safety culture – Page 49 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Examining core values may benefit safety

Contemporary safety training is increasing discussing the core values of employees and managers. This focus can be very confronting for many people as core values are rarely discussed or even acknowledged, yet they could be central to the modern approach to safety management and safety compliance.

New safety legislation in Australia applies a common obligation across jurisdictions and industries to consult about health and safety, to communicate, to listen. But personal and corporate OHS obligations are well established so will the reiteration of these obligations in the consultative process have the impact expected? Does this conversation make safety more important, more “front of mind?

A better result may come from discussing core values in the workplace safety and health context. Some may look for these core values to be exposed via expensive training courses and awareness gurus but the first step could be to simply ask one’s self, or discuss with one’s partner, the question “what are my core values?” or “what do I believe?” or “what is most important to me?” Continue reading “Examining core values may benefit safety”

Peter Sandman interview in the aftermath of 9/11

In November 2001, prominent risk communicator, Peter Sandman, examined the 9/11 attacks in a long article trying to clarify the impact and the context of the attacks. Shortly after the attacks I had the chance to interview Peter Sandman for the online magazine I was then publishing, safetyATWORK. Below is the text of that 2001 interview.

“SAW: As a resident of New Jersey and a risk communicator, what effect has the September 11 attacks had?

PS: I was very lucky. I live a sufficient distance away, that neither I nor anyone really close to me was lost. But lots of people close to people close to me were lost. Everybody in this part of the country is one or two steps removed from someone who died that day. But, professionally, I’m trying to think through, as I assume anybody in risk communication would be trying to think through what we can say to our countrymen and countrywomen about living in a dangerous world. This is obviously a situation where the outrage is entirely justified. The last thing I want to be doing is telling people they ought not to be outraged. But it’s also a situation where the hazard is serious. Most of my work is in either a high-outrage low-hazard situation, where the risk communication job is to reduce the outrage, calm people down; or a high-hazard low-outrage situation, where the job is to increase the outrage, get people to protect themselves. September 11 and its aftermath have to be described as high-hazard high-outrage. Neither paradigm works. And yet clearly the message to people has got to be you need to live your life. You need to take what precautions you can take and recognise that you’re not going to be completely safe and live your life anyway. You need to get on aeroplanes, and go to ball games. You need to go into big cities. I think in the months ahead people like me are going to be trying to figure out how to say that and say it honestly and honourably and credibly to a population that desperately needs to hear it and understand it. Continue reading “Peter Sandman interview in the aftermath of 9/11”

Australian OHS experts call for a single OHS regulator and a unified insurance system

Some of Australia’s top work health and safety experts have stressed, to Safe Work Australia, the need for a single national OHS regulator. Many also called for a radical overhaul of workers’ compensation and insurance structures to achieve a combined insurance/compensation similar to that of New Zealand, the Accident Compensation Commission (ACC).

These calls were made in a whole day workshop, conducted by Safe Work Australia on 30 August 2011, on the development of the next ten-year national OHS strategy. This was the latest of around ten consultative sessions whose notes will be summarised and posted online. The notes from an earlier seminar list the following discussion topics:

“The need to focus on work health and safety prevention.
Engagement with target groups and industries to ensure advice and support is relevant to enable them to effectively respond to hazards.
Engineering hazards out through good design.
Influencing the supply chain inside and outside Australia.
Prioritising key work health and safety hazards and focusing national attention.
Creating opportunities for innovation in work health and safety particularly within the regulatory framework.
Enhancing the culture of safety leadership (promoting highly reliable organisations).
The importance of safety culture.
Enhancing the capability of workers to return to work following accident or illness.
Influencing or assisting academia to undertake research – focusing on intervention effectiveness.
Developing a shared communication strategy to promote the new principles of the new Strategy.”

These echo many of the comments in today’s seminar and illustrate what was a major missed opportunity. The theme of today’s workshop was to imagine what OHS (or work health and safety or work health safety & environment, as some suggested) will be like in 2022 but there were few futuristic suggestions. This was the opportunity to extend some of the practices currently undertaken by ten years. Continue reading “Australian OHS experts call for a single OHS regulator and a unified insurance system”

Interview with Kevin Jones

In a few weeks time SafetyAtWorkBlog will be reporting on the Safety in Design, Engineering and Construction conference to be held in Melbourne. The conference organisers interviewed me on my thoughts on workplace safety. The interview is available HERE but you may need to provide your contact details.

The odd thing about the interview is that a safety conference organiser chose me for the interview yet I am not a speaker at the conference they are organising. IQPC is the company and the August conference in Melbourne is Safety in Design, Engineering & Construction 2011.

