Firefighter trauma

A major element of risk management  is business continuity.  This requires considerable planning, disaster recovery resources, and a long-term focus.

In early 2009 parts of Victoria, some not far from the offices of SafetyAtWorkBlog, were incinerated and across the State over 170 people died. In a conservative western culture like Australia, the bush-fires were the biggest natural disaster in living memory.

The is a Royal Commission into the Victorian Bushfires that is illustrating many of the disaster planning and community continuity needs in risk management.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7.30 Report” provided a report on 5 August 2009 which originates from the views of the community and the volunteer firefighters.  One of the issues relevant to safety professionals and risk managers is the psychological impact on volunteer workers.  Many in the report talk of trauma.  Many in the disaster areas have not returned and their are many who remain psychologically harmed.

When a workforce is so closely integrated with a community, rehabilitation is a daunting task and changes a community forever.

Overseas readers may have experienced their own natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina, earthquakes, floods and wildfires.  Many of these stories are reported around the world.  In the recovery phase of any disaster, businesses need to rebuild but are often rebuilding with damaged people.  It would be heartening to see the OHS regulators and OHS professions becoming more involved over the long recovery period.

Kevin Jones

Complacency and arrogance are the problems with mine safety in Australia

The signs are not good for the future of BHP Billiton’s safety program.  At the Diggers & Dealers conference in Western Australia on 5 August 2009, Ian Ashby, the President of BHP Billiton Iron Ore expanded on his statements some months ago about the poor safety practices at the company’s Pilbara worksites.

According to one media report, Ashby has said that BHP’s safety performance was  “generally showing improving trends”. He also said

“We’re looking for systems to eliminate these tragic events….. There hasn’t been any epiphany but we need to increase the intentionality and focus.”

Ashby specified two particular occupational hazards

  • traffic management, and
  • “fatigue management to prevent excess working hours”.

In April 2009, Ashby identified the following safety areas as those requiring attention:

  • Reduce site access;
  • Improve contractor management;
  • Enhance existing strategies to prevent excess working hours;
  • Move rail operations from the Mine Safety and Inspection Act to the Rail Safety Act;
  • Enhance traffic management standards, and;
  • Suspend all non-essential work outside daylight hours

Ashby’s presentation to the conference is now available for download.

Pages from diggersAndDealersMiningForumPresentation cover

The concern for the future safety performance of BHP Billiton comes from Ashby statements that, according to the press report, “the root of the problem was a poor attitude towards safety in the Pilbara region.

“There is an element that I don’t like to dwell on, but there is a complacency generally in the Australian workforce and a bit of an arrogance. I think some of that is quite manifest in the Pilbara.”

Ashby must have read the comments by Warren Edney about the lack of “safety brainwashing” in relation to the Pilbara miners. [SafetyAtWorkBlog has tried to clarify Edney’s comments with his employer, Royal Bank of Scotland]

The machismo of mine workers and new mining employers may be part of the issue but, as has been pointed out before, a similar Australian company in the same industry sector in very similar geographies – Rio Tinto – does not have anywhere near the same amount of fatalities even though it draw from the same worker demographics.

The OHS issue at BHP Billiton seems to be developing into a classic study of safety versus production.

It may be useful to note the report in the business section of The Age newspaper entitled “China taking all the ore we can ship: BHP“, a  report generated from the same presentation by Ian Ashby at Diggers & Dealers’.

Kevin Jones

Leadership, stress and performance reviews – interview

Graham Winter is an Australian psychologist Graham Winter Book 001who was the chief psychologist for the Australian Olympic team and is now an author and business adviser.  In August 2009 he has a book released entitled “The Man Who Cured the Performance Review”.

SafetyAtWorkBlog managed to interview Graham last week about the book, stress and safety leadership.  The SafetyAtWorkBlog podcast is available for download.

SafetyAtWorkBlog Graham Winter Interview

Kevin Jones

New OHS research on the limits of management based regulation

The National Research Centre for Occupational Health and Safety Regulation at the Australian National University is one of the few Australian research centres who provide free access to their data.  The number is growing but is still way behind institutions overseas.

Pages from wp%20-       -1.72813E-062unningham     0x1.8e0c80p-893nd              (null)inclair coverThe latest research report they have released concerns management-based regulations as opposed to prescriptive regulations.  Australia and many other countries have moved away from prescriptive OHS rules but this research by Neil Gunningham and Darren Sinclair has some good points on establishing workplace safety cultures by looking at a couple of case studies.

The abstract says

“The paper argues that notwithstanding the heavy emphasis currently being placed on both internal (company driven) and external (government driven) management-based regulation, a commitment at corporate level does not necessarily percolate down to individual facilities where ritualistic responses or resistant sub-cultures may thwart effective change. The findings have important implications for the effectiveness of management based regulation and meta-regulation more broadly.” (my emphasis)

The researchers go on to discuss the spread of shared values and shared meaning, how individuals and small units can thwart the good management intentions by a lack of organisational trust, through a literature review as well as the case studies and empirical data

For anyone who is the least bit interested in establishing a workplace safety culture, the following quote should get them downloading this report.

