tolerant and accommodating of a person’s many other responsibilities, you ensure as much quality feedback from them as possible within their constraints. Because a small amount of honest feedback is better than none.

Show local leadership

Origins of successful and lasting culture change come from leaders within your organisation. It’s the principle that should guide your strategy when the results of your survey arrive and you decide how to act on them:

“We look to supervisors and managers at our local business units to drive their own change.. and take ownership locally… because they know their staff best and we accept there are cultural issues that they understand more fully than we ever can at corporate level.”

Remember, just because you get a high percentage of responses doesn’t mean they’re all good ones. That’s why it helps to have culture change specialists make sense of your results, and gain you a balanced and realistic view of your organisation’s culture with support on how to move forward.

“Ultimately it’s up to you what you do with your survey results. It’s how you use them to drive change that’s most important. We’re keeping an open-mind and our survey means we’ve now got an educated outlook, informed by the people it affects.”

1. What leaders talk about (and how)

If my leader talks about output all the time, guess what I’ll try to give him? So the safety excellent leader has to talk about safety. But is this enough? Well no; because it’s how my leader talks about safety that’s important. How enthusiastic is this person? I’m reluctant to use the word passionate as it’s been completely devalued by ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair who was so passionate about so many things. Middle East peace envoy… you couldn’t make it up could you? He was very passionate about war in Iraq at one point too. However, the safety excellent manager must talk with passion about safety because if they aren’t then people will tell from their body language.

2. Conviction and standards

Safety is great when it’s convenient. The real test of commitment to safey from a leader is how they react when there’s a production vs safety decision or a finance vs safety decision or an anything vs safety decision.

“The night has a thousand eyes,
And a thousand eyes can’t help but see…”

When the chips are down everyone will watch how their leader reacts and if they jump the wrong way then the story of this lack of commitment will pass into organisational legend and be told and retold from father to son.

3. Their behaviour

Does my leader practice what they preach? The most obvious manifestation of this is the fireproof manager who doesn’t wear their PPE; followed closely by the manager who drives like a maniac and sadly the manager whose DIY exploits involve no safety considerations at all. Home behaviour is the best indicator of what’s really valued; the leader who’s safe at work but not at home frankly doesn’t get it. As a minimum their safe behaviour at work has to be immaculate. Leaders simply have to walk the talk as our trans-Atlantic cousins would have it.

How does my leader react to someone challenging his behaviour? This is really important, if people only feel that they can challenge the behaviour of their peers or subordinates then the organisation can hardly be described as a learning one.

4. Where they spend their time

People who are interested in golf spend their time on the golf course, safety is no different. Good leaders in safety will turn up for safety meetings instead of sending a deputy. They’ll exceed their monthly safety conversation target. They’ll take a personal interest in accident and incident investigation and closure of actions arising and so on.

In summary

People can tell what we really want by:

• What we talk about and how passionate we are
• The amount of commitment we demonstrate
• The standards we maintain
• How we behave ourselves
• Where we spend our time

You can find Steve Beswick on LinkedIn or read more about our engagement, safety and culture change services.

Let’s take the phrase on face value. It simply says that it’s possible to prevent all injuries; it doesn’t say by whom, it doesn’t imply that any individual or possibly even any specific group can prevent them all. It says injuries not accidents. We often end up having to rely on PPE, which in most cases does not prevent accidents but can protect us from injury when the accident does happen.

The statement says all injuries but do we really mean this? Many organisations state this then go on to qualify it by saying all serious/reportable/lost time etc. If not all, then which do we think cannot be prevented? I don’t recall coming across any injury reports that concluded that nothing could have been done to prevent them. The reality is that we generally find something after the event and the trick is recognising that missing control before the event. We all know this as risk assessment.

Which injuries are you prepared to accept?

If we’re left believing that we cannot prevent all injuries then we must accept that some will happen – but which ones? Actually there are some injuries that I am prepared to accept.

When I go climbing I absolutely believe that it’s possible to prevent a serious injury from a fall by choosing the appropriate route, protecting it adequately, using the right equipment and listening to what my body is telling me about how strong I feel: am I on form that day or feeling tired? Yet I am prepared to accept the inevitable scrapes and minor cuts on my knuckles and the backs of my hands resulting from jamming them into rough cracks in order to make progress. I could actually prevent minor cuts by not doing the activity, but I want to climb because I get a lot of benefit from it.

The only way to have zero risk is to remove the hazard and that isn’t always an option. Sometimes, removing the hazard is a lazy option that often results in the derogatory “‘elf & safety” comments we read about in the tabloid press. The approach of removing the hazard rather than controlling the risk is not only lazy but potentially harmful in that it prevents people from experiencing any degree of risk – this is particularly true in the case of children. This is often the choice of the risk averse – people who have a very low tolerance of risk and so do all they can to avoid it.

Exposure to some risk (even if it is a perceived risk) can be very beneficial as it helps us to tune-in to it, recognise it and deal with it when we have to. I don’t want to see my child get badly hurt but similarly I would be concerned if she goes all through her early development without some bumps and scrapes, especially if it had been achieved by restricting her exposure to genuine challenges that occasionally resulted in minor mishaps or near-misses.

