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Maybe 1% of businesses we come across are ready for something more than a fundamental approach to safety management. Most have not even given a formal and structured Safety Management System (SMS) a chance to work, or they have stripped down an already very basic SMS to nothing more than “window dressing” and then complained, “It did not work for us” after a year of trying. Somewhere along my career (I believe it all started with BBS Observation programs), we (the safety profession, encouraged by management) started to seek that “silver bullet” approach. I guess it reflects our everyday lives- we tend to seek easy paths. Just look at the pharmaceutical and wellness industries today. We seek a pill to cure our illness rather than a change to our lifestyles. So, I guess I should not be surprised by the desire to find the “silver bullet” in safety performance. But here is the dirty secret to the Infomercials and Consultants peddling their last “fixes everything with no effort” product… |
| Image Source: Muchina T.K |
Folks, there is NO EASY path to safety excellence. There is NO PILL to take to cure our ills in our attempt to manage safety. It simply boils down to developing a solid plan and then executing it. It is as simple as the PLAN→DO→CHECK→ACT model, which has existed for at least 50 years.
But this desire to try and utilize every shiny object that gets dangled in front of us MUST STOP! It is eroding our credibility as a profession and as safety professionals.
Is there room for new approaches and methodologies in managing our SMS/Safety Process? Absolutely; we must always be pushing for CONTINUOS IMPROVEMENTS. However, with that said,
99% of businesses have a tremendous opportunity to see significant improvements in BOTH safety numbers and culture by simply sticking to the FUNDAMENTALs and improving their performance within these FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS of a formal SMS. If we just look at our Incident Management element, we can find huge opportunities to improve the Reporting of incidents, the Investigation of the incidents, the Causal Analysis of the facts from the investigation, how we develop our corrective actions using the hierarchy of controls, and how we apply those actions and LEARNINGS to where ever they can bring us value.
I like to tell the SAFTENG clients who ask about a BBS Observation process…
If you are not capturing many First Aid and Nearmiss incidents, do you think the culture is mature enough to identify INDIVIDUALS’ unsafe acts?
Spend the next 2-3 years increasing the reporting of and formal investigation with a causal analysis of First Aid and Nearmiss incidents. This will build TRUST and CREDIBILITY with the workers by demonstrating that it is ALL about DOING THINGS BETTER and not solely about their Active Failures. This lays the groundwork for a successful launch of a BBS Observation process when the time comes. And all along this journey to increased incident reporting and formally analyzing these incidents, there will be hundreds of corrective actions that get put in place that will REDUCE RISK and improve both the safety numbers and the culture.
If we want to do something new/fancy, look at the opportunities with the Incident Management element. Look to improve reporting with incentives. Look to improve the investigation techniques used to gather the data for the causal analysis. Look to improve the causal analysis with a formal and proven methodology. This is what we can be working on that will reap us immense rewards in safety performance and culture. But these are FUNDAMENTALS within our SMS/Safety Process. No need for some “shiny” and expensive program that most are not even ready for.
