Tim Marsh thinks companies need to train managers in practical people skills so they can properly engage their workforce and take their safety cultures on to the next level.
In one of his recent novels, author and English football enthusiast Nick Hornby describes a phenomenon about Scottish football fans.1 The conundrum is this: why do Scottish fans behave so well abroad when they didn’t used to (think Wembley 1977!), yet still don’t necessarily after a domestic club game?
The answer is that at a World Cup some time ago, the Scottish team was knocked out by the odd goal in a great game against the favourites, Brazil. Honour was satisfied, and the next day’s papers were full of pictures of men in kilts dancing in fountains with pretty Brazilian women. The headlines were broadly ‘Scots party after heroic exit’, ‘hardly any arrests’, and ‘what a contrast with the English!’ Ever since, Scottish football fans have made an effort to behave well when abroad to show up the English!
The interesting point is that telling people to do something is possibly the worst way to get them to change. However, if they decide themselves that they want to change, then things can be very different.
This is especially important for safety practitioners, as I’d argue that the person factor is vital when considering the practicalities of moving beyond a compliant safety culture to a proactive one.
For example, in his recent article in SHP, ‘Beyond behaviour’,2 Martin Anderson gives a long list of points that organisations should focus on before considering a behavioural approach. The checklist states, among other things, that HAZOPs or other assessments should have been completed; a hierarchy of control should have been applied; operators should have been fully trained so they can trouble-shoot, should things go wrong; and lessons should have been learned by site, company and industry. He concludes that “behavioural interventions will only be successful and. . . should only be attempted” when companies have satisfied the above.
At first glance, this seems a sensible enough approach, but how many companies can actually say, with confidence, that everything on Anderson’s list has been addressed? And what about when we add people to the equation?
The position he advocates should systematically cover the field of human error and ergonomic analysis, which basically asks: “Can the employee work safely, or is the way the job is set up likely to cause unintentional error?” In addition, the behavioural perspective focuses on the issue that ‘technically they can but sometimes they don’t’. It’s a subtle but important distinction.
The Baker Report
I’d argue that one of the key lessons from the Baker report3 into the explosion in 2005 at BP’s Texas City refinery — don’t forget basic processes — could prove problematic here, if misunderstood. Clearly, it is possible that organisations may get side-tracked by numbers and statistics and place too much focus on the behavioural accidents they are suffering, rather than the process accidents they may have in the future.
Of course, the message on basic processes is 100-per-cent valid. Ultimately, however, companies can and should do both. Indeed, the main benefit of a behavioural root-cause analysis could be to aid any work on systems improvements by highlighting existing weaknesses from a separate angle. Moreover, without focusing sufficiently on individual issues, a company’s safety culture effectively has an upper limit.
The Parker and Hudson model
There is a behavioural model devised by Parker and Hudson,4 which describes five possible stages at which an organisation could find itself at in terms of its safety culture:
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