It’s all about getting the balance right

This is achieved by being able to assess the risk, not the formal written process that we’re all familiar with, but being able to dynamically react to a changing situation and:

• Recognise the hazards
• Picture the consequences
• Weigh up the likelihood of it occurring

Then making the appropriate choices. Far too many people do not get the opportunity to go through this process. Even with a very hazardous activity such as driving we’re cocooned in a large metal box surrounded by an ever-increasing array of safety measures.

I practice this dynamic risk assessment every time I go climbing, skiing, mountain-biking and even running or walking on the fells. I would always encourage my daughter to participate in these adventure activities in the hope that when she’s faced with a hazard in the workplace or elsewhere in the environment, she’ll have developed the intuition through previous experiences to deal with them appropriately.

What do you think?

Are all injuries preventable? Should we really want to prevent all injuries? Is it right to try and remove all risk from our lives? These are huge questions and I’d really like to hear what you think.

You can find Nick Wharton on LinkedIn or read more about our engagement, safety and culture change services.

I believe this because point seven of our culture assessment process asks this question, or more specifically, it asks whether people take responsibility for their own safety or leave it to management. I’m in the middle of quite a few culture assessments and I can count on my hand the number of operatives, team members and shop floor workers who’ve said that it isn’t their responsibility.

OK, this is great isn’t it?

So what’s wrong with everyone knowing the right answer to this question? Surely we want people to know that safety is their own responsibility, because once they take responsibility then they take ownership of safety issues, making the workplace safer for everyone.

But there lies the problem. Responsibility in this context does not automatically lead to ownership. In fact, with the HASAWA 1974 message being drummed into people so intensely, it’s actually creating a large amount of apathy rather than ownership. Does it make sense that I have high scores for personal responsibility when I do a culture assessment and virtually no near misses reported in the workplace? Or high scores for personal responsibility and people ‘up in arms’ about the health and safety department not sorting out their problems quickly enough, despite the fact there is just one health and safety manager for a UK-wide manufacturing and service business, and he’s also responsible for occupational health?

Make responsibility meaningful and practical

The clue comes when you ask people what personal responsibility means to them and they give you a blank face. This tells you two things: firstly that they haven’t taken the time out (or been given the time out by managers) to consider and understand the importance of personal responsibility, and secondly that they don’t really know how to make this work practically.

Make the benefits of taking personal ownership real, help people understand the personal consequences of not doing so and give them some practical channels with which to do this. Only then will you start to see ‘true’ personal responsibility.

You can find Mark Ormond on LinkedIn or read more about our engagement, safety and culture change services.

When I thought about doing this I was really keen to talk about something that comes up time and again when I’m working with safety teams and that was obviously going to be an issue for other safety people out there. So I chose to hone in on induction sessions because I’ve experienced many of these during site visits to do safety culture assessments, and the experience has often made me want to cry. These sessions are apologetic in tone and whiz through the material to get you on your way as if we don’t really need to know what’s being said, just to go through the motions and sign the form. And god forbid you actually want to ask a question about anything, that just prolongs the time people are held up rather than clarifies how not to be squashed by a folklift on the way to the car park!

The purpose of the webinar was to show how important first impressions are when people arrive at your organisation. From the posters and certificates in reception to the desk staff who sign them in and of course the person who delivers the site induction. Choosing this person and training them is vital, I can’t stress this enough. If you have someone reading from a checklist who doesn’t belive a word of it themselves you’re not going to get people to understand your important safety messages. But you’re also giving visitors a lasting impression that it’s all just a compliance issue anyway. People who aren’t on side with health and safety will say things like “I know this seems over the top but we have to tell you about the walkways and to cross at the crossing ok?”. Yes information about walkways to car-parks must be imparted to your audience, but do the audience believe it’s a necessary thing for them to do? Probably not.

Twenty people registered for our free webinar from diverse industries and they made very interesting points about how they’ve improved their induction, by recognising how crucial it is to get people on board with how seriously health and safety is taken at their organisation. We spoke about the particular difficulties of inductions in the construction industry, as many staff feel that they’ve been through so many they fall asleep and don’t listen or care any more so set a poor example to new starters.

There are some very interesting problems faced by safety teams and as I say in the webinar the person you give the job of inductions to must be able to deal with the cynics and those senior people who don’t think they should have to sit through them. It’s their job to help everyone feel engaged with the material, that’s the only way to make your safety stick with them.

It’s not too late if you missed the webinar, you can watch it here. The sound quality could be better, but that’s probably just my voice which I’m told repeatedly here that I obviously like the sound of! Share your own induction experiences with me in the comments below.

You can find Lizz Fields-Pattinson on LinkedIn or read more about our engagement, safety and culture change services.

Inductees are a captive audience. Keen to impress and often impressionable they’re incredibly receptive to messages that are critical to fitting in at your company. This means you have a valuable opportunity to give people a clear model of expected behaviour.

Lizz Fields-Pattinson answers your questions in this popular webinar video originally broadcast on Friday 24th February.

Watch the video on the JOMC YouTube channel

You can find Lizz Fields-Pattinson on LinkedIn or read more about our engagement, safety and culture change services.