executives – Page 62 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Nightclub fires and evacuations

Mainstream press around the world reported on the fire in a Russian nightclub over the weekend in which 100 people were killed. One report says the nightclub owner has been arrested quotes the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as saying

“All that has happened can only be described as a crime….I think this is absolutely clear….You have noted that a criminal investigation has been launched. This is not a premeditated crime, but that does not reduce the gravity of the consequences. A huge number of people were killed.”

The fire reportedly started when stage pyrotechnics set fire to the ceiling.

Some readers, particularly in the United States would see distinct similarities with the February 20 2003 in which 100 people were killed and over 200 injured. A fire, also started by stage pyrotechnics, occurred in the Station nightclub on Rhode Island. That whole event was captured on video. The band’s tour manager who started the pyrotechnics, Daniel Biechele, was charged with 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter, pleaded guilty and served 4 years of a 15 year jail sentence.

The nightclub owners did not contest their charges and received similar sentences to Biechele. Civil penalties added up to around $US175 million.

Given that the Station fire was six years ago, it is hard to understand why any nightclub would even consider using such stage pyrotechnics.

Other nightclub fires should not be forgotten although they received less coverage in the Western media. Those with which SafetyAtWorkBlog is familiar include the 2002 fires in the Caracas nightclub, La Guajira where 47 people died, mainly from smoke inhalation. Rumours had it that the nightclub had exceeded its allowable client limit. Investigations showed that fire exits were not clear and the fire extinguishers were inoperative.

Although there are several incidents going back to the 1970s one that received a huge amount of attention was the December 30 2004 fire in the Republica Cromagnon nightclub in Buenos Aires. (The Wikipedia entry for this incident has a very good list of similar incidents)

The Republica Cromagnon nightclub had several of its doors shut with wire or padlocks. The nightclub had 4,000 patrons in a premises licensed for 1,100. Initial reports said that 715 people were injured and over 190 died from a fire that was started by a flare.

The incident generate three days of rioting and street protests of thousands of people, many were relatives of the dead.

In this case, not only were the club’s owners jailed on murder charges but city building inspectors and police officers were charged with manslaughter and corruption. The inspectors allowed the nightclub to operate with inadequate safety standards. The police accepted bribes from the owners and did not report the overcrowding or use of flares.

In November 2005, the mayor Buenos Aires, Anibal Ibarra, was suspended from office after the legislature voted to impeach him over issues related to the Republica Cromagnon fire.

Managing safety in nightclubs is a complex business as the industry overlaps many jurisdictional areas from workplace safety to building design to security to emergency response. As the world moves towards the main season of celebrations with Christmas, New Year and others it is worth considering some of the more useful OHS guidelines for nightclub operation, even though such measures should have been considered well before now.

Going from the violations related to the Rhode Island fire by OSHA it would be expected for a nightclub owner to

Remove any highly flammable materials from the interior of the structure
Make sure that exit doors are visible at all times
have a written emergency action plan
have a written fire prevention plan
nominate and train staff to assist in a safe and orderly evacuation of other employees
review fire hazards with employees.

Seattle has a nightclub patron safety handout.

One guide from Virginia specifically references the Station nightclub fire.

The Health and Safety Executive has a guide to assessing risks in nightclubs as well as general OHS advice for the hospitality and leisure industries.

WorkSafe Victoria has a guide on crowd control which may also be useful

Many local jurisdictions have guidelines, or the industry itself has developed guidelines, to assist in the management of nightclub crowds. SafetyAtWorkBlog urges owners and staff to undertake reviews prior to peak times.

Kevin Jones

HSE executive talks about OHS Leadership

At the launch of a new guidance for higher education students in late November 2009, Judith Hackett CBE, chair of the Health & Safety Executive spoke at length on a range of interesting matters but one section on leadership was particularly interesting:

“Strong leadership, engagement and a common sense approach are key to effective health and safety in any and every organisation. Leadership is fundamental because it sets the tone for whether health and safety happens or not, and how it happens. The type of health and safety culture that exists in organisations will be decided by how leaders manage it.

If they see that it makes good business sense this will lead to openness and involvement. Leaders will be seen to care about the people they employ and manage. But if, on the other hand leaders see health and safety as being all about bureaucracy, paperwork and procedures, this is likely to lead to health and safety being seen as a chore, a burden and therefore not properly and appropriately addressed.”

Kevin Jones

Big fine for Queensland Rail – big risks in rail

Almost two years ago, two rail workers died in Queensland. According to the official report into the incident:

“At approximately 1056 on Friday 7 December 2007, two QR [Queensland Rail] Infrastructure Services Group (ISG) track workers were fatally injured as a consequence of being struck by a track machine (train) at Mindi, approximately 130 kilometres south-west of Mackay.

The collision occurred when Track Machine MMA59, in the process of conducting track resurfacing work on the Down line at Mindi, commenced a routine reversing movement.

During the process, two QR Systems Maintenance personnel, working on the same track and behind the track machine, were struck and fatally injured by this track machine.

Analysis of evidence and conditions surrounding the accident revealed:

An overall lack of compliance with elements of the QR SMS at the Mindi site; and

Inadequate communication and coordination between workgroups at the Mindi site.”

On 26 November 2009, Queensland Rail was fined $A650,000 over the deaths. The fine is only $A100,000 below the maximum fine applicable. According to a media release about the fine:

“The Workplace Health and Safety Queensland investigation found that QR’s safety management systems were inadequate for managing the separation of workers and plant, particularly when both were within the same section of track between signals.

It also found that QR knew the systems were inadequate and not working because it had been highlighted to management in a series of audits.”

Not only were Queensland Rail’s safety management systems inadequate, Queensland Rail knew they were inadequate because a series of audits had told it so.

Railway in Australia and elsewhere is one of the most regulated industries. It is also one of the industries with the most prescriptive set of rules. It is a complicated business but one where hazards are known and systems are in place to control these hazards.

The extent of QR’s failure to operate safely can be illustrated by some of the many recommendations made in 2008 by Queensland Transport:

The necessity for consistent and effective Worksite Safety Briefings by ISG personnel;

Preconditions to the reversal of vehicles in accordance with QR safeworking requirements;

Responsibilities and training syllabi for ISG Resurfacing personnel;

The necessity for pre-departure safety checks on ISG trains;

Provision of safe separation and segregation between ISG track workers and trains;

ISG SMS compliance monitoring, at the local level;

Fatigue management within QR, and in particular ISG rostering;

Management of the perceived relationship between ISG and Network Control;

Awareness of the priority of safety over commercial pressures by remote ISG staff;

Distribution of safety communications and documents within QR;

Representation for relevant stakeholders in operational change management processes;

Risk and change management training for ISG operational personnel;

Safety risks presented to ISG through the permanent coupling of track machines;

The safety value to QR of an enhanced and transparent reporting system;

The management of ISG district staff relationship issues; and

ISG and Network Access radio protocol compliance monitoring.

Many elements are familiar to other investigations in rail and other industries – fatigue, on-site communication, training, segregation, document control and distribution, local compliance enforcement, transparency in reporting…..

On 10 September 2008, the QR CEO Lance Hockridge said:

“When I arrived in November 2007, I found an organisation with a safety record that was improving but not what it should be. Only three weeks later we had a very tragic reminder of this when work colleagues Jamie Adams and Gary Watkins were killed at Mindi.

“Organisations hoping to achieve meaningful change must firstly be honest with themselves – we need to confront this reality and make the changes required.”

Queensland Rail did not face the reality of problems identified by safety auditors and two workers died.

The news of the record fine came at a time when the ownership of Victoria’s metropolitan rail network has changed from Connex to Metro. Victoria has a stressed rail service but has managed to avoid the controversy of Queensland Rail and RailCorp in New South Wales but this has been through luck rather than good management. The Victorian Government, and particularly the Transport Minister, Lynne Kosky, needs to read the Waterfall Inquiry report and the Queensland Mindi report to understand the personal, economic and political cost of not having a tightly managed, functional rail safety regime. Having been in power for just over 10 years, this government now owns all the Victorian problems and must account to the electorate for not fixing them.

The political risk was summarized in an editorial in The Age on 30 November 2009

“In September, a Senate report into federal funding of public transport found Melbourne’s network was badly managed in comparison with Perth’s government-operated system. A key problem was lack of accountability: it was unclear who was in charge. The consequences of the lack of an overarching transit authority to oversee the whole system are clear…..

New operators of trains and trams in new livery will struggle to deliver acceptable service unless the Government makes good its past neglect of infrastructure.”

The fact that the Victorian rail system is being privately operated will not be an acceptable shield when the first passenger train crashes with a jam-packed peak hour cargo.

Kevin Jones

Understanding the new world of the CEO

OHS professionals are very keen on advocating a change in workplace culture as a base requirement for safety improvements. They also regularly quote the need for “top-down” leadership (however that is defined) to generate the cultural change.

SafetyAtWorkBlog has already may some comments about leadership today but an interesting article has been brought to our attention that, although it doesn’t discuss safety, talks about how the role of chief executive officers over the last decade and some of the agents of change.

The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology released an article on 23 November 2009 concerning the selection of CEOs and succession planning. The article says that the days of the “imperial CEO” has gone as (US) legislation has required a the process of complaisance to be shared. Perhaps there really is “no I in TEAM”.

Randall Cheloha summarises the variety of forces and obligations that now must be considered when running a corporation. Occupational Safety is not included but could have been.

“There are more constituencies to satisfy. In addition to major shareholders, financial analysts, employees and former executives, some companies, particularly those that received large government bailouts, have directly or indirectly been asked to change directors and add new players to their boards to represent the new constituencies, including the federal government and unions.”

Not only have the constituencies multiplied but the demands have changed as well. Many of the groups suddenly have the ear of the executives and realize from past experience that the window of opportunity may not last. The risk is that they go in too hard and too fast and create their own resistance.

Australian corporations had a habit of always looking overseas for CEOs, implying that the local executive pool was deficient. That has changed recently where well-qualified local candidates are getting serious consideration and, some, appointments. The SIOP article refers to the weakening of corporate culture by feeling the need to look outside for candidates. Cultural continuity is equally valid and safety is part of that.

Hopefully the days of CEOs taking pride in nicknames such as “toecutter” or “the axe” have gone the way of “razor gangs”.

There is the risk of “cronyism” with internal CEO appointments but that risk is minimised if the cultural work on the company has already been undertaken.

Australian conferences have recently been pushing for “CEO days” where CEOs talk about the importance of safety and culture in their organisations. To some extent, the safety professionals in the audience are the wrong audience. Perhaps it is the CEO conferences that need to hear from a safety spokesperson who can use bad OHS management as a case study of how executive decisions created a toxic culture that led to injury and death. Sadly, such case studies are not hard to find.

Kevin Jones

Leadership – research, mental health and what true leadership is.

Scandinavia produces some of the best research into OHS issues. However, due to the social structure of Scandinavian countries, the research has little direct and practical application outside the region. The research is best taken conceptually as it will need to be evaluated closely to determine local applicability.

(TIP: whenever an OHS researcher says “recent Scandinavian studies show….” remind the researcher which country they are in and ask them to explain the practical application in the local context)

In early 2009, there was a bit of media attention about research that found, according to researcher Anna Nyberg

“Enhancing managers’ skills – regarding providing employees with information, support, power in relation to responsibilities, clarity in expectations, and feedback – could have important stress-reducing effects on employees and enhance the health at workplaces.”

In October 2009 Anna Nyberg’s thesis on the issue was released. According to the abstract to her thesis

“The overall aim of this thesis was to explore the relationship between managerial leadership on the one hand and stress, health, and other health related outcomes among employees on the other.”

Nyberg’s thesis details the needs for some adjustments in the research to allow for “staff category, labour market sector, job insecurity, marital status, satisfaction with life in general, and biological risk factors for cardiovascular disease.” These adjustments are important to remember when reading any of the media statements about Nyberg’s research.

There were five studies within the thesis and, according to the abstract, they found the following:

“Attentive managerial leadership was found to be significantly related to the employees’ perceived stress, age-adjusted self-rated health and sickness absence due to overstrain or fatigue in a multi-national company.”

“Autocratic and Malevolent leadership [in Sweden, Poland, and Italy] aggregated to the organizational level were found to be related to poorer individual ratings of vitality…. Self-centred leadership … was related to poor employee mental health, vitality, and behavioural stress after these adjustments.”

“… significant associations in the expected directions between Inspirational leadership, Autocratic leadership, Integrity, and Team-integrating leadership on the one hand and self-reported sickness absence among employees on the other in SLOSH, a nationally representative sample of the Swedish working population.”

“… significant associations were found between Dictatorial leadership and lack of Positive leadership on the one hand, and long-lasting stress, emotional exhaustion, deteriorated SRH [self-reported general health], and the risk of leaving the workplace due to poor health or for unemployment on the other hand.”

“In the fifth study…a dose-response relationship between positive aspects of managerial leadership and a lower incidence of hard end-point ischemic heart disease among employees was observed.”

