Imagine That by Ray Thomas

 

It has long been considered inadequate for companies to limit their safety commitments to ensuring all the compliance boxes are ticked to satisfy the demands of OHS regulators.

 

Companies must also consider proactively what might go wrong and put steps in place to stop it from happening.

 

During a recent visit to Australia, internationally recognised safety academic Patrick Hudson told his audiences that safety wasn’t rocket science: it was much harder.

 

During an earlier visit to Australia in 2001, he had noted that while organisations could plan for most situations, it was necessary to do more than plan because it was impossible to think of everything. Systems needed to be constructed that would handle the unexpected.

 

Hudson said that people running effective management systems assume they have it wrong, that problems have been missed and that plans in place to fix the problems are inadequate. They don’t wait to see if their systems work; they go back and check and check again.

For many decades, companies have been urged to identify safety hazards and put in place measures to minimise their potential to cause harm. But as Professor Andrew Hopkinsof the Australian National University told National Safety, it’s not that simple.

 

Hopkins believes that employers not only have to devote resources to managing safety, but also to understanding that more hazardous and more complex situations require more resources.

 

Hopkins uses the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to illustrate his point. He says that BP, Transocean and Halliburton needed to put enormous resources into carrying out risk assessments before their oil-drilling project went ahead. But these risk assessments were not done as thoroughly and imaginatively as they should have been.

 

“You have to imagine what might go wrong and plan for it, and that was not done,” he says.

 

Already, there have been allegations that cost imperatives played a role in the disaster – a suggestion that has also been put forward as investigations continue into the recent grounding of the Shen Neng 1 on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.

 

The Chinese coal carrier went aground on Easter Saturday.

 

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is investigating the incident, is focusing on the ship’s safety and fatigue management systems, among other issues.

Freehills’ senior associate Steve Bell has told National Safety there will always be pressure to compromise on health andsafety. “It is nearly always easier to do things quickly andwithout thought or planning,” he says, “but the law requires something more.”

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Bell says that at the heart of every OHS case that goes before the courts, there is not only a general failure to manage risk but also a decision to take a short-cut.

 

He says that Australian workers want to do things well and quickly in their enthusiasm to meet management targets but, in doing so, they unknowingly take risks. For employers, pulling these employees back from well-intentioned haste can be difficult.

 

Bell notes, however, that this becomes easier when employees understand that what they are doing puts their health and safety – and that of other employees – at risk.

In his 2001 visit to Australia, Hudson referred to safety measures put in place after the 1988 oil and gas disaster at the Piper Alpha platform in the North Sea operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Ltd, in which 167 people were killed.

 

The incident led to recommendations for change in the oil and gas industry in general. In response to these recommendations, Shell, for example, re-structured its safety commitment around a safety case approach, which identified hazards and assessed how big they were, how they were being controlled and what to do when the controls failed.

 

This approach has led to more substantive discussions about how hazards should be controlled. Hudson says a “big philosophical argument” developed, with half the engineers saying, “We’ve controlled it; it’s fixed; it won’t happen again” but the other half saying, “Hang on, it’s not like that: things keep going wrong. Let’s assume that whatever perfect control we have will turn imperfect in the face of reality.”

 

Hudson says constructing a safety case is “like falling off a log” for executives with a thorough understanding of their businesses. He points out that Shell broke down its business into two categories: assets; and the processes that interact with assets. Once you have done that, Hudson says, “It really becomes manageable”.

 

Small business can also take advantage of safety case. Hudson notes that small organisations with limited operations are easier to manage and urges similar small operations to cooperate to keep costs under control. “You don’t compete at this level: you do it together. So instead of buying a safety system off the shelf, you develop your own.”

Creating such a culture “must be the CEO’s pet project”, Hudson says. That doesn’t mean that the CEO has to do everything but he or she has to find a champion who believes in it, is dedicated to it and can tough it out when the going gets hard.

Everyone must realise that creating a safety culture is going to be a bumpy ride. “You are going to discover things that you really didn’t want to know,” he says.

 

The workforce must be encouraged to report near misses and the CEO should have the attitude of “I don’t want to hear about the accidents; I want to hear about the near misses.”

 

He says that when an employee reports a near miss, it’s important to say, “Fantastic: do you have any more?” To facilitate reporting, different parts of the organisation could compete on the number and quality of incidents they report.

 

For all companies, learning from every incidents, large or small, is extremely important – and if a company hasn’t experienced any incidents of its own from which to learn, it’s important that someone from that company goes out and finds one that has happened in a similar organisation.

 

To analyse incidents effectively, the reporting system has to be easy to use and must be open-ended and impersonal so that it doesn’t ‘point fingers’ at people.

 

Hudson stresses, however, that while reporting should be confidential, it should not be anonymous, so that “you can go back and ask people what really happened”.

 

Overall, the safety culture must be just, Hudson notes. When lines are being drawn about what is acceptable, they should not be sent down from management on high; they should be drawn by the people who are most likely to cross them. Hudson says that once this is done, everyone tends to come on board naturally.

Bell believes safety has to be part of the thinking that goes into managing all sorts of risks associated with work.

 

It can’t be bolted onto other thinking; this encourages employees to roll their eyes and say, “Not another OHS problem we have to get over”.

 

“If you approach health and safety in isolation, it will be seen as just another thing that has to be done,” he says.

 

“But if you build it in and train people to understand that managing risk is part of the process for planning work, and managing health and safety is part of that process of managing risk, you start to break down some of those barriers.”

 

Bell says that companies should take action against employees who fail to fulfil their safety obligations, and notes that those companies that are best at managing safety have a culture of not accepting “nearly good enough”. “They have a culture of compliance with internal procedures and take steps against those who don’t comply with these policies,” he says.

But before employees are penalised, management commitment must be considered. Human factors expert Dr Matthew Thomas of the University of South Australia tells National Safety that though the mantra in Australian workplaces often emphasises top-level commitment to safety, messages from senior management can be very different.

“They can very subtly try to promote work practices that aren’t inherently safe or do not effectively manage the risks associated with whatever activity is taking place,” Bell says.

 

Commitment means more than talking the talk, he adds – you must also take action. “Unless you believe it in your heart, you are going to send out mixed messages.”

 

It must be remembered, however, that humans share the vulnerability of being human. Thomas says everyone is vulnerable to error, and points to the influence of stress in channelling workers’ attention and biasing decision-making.

 

“No-one, from the CEO to the safety rep on the shop floor, is driven by the same things,” he says. “[And] we need to be mindful of the effects of fatigue, drugs or alcohol, or a fight at home”.

 

When it comes to managing the complexities of safety, remember to let your mind go free and think outside the box.