A Perspective on Safety Culture

Videos from a recent HSL/Cardinus event on safety culture and the Safety Climate Tool.

Building a mushroom culture in your organisation

I was given an important job at home recently.  My partner was going away for a few days and there were several instructions. There was something about washing. I vaguely recall a sentence which contained the words ‘Windows, AirWick, and Vacuum’.  There was also something about watering the tomatoes and specifically ‘don’t forget that if it’s warm, they’ll need watering twice a day, because the conservatory gets warm. We don’t want them wilting now, do we?’

No, we don’t.  

I admit my thoughts were on other things. Specifically, what time the Indian takeaway opened,  whether I could remember how the television control worked such was the length of time since I had last operated it, and whether the Ukraine-England match was on ITV or Sky Sports.

I should have listened more.

They say hindsight is a wonderful thing. I disagree. Hindsight is horrible. Hindsight is the bailiff who comes to take your dignity.  Hindsight is there to mock you.  Hindsight, to date, has never done anything good for me.  It’s the horrible little man cackling in the corner when your partner comes home, just as you’ve finished blasting the house with Shake ‘n’ Vac who says “Ah, well done, it smells lovely in here. How are the tomatoes doing?”

“Er…Well, they were fine yesterday.”

Cue a darkened face, a march to the conservatory and the pitiful sight of a hapless tomato vine, snaked across the floor, pointing an accusatory withered limb at me. I was then told, in no uncertain terms, that I am ‘inherently unreliable and incapable of learning’.

Guilty, M’lud. 

So, with that in mind, and with horticulture seemingly closed off as a career path, I thought I would offer my expertise to the world of business. So, here are my top tips as to how to build a truly unreliable organisation.

Forget Mindful leadership

It all starts at the top with the ‘Ostrich’ approach. Make sure that, as a board, you encourage the hiding away of bad news.  Even better, if you can, try to silence those who would seek to share it.  If you must share bad news, try to put it in a place where no one will see it. After all, you don’t want people getting upset. Why not have a ‘bad news’ corkboard in the boardroom so only the top people know that things aren’t great?  If you have your own ‘withered tomato vine’ in your organisation, don’t make any attempt to revive it, just shove it away somewhere and maybe it will go away.   If you are challenged by any members of staff, or given any compelling evidence that things are not perfect, simply put your fingers in your ears and shout “La la la I can’t hear you.”  Even better, stay out of everyone’s way in the first place. After all, you are far too busy and important to mingle with the workforce anyway. They just wouldn’t appreciate you trying, so why bother, right?

Don’t give me problems, give me solutions

If you have systems in place to capture near misses, accidents and other key performance data that might indicate a problem, stop collecting it. It will only upset you.  A near miss is the same as nothing happening anyway isn’t it? Plus, board meetings are busy enough so wasting precious time talking about stuff that ‘didn’t actually happen but nearly did and could happen in the future’ is not very productive at all. And it’s all about productivity. Similarly, if staff are coming to you with health and safety concerns, you should come right back at them. Why aren’t they just getting on with the job? Don’t they understand the importance of the bottom line? Honestly, it’s like you have to do everything yourself isn’t it? Remember, the best type of organisational culture is the mushroom culture: keep your staff in the dark and feed them s**t.

Make sure you take charge

When things go wrong, and they will, even in a perfect organisation like yours, it’s important that you are seen to be the pure specimen of management excellence that you are. So take charge and make sure everyone know that you are taking control. Even if there are voices screaming at you that there are people better qualified to handle the situation, ignore them. What do they know? Have they got an MBA? No. Do not, under any circumstances, devolve any responsibility to anyone else of a lower pay grade than you. The best people to manage a crisis are the ones who are paid the most. That much is obvious isn’t it? Besides, they will be plotting against you and will be after your job if you give them any responsibility.  Even if you get the decisions wrong and things get worse, don’t relent. Remember, great leadership in safety is about making decisions that you know are the right ones.

Culture shmulture

People make mistakes. Not everyone can be a perfect as you, that would be unfair and you are a fair leader. But while you should recognise that people will make mistakes, you should also ensure that they pay for them.  Don’t worry when people tell you that the reason the mistake happened was because of something nebulous like ‘the system’ or ‘the processes’ or ‘the culture’. Ignore them. People who make mistakes are a sign of weakness in your organisation, the proverbial limping gazelle, and they must be weeded out and criticised. Publically, if possible, just to make sure everyone gets the message that you are running a tight ship.  If anyone utters the words blame culture reply with a curt but authoritarian “It’s your fault we don’t have a no-blame culture.”