“Management based regulation does not ignore the challenges of engaging with group behavior. Indeed, its proponents assert that the capacity to achieve cultural change is one of its attributes (Welford 1997).  But whether, to what extent, or in what circumstances this is the case remains a matter of conjecture. Certainly changing cultures is no easy matter and it may well be far more difficult for senior management to manipulate than many organizational theorists assume (Morgan 1986:139).  Yet without cultural commitment on the part of those who are expected to implement the system, then edicts from regulators or (in the case of internal regulation) from senior management, may be met with creative compliance (McBarnet & Whelan 1999), resistance, “ritualism” (Merton 1968; Braithwaite 2008a:140-56) or various other forms of tokenism.”

Kevin Jones

New Work/Life Research

There seems to be new institutes and academic schools popping up regularly over research into the issue of work/life balance.  Recently one of the oldest and most prominent of the institutes, the Centre for Work + Life at the University of South Australia, released new research data.AWALI--full cover

The latest Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) was released in late July 2009.  The executive summary identifies several important issues relevant to OHS:

“Three years of data about work-life interference in Australia tell us that many employees experience frequent interference from work in their personal, home and community lives, many feel overloaded at work and feelings of time pressure are also common and growing.”

“Work hours are central to work-life interference….. Many Australians are a long way from their preferred working hours and the 2008/09 economic downturn has not made any difference to the incidence of this mismatch.”

The work by Barbara Pocock and others at the Centre is characterised by recommendations for improvements rather than simply describing a situation.  In this data the researchers say

“Our AWALI reports over the past three years suggest that employers and public policy makers can help workers deal with work-life pressures.  This involves improving the quality of supervision and workplace culture, controlling workloads, designing ‘do-able’ jobs, reducing long working hours and work-related commuting, increasing employee-centered flexibility and options for permanent part-time work, improving the fit between actual and preferred hours and increasing care supports.”

It is obvious from these comments that OHS professionals need to work hard on these matters to create, or maintain, their workplace safety cultures.

Kevin Jones

Behavioural-based safety is no different to traditional safety management

Sometime ago SafetyAtWorkBlog wrote that “engagement” was just a new term for “consultation”.  Rebadging or rebranding occurs in the safety discipline as much as any other but our internet ears pricked up at some recent comments in a  Canadian podcast from Safety Excellence.

Shawn Galloway and Terry of ProACT Safety is discussing traditional approaches to safety management and how they fit into his philosophy of safety excellence.  They say this about behavioural-based safety (BBS):

“[People] come back in with advanced strategies, like behavior-based safety and it’s the same old thing.  Everything on the behavior-based safety list is already covered by a rule or procedure in traditional safety.

A lot of times it’s an admission of failure of their traditional safety program…”

It is refreshing to hear a BBS specialist acknowledge that the role for BBS is to progress safety beyond compliance and that compliance strategies, what Galloway describes as “traditional safety”, are fundamental to a company’s safe operation.

For those enlightened safety professionals who seek a deeper understanding of their discipline thr0ugh alternate perspectives, this particular podcast is very good.

The full podcasts are often worth listening to as they discuss safety culture issues, performance indicators and many more of the current safety management concepts.

Kevin Jones

“Union safety”?

Reading an article about CFMEU organiser, Joe McDonald, today illustrates an important differentiation to be kept in mind.  A unionist’s benchmark for safety compliance may differ from that of the employer, regardless of the fact that the employer has the major legislative obligation to establish a “safe and healthy work environment”.

Joe McDonald pledges to keep his members safe.  A spokesperson for the construction company said

“…there were some safety issues at the site but said they were being addressed when the union walked out.”

How does walking away from OHS consultation improve safety?

The cause of the confusion on “safety” comes from the weakening of prescriptive legislation and codes to accommodate operating costs, and in the increase of the  “reasonably practicable”  test.

The union movement in New South Wales had the most extreme level of OHS regulation in Australia.  It was hated by the business sector and has been weakened by the government as a result of federal pressures and aims but, the fact that New South Wales has achieved a 2% reduction in the injury incident rate, may add weight to the unions’ desire to retain the legislation.

There is a fundamental dichotomy of regulatory and operational approaches in OHS management in Australia currently that the harmonised OHS system may only exacerbate.  It is now up to the Safe Work Australia boffins to keep an open mind in harmonisation negotiations but to also remained focused on the aim of any OHS legislation which is to keep people safe.

Kevin Jones

Concatenate Web Development
© Designed and developed by Concatenate Aust Pty Ltd