But what can be done about the negative affects of poor leadership on health, safety and wellbeing? The thesis is unclear on this, other than identifying pathways for further research in this area.

The SafetyAtWorkBlog recommendations, based on our experience, are below

Carefully assess any training provider or business adviser who offers leadership training.
Ask for evidence of successful results in the improvement of worker health and wellbeing, not just a list of client recommendations.
Look beyond the MBA in selecting senior executives. If you expect executives to establish and foster a positive workplace culture, they need to have to be able to understand people as well as balance sheets.
Remember that the issue of leadership as a management skill is still being investigated, researched and refined. It is not a mature science and may never be, so do not rely solely on these skills.
Some say that leadership cannot be taught and cannot be learned. Some say that leadership, as spruiked currently, is not leadership, only good management. Leadership only appears in times of crisis and manifests in response to critical need, not in response to day-to-day matters.

This last point needs a reference – page xiii of “Seventh Journey” by Earl de Blonville

“… leadership cannot be taught. If it is being taught, it may just be management, rebadged at a higher price. The second discovery was that leadership is not about the leader, which will confound those with a needy ego. There were two more things that revealed themselves to me: leadership is all about paradox, which is why it resists attempts to tame it into a curriculum, and at its core leadership is lonely, requiring the strength that could only come from a grasp of its intrinsic paradox.”

Kevin Jones

OHS must raise its profile in the debate of directors’ liability and accountability

The global financial crisis has highlighted many business management issues. Probably one of the most contentious is executive remuneration which is based on the question “should executives receive performance bonuses when the company is not performing well, ie. not returning profits to shareholders?” But underpinning even this question is one of accountability.

Business leaders, commentators, lawyers and politicians are comfortable in discussing financial and corporate accountability but extend that discussion to other areas of business and they respond with a confused stare or outright dismissal of the proposal.

This week, the Australian Financial Review newspaper ran a page one story: “Revealed: directors face harsher liability penalties.” [None of the AFR articles are freely accessible online] The article revolved around Australian Government plans to “break an impasse between state governments over proposals to harmonise conflicting commonwealth and state directors’ liability laws.”

As should not be surprising from a business paper, the discussion centred on financial and corporate governance issues but OHS obligations were floating behind all of the business-speak. This was particularly obvious with this paragraph:

“Federal ministers have expressed concerns that onerous directors’ liability rules increase the cost of directors’ insurance and discourage them from taking board seats.”

This paragraph shows that the first response to any corporate trouble is insurance. This cowardly response is short-sighted and contributes to the unnecessary growth in litigation which the directors regularly complain and which increases the cost of liability insurance premiums.

It is also an acknowledgement that the introduction of new rules does not address the behaviour intended, it leads to investigating ways of avoiding accountability for one’s actions.

The second point of that paragraph is that people are more likely to refuse to participate than to undertake sufficient education that would allow them to perform the job better and with less risk. The response should not be “it’s too risky so I won’t do it” but “let’s get better informed so that my decisions are more valid and the risk is reduced”.

It is clear that lawyers are running the agenda when semantics enter the argument. The AFR article goes one to say “there are fears about confusion over the distinction between executive and non-executive directors”. This confusion comes from the main concern of directors being to cover one’s arse rather than focusing on the job at hand and the corporate purpose.

The AFR article makes no mention of OHS but the accompanying article “Duty weighs heavily” by reporters James Eyers and Annabel Hepworth does. Eyers and Hepworth look back through several decades of law reform investigations and reviews to show the history of similar director concerns.

But it is a more recent statistic that is the nub of the article. A Treasurysurvey of directors from top Australian listed companies, in conjunction with the Australian Institute of Company Directors, found that

“…71 per cent of those surveyed had declined taking board seats mainly because of their fears of personal liability, while 46 per cent had resigned from a board position because of the issue.”

These concerns largely deal with false market rumours, manipulating securities prices, criminal cartels, consumer protection laws and others. It is this company that the importance of taking responsibility for OHS should be pushed by the safety advocates but it seems that the business and corporate contexts of OHS are only ever discussed by the corporate lawyers. And yet, OHS professionals complain about not getting heard at Board level. Perhaps what is needed is one of these OHS professionals to take a business degree so that OHS can be described in terms business understand.

Of course the risk is that OHS may be found to be contrary to all the basic capitalist concepts and that the only way it can be applied in a business is for the application of legal “wriggle room” from the concept of reasonably practicable.