Learning orientation

Look, you’ve got your MBA and you are pretty sure that someone in the organisation is providing a half-day risk assessment course, or is it a full-day? Who knows. The point is, you are doing everything you can to reduce the risks to your staff. Work is sometimes dangerous isn’t it? We can’t all live in a bubble. Got to expect a few accidents and sick days.  What you certainly want to avoid is getting dragged into discussions about ‘learning from incidents’.  Aren’t the HR department in charge of learning anyway? Shouldn’t they be doing this stuff? Maybe they need a root-and-branch review of their effectiveness.  The only learning that needs to occur when things go wrong is that the people involved don’t do it again. If they haven’t followed the processes, that’s their fault isn’t it? And forget all this stuff about investing in developing your employee’s competencies: people should be competent at their job and if the job evolves, they should evolve with it shouldn’t they. After all, you have evolved into a fine leader of people. You don’t even wear a tie on Friday’s, what more can you do?

If you would like a more serious look at building High Reliability Organisations you can find an article here

 http://www.bjhcm.co.uk/cgi-bin/go.pl/library/article.cgi?uid=100559;article=BJHCM_19_9_446_448

Or get in touch, and I’ll put you in contact with one of HSL’s Human Factors team.

P.S. What I also learned from this episode: (1) All the AirWick fragrance in the world won’t sustain a tomato plant (2) England aren’t going to win the World Cup in my lifetime.

Did you send me a postcard?

Or ‘Was the weather nice?’, or, my favourite, ‘Have a nice time did you?’

If you’ve heard one of these phrases, and you haven’t recently returned from a fortnight in the Seychelles, you’ve probably wanted to wish pestilence on the person who said it. It’s happened to us all. It happened to me recently, in a shopping centre. It will happen to you again. It’s the third certainty of life, along with death and taxes.

The dreaded trip.

That horrible moment when you realise that you have misjudged the height or, in my case, the presence of a step and rather than your foot meeting a solid surface it meets air or it meets the lip of the step you should be standing on.  Time slows, just enough for you to appreciate the faces watching you. Take a good look.  There will be teenagers and an attractive member of the opposite sex. There always is.  Your brain whirs into action as it tries to compute the best way of keeping you upright.  It took billions of years of evolution to get us walking on two feet. But you, you’ve managed to undo that in seconds. You are taking an evolutionary step back in time, my friend. You are going down. You will walk on all fours again. 

If you are lucky, you might not fall. You might just do a forward stumble, and like some Charleston dancer, your feet will start to move double time as they try to catch the rest of your body. You might just make it. If that is the case, well done to you.  Great recovery.  You have another problem now: whether to look around you and stare angrily at the offending step, or whether you pretend nothing has happened.  Most people go for the second option, often accompanied with what’s known as the ‘speed up’.  Yep, if you trip, but don’t quite fall, the best thing to do is speed up. This helps (a) give the impression that you are in a serious rush, hence the reason why you tripped in the first place (b) it gets you away from the sniggering teenagers as quickly as possible.  Have a look at the video below, to see what I mean. How many people look back at what they tripped on? I counted one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap-22FjgoE4

There is a serious side though. Did you know that over 10,000 people suffer a major injury as a result of a slip or a trip in workplaces each year? Or that the latest HSE statistics (below) show that around 1,000,000 workers reported a slip or a trip in the workplace last year (Graph from http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causinj/kinds-of-accident.htm)

Here at HSL, we have a whole team dedicated to undertaking research and helping to reduce the risks of slipping, tripping and falling.  Much of the work that the team has undertaken has been done for HSE and has resulted in freely-available guidance and toolkits such as those found here (http://www.hse.gov.uk/shatteredlives/tools.htm).  Some of it has been undertaken for other customers who are experiencing high numbers of accidents and who want help in trying to understand why.  

Some of the work the team has undertaken over the last few years has had a major impact on the way in which organisations minimise their risks. From helping to develop technical guidance for hospital flooring, to advising on which footwear is appropriate for different environments (one anti-slip shoe might be great on an oil-rig, but hopeless in a bakery environment), the team are undertaking research which is helping to prevent accidents and save lives. 

Their research involves aspects you perhaps wouldn’t think about when talking about slipping, tripping or falling and, like most of the work at HSL, it needs an appreciation of human factors. Reducing accidents and fatalities through slips, trips and falls is about choosing the right flooring and footwear for the right environment. But it’s also about using the right cleaning regime, it’s about understanding human behaviour. It’s about signage, lighting, the impact of weather. It’s about safety culture, workplace layout and using common sense in the design of the work environment.

Getting the right information is critical if you want to prevent slips, trips and falls (and you can prevent them). The team have developed two training courses:

• A one-day course on slips, trips and falls
• A half-day course on assessing stair falls risk, this includes some simple tools developed by HSL for assessing stairs.

If you want to get in touch with the team, you can find two key members on LinkedIn (Rob Shaw and Kevin Hallas).

In the meantime, if you do happen to trip up, just remember, it really can happen to anyone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FixSd3DVcjY