Tony Roscoe, Director at Implexis Consulting, discusses what problems may arise from the ‘more is better’ approach.
We are working with an organisation to modernise their behavioural safety programme and they have everything, in fact even my client said, “we have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at them” (meaning their staff).
This idea that more is ‘better’ is something that we come across a lot! There are two major problems with this approach and while we are looking at these problems, we’d like you to relate them to your organisation and see how much they apply.
How many processes in your organisation do you have where the only measure of success is ‘did they complete the paperwork’?
I have seen so many variations on this theme, they usually include near-miss reporting, observations, hazard spotting etc. etc. etc.
We start off with these systems with the best of intentions, introducing them to staff as the new ‘silver bullet’ that is going to radically change our health and safety culture. Staff will often join in and start completing the required paperwork and send it off. Managers then end up with a list of issues as long as their arm and with the best of intentions, they try to fix them, but this takes some time. For the person who completed the form, as far as they know the issue they raised has been forgotten, so they stop completing forms. In psychology, this is called latency and the longer the time between completing an action and getting a response, then the less likely it is that they will perform that action again.
What the company sees is a reduction in reports and the most common response to this?…….you guessed it, a target.
So, all we are now measuring is the number of pieces of paper people are filling in and whether they filled in enough to hit their target. We get what we measure, filled in pieces of paper that achieve nothing.
Obviously, what we need to do is remove the target and look at how we reduce the latency. The best way to do this is to get the staff themselves involved in the solution. This in itself becomes a filtration process, what can they fix themselves, what can they fix with their team and what can they fix with technical help? Only the issues that get through these filters go onto the manager’s list and this then becomes about how we feedback on longer term projects.
We get what we measure, therefore we need to measure outcomes not inputs.
The problem with adding more and more piecemeal is that we end up with lots of different rules, regulations and tools that don’t work together, often contradict each other and has the opposite to the desired effect of helping to improve our safety culture.
When we introduce a new tool or system, we have to think about how it interacts with what we already have in place and of course, how are we going to measure the outputs?
Going back to our client who have thrown everything at their staff, they unfortunately have fallen into this trap. They have Gemba walks, observations, hazard spotting, near-miss reporting etc. all of which are different systems with a huge amount of cross-over. In their own behavioural safety programme, their Gemba walks are described as “go out and observe” and then they describe their observations in exactly the same way.
I understand both Gemba walks (as a lean practitioner) and observations (as a behavioural psychologist), yet their description and instructions in the course left me baffled as to the difference (apart from the paperwork completed, because that’s all we measure).
Taking away the kitchen sink & everything else
Whenever I give any new tool to a client, I ask them to apply three simple questions; “What would you keep?”, “What would you change?” and “What would you remove?”. This is a simple process, but you start to develop a tool that is not only suitable for the organisation, it interacts with the tools and process that are currently in place and you gain some ownership of the tool that the organisation creates.
The bravest things though in health and safety is to take something away, especially when that thing has become a safety net, but you have to ask if it is helping or hurting the culture.
Organisations can often fall into a trap that we call System Obsessed. This is when we are measuring those inputs and pushing people to fill in paperwork of which the only value is hitting a target.
In order to get out of this we have to strip away the stuff Roscoe Bizzell Model 2014 that is making us system obsessed and that can feel like a very scary place to be. The one thing though that I always remind my clients is that doing more of the same will get them no further and in fact it will just drive the culture further into the dead-end of a system obsessed culture.
Three things to take away:
