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October 1, 2013

Sometimes the rules don’t apply

There is a temptation to follow every health and safety rule in place in your company to the letter. But in some situations, it’s better to throw the rulebook away and make your own judgement

 

By Richard Byrne

 

 

A few years ago, a guy at the business I was working for managed to lower a vehicle onto his arm, such that his arm was crushed between the vehicle’s chassis and the jacking beam on the vehicle lift. It was nasty.

As the usual investigations were carried out, I remember having a rather interesting conversation with the ops director about the favoured outcome of the disciplinary (it got that far because he had quite obviously broken a basic safety rule).  

My view was (and still is) that disciplinary action is designed to help an individual modify their behaviour when what they did was for personal gain and the softly, softly approach of training, mentoring and development is less likely to work.  So the ops director was somewhat surprised when I told her that, in my opinion, we shouldn’t discipline the chap because he’d suffered a far worse punishment than we could ever give him.

After all, he’d had a two-tonne van resting on his arm for a minute or two, and because of that, he was probably going to be the safest worker we had in the future. Eventually my view prevailed and, as far as I know, he is a good safe worker with all his limbs still attached.

I recall a similar reaction recently when a company released a short film, which seemed to show one of their people working unsafely (they didn’t have their bump cap on).

There was uproar, when actually what had happened was that the person was working outside in the summer, there was no risk of anything hitting his head and because he was bending over to do the task in hand, his hard hat kept coming off – helped by the sweat on his forehead. Yes, a chinstrap would have resolved this, but sometimes you have to consider the embuggerance factor.

My view was: “Ok, the safe system of work might say ‘wear a hard hat’ (which was something that might need to change in this case) but the guy was risk aware, had done his own assessment and cleared it with his boss.”

That isn’t just a cover up statement; the guy genuinely was risk aware. He could tell you quite clearly what the rationale was behind his decision.  No action was taken against him either, as far as I know.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t discipline people for working unsafely, there is absolutely a time and place for it and — dare I say it — it is also linked to where you are in your safety culture development.  But if we are ever going to get to a point where people make conscious, informed, risk-based decisions (which to me is where we need to help people get to) we have to support them, instead of trying to control them every second of every day that they’re at work.
 
Have your say:  Do you agree with Richard or not? What approach would you take?

 

 

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Karen Meadows
Karen Meadows
11 years ago

A sensible approach Richard, I have no problem with someone assessing their own risk and not blindly following a risk assessment which is quite likely to change under differing circumstances anyway.(as in the hard had case above).

Linda
Linda
11 years ago

How refreshing! We try to take this approach with a point of work risk assessment and implementing a “just culture”; this would work very well if we did not have to work off site where management is not so enlightened; we continue to push for this more effective approach educating as we go – something we can all do. Well done Richard for raising this important point – now let’s start a movement!

Robert Randall
Robert Randall
11 years ago

Absolutely agree 100% with this approach. If we take the “rules” approach all the time rather than the risk based approach we will only succeed in confirming most people’s unwarranted opinion that all health and safety professionals are “jobsworths”. OK hard hats on building sites etc. is often a blanket rule because otherwise it is hard to enforce hard hats when they are needed if you take a risk based approach but it leads to ludicrous situations. For example railway workers simply inspecting the track walking along in a “green zone” in open country with no construction work within miles… Read more »