On 6 November 2009, Bob Baxt (a partners with law firm Freehills and the chair of the law committee with AICD) responded to the Eyers and Hepworth article with a personal opinion describing directors and senior managers already in the “firing line” from the corporate regulators. He seems to see this as unfair but those executives are in the “firing line” because they are suspected of doing the wrong thing.

Baxt describes the “reverse onus of proof” as an “obnoxious device” and he may be right but he needs to consider why such a provision was introduced in the first place – business managers were not complying with their legislative obligations, they were avoiding responsibility, taking short cuts for personal wealth, having workers die and then winding up the company to avoid prosecution.

Too many business professionals focus on “cause and effect” and see injustice. Yet if they looked a little further back and analysed the “causes” a bit more carefully they may just see that in many cases the regulatory changes have come about as a result of their own misdeeds.

The analysis of capitalism that resulted from the global financial crisis has faded very quickly as the markets rebound. Companies are applying the same behaviours that led to that crisis. Most business analysts and executives talk about leadership as the be-all and end-all but we should not be lead in the same direction as in the past as we are likely to end up in the same place. True leadership is about accepting mistakes and heading in a fresh direction where such mistakes cannot be repeated.

Those who are bleating about how corporate executives are being bludgeoned by regulation and accountability need to get out of the leafy middle-class suburbs and the office buildings with bayside views and take some time to reflect on how we came to be in such an economic mess and why workers continue to get injured, maimed and killed. It may just be that accepting responsibility is the new foundation required to build a humaneand profitable future.

Kevin Jones

Good corporate advice tainted by poisonous product

In Matt Peacock’s book, “Killer Company“, an entire chapter is devoted to the legacy of the James Hardie chairman, John B Reid. In Peacock’s talk at Trades Hall in October 2009, he mentioned that Reid had once published a book called “Commonsense Corporate Governance”. The apparent hypocrisy of an executive of a company that knowingly sells toxic material while advising others on how to manage their corporation responsibly generated chuckles of disbelief in the Trade Hall audience.

Reid book cover 001 SafetyAtWorkBlog obtained a copy of John Reid’s book to see first-hand that someone could do such a thing. A sad part of all this is that the advice in the book is sensible but Reid’s “legacy” now taints all he does and all he says.

One random example of the advice he provides concerns dealing with consultants:

“Where, as with solicitors and auditors, it is imperative for the company to retain them, company staff need to be reminded that the professional advisers are paid for on the basis of the time that they spend on the company’s business. This is not predetermined by the nature of the task. In large measure it is affected by the decisions made and by the homework done within the company. What does this mean?

First, the imposition of new and more demanding, and frequently less precise, legislation on all manner of subjects has made management and, as a result, directors, nervous about things that directors 50 years ago would have dealt with very quickly-and inexpensively. Further, the increasing number of specialists necessary within a company’s own payroll is a result of this legislative epidemic, and has produced a reinforcement of this culture of caution and, occasionally, of fear.”

Safety professionals may want to take particular note of this corporate imperative.

Peacock points to the strict confidentiality clauses that Hardie included in any settlements in the 1970s. Peacock writes (p 156)

“Secrecy indeed was Hardie’s byword, one endorsed by the chairman, who would later advise aspiring directors to ‘remain silent where there is criticism’.”

Reid recommended this in a bulleted list of ways to handle the media.

John B Reid, whose personal wealth was estimated at $A181 million in 2004, is not unique in advising companies while also having a tarnished corporate reputation. Some argue that the adjective “good businessman” is a tautology.

There is no doubt that Reid was an active philanthropist and corporate citizen. He was awarded an Order of Australia for “service to industry” – no citation is available to explain the decision. In 2006, he received the Goldman Sachs JBWere Philanthropy Leadership Award.

Greek tragedies were full of hubris and examples of the single flaw that made good men do bad things. If the plays of Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles have yet to be analysed for their advice to corporate executives, they should be, for not only do they show human flaws but human corporate flaws.

John B Reid’s book on corporate governance is an easy read and has valuable lessons but it is now a book that makes the reader feel dirty.

Kevin Jones

Category: executives

Nightclub fires and evacuations

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HSE executive talks about OHS Leadership

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Big fine for Queensland Rail – big risks in rail

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Understanding the new world of the CEO

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Leadership – research, mental health and what true leadership is.

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OHS must raise its profile in the debate of directors’ liability and accountability

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Good corporate advice tainted by poisonous product

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