Excerpt:

Construction IQ

“It’s very nice to have you here. Now, as a commentator on safety and OHS, you’d know that there’s a lot of talk surrounding the Harmonisation process. How do you think the legislation will change the OHS landscape, and do you think there are any particular areas that will translate into normal practices across all work sites?”

Kevin Jones

“No, I think it will have a particular impact on national companies, those that operate across jurisdictions, so it will be very important to them because that’s where the cost savings are meant to be coming from by reducing the administrative duplication, but that deals with only about 5% to 10% of companies in Australia. For those companies that operate within just a single state jurisdiction, Harmonisation isn’t going to impact them overly much. There are going to be some changes to the state legislation because the national model legislation has to be implemented at each State level, so individual States will see some changes. But those changes, by and large, are not radical in terms of how safety is managed. It’s certainly a considerable shock for some companies – particularly on issues of union right of entry and prosecutions and those sorts of things – but if you have a look at the management of safety in a work site, I don’t think the Harmonisation process is going to change the way it is controlled and managed.”

In my experience many conferences produce a “teaser”, in audio or video, of the keynote speakers, in particular. This is intended to generate some enthusiasm for the conference in order for people to register but it also introduces speakers with whom the audience may be unfamiliar. As with any advertising it is difficult to quantify the benefits of such strategies but with the phone interview mentioned above, there is little cost other than 10 minutes of time, once the recording process is established, and so perhaps the return on investment is not of great significance.

Kevin Jones

Managers being closer

The following are some of the processes supposedly used in workplaces to control/eliminate hazards: hazard identification, risk assessment and risk management. These should address the implicit questions of: ‘What?’, ‘How bad?’ and ‘What to do?’

The language then turns to words and concepts like ‘OHS culture’, ‘behaviour-based safety’… and all within some over-arching package referred to as an ‘OHS management system’. These are shown in the diagram below.

But that’s one representation, there are many others. Now ask some simple questions: Given that some 80% of workers work in small to medium workplaces, just how much interest will there be from managers in these approaches?

The single most obvious change I’ve seen in OHS in the last 20 years has been the dramatic increase in the amount and volume of talking about it. It’s clearly not the only change, but the most wide-spread and obvious one. Continue reading “Managers being closer”

France Telecome’s CSR report is telling but sets high expectations

In 2009, France Telecom’s management practices came to global attention as a result of a spate of over 20 suicides that were identified as work-related. On 6 June 2011, France Telecom released its Corporate Responsibility Report that covers the period of the management turmoil touched upon in earlier SafetyAtWorkBlog articles.

The document is an impressive document that sets an enormously high benchmark on a range of corporate and personnel issues but one will find no mention of suicides. The best indication that this was a company in crisis is the level of inquiries, reviews, audits and workplace safety control measures that have been implemented over the last two years. It is also important to remember that the control measures are designed to bring about a cultural and organisational change to this corporation and that this will take a considerable time. The struggle can be best, and most tragically, illustrated by the April 2011 self-immolation of a France Telecom employee in the company carpark in Merignac.

By acknowledging that this report has come from a company in crisis it is possible to identify some useful OHS, human resource and organisational cultural initiatives that may be applied in other large corporations around the world. Continue reading “France Telecome’s CSR report is telling but sets high expectations”

New work health safety laws in NSW parliament

The New South Wales Government submitted its version of the Work Health and Safety Bill into parliament on 4 May 2011. Neither the Bill or speeches are yet available on-line [Update – see comments below] but NSW Greens MP, David Shoebridge, has provided some indication of what was presented. Hopefully more information will be available tomorrow.

Shoebridge confirms what many expected

“The Work Health and Safety Bill and Occupational Health and Safety Amendment Bill will remove the capacity of unions to prosecute for breaches of Occupational Health and Safety laws….”

“These bills will also remove the jurisdiction of the Industrial Relations Court and abolish the reverse onus of proof…”

These changes are simply the political cost of the national harmonisation process. Whether the removal of these powers will decrease workplace safety levels in NSW is highly debatable, as the lack of these in other State does not seem to have affected safety levels. Continue reading “New work health safety laws in NSW parliament”

Category: safety culture

Examining core values may benefit safety

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Peter Sandman interview in the aftermath of 9/11

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Australian OHS experts call for a single OHS regulator and a unified insurance system

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Interview with Kevin Jones

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Managers being closer

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France Telecome’s CSR report is telling but sets high expectations

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New work health safety laws in NSW parliament

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