Graham Winter is an Australian psychologist 
who 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.
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.
The 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of my colleagues has described her role in a corporation as an “irritant”. She is responsible for quality, environment, risk and OHS – all of those required business elements that companies will avoid or ignore if they could. Her company acknowledges that these elements are necessary and values her role and efforts.
OHS professionals could benefit from realising that in most circumstances, they are not welcome, or rather, their advice is not welcome. OHS is a bitter pill for many companies. But handled well, explained and discussed, OHS can be a substantial agent for positive change.
Sadly, one construction industry unionist in Australia is doing more harm than good. Joe McDonlad is an experienced unionist who is undoubtedly committed to the safety of his members in Western Australia’s construction industry. However, he does not respect the law or due process.
This week, Joe McDonald was fined $10,000 by a Perth Magistrate, Jeremy Packington, for unlawfully entering three building sites in 2007. McDonald’s actions generated considerable political discussion at the time, mainly because his actions occurred during an election campaign.
Safety improvements can be achieved without confrontation and insults. A major OHS principle is consultation. McDonald is a safety-focused trade unionist who may succeed in his aims to improve safety for his members. But the manner in which he conducts his services is causing widespread damage to the cause of OHS in the general community, employers’ perceptions of OHS and the trade union movement in general.
Sometimes the bigger picture is important.
An audio report and a video report of Joe’s action on the construction site and his thoughts on safety are available online.
The improved safety status in workplaces that have an active union presence has been verified through research, but what of the efforts on safety management from outside the union research efforts.
Below is the abstract of an article that was published online late-2008 (and is available for purchase). The research was conducted in a country with a negative safety culture so the improvements may be more marked than from outside Spain. However, the full study (not accessed by SafetyAtWorkBlog) may provide an interesting before-and-after story.
“Occupational accidents severely deteriorate human capital, and hence negatively affect the productivity and competitiveness of countries. But despite this, we still observe a scarcity of preventive practices, an unsatisfactory management commitment and an absence of safety culture among Spanish firms. The result is evident in firms’ high accident rates. This situation is a consequence of the general belief among firms that investing in safety is a cost, and hence has negative repercussions for their competitiveness. The current work aims to identify good practices in safety management, and analyse the effect of these practices on a set of indicators of organisational performance. For this, we first carry out an exhaustive literature review, and then formulate a series of hypotheses. We then test the proposed model on a sample of 455 Spanish firms. Our findings show that safety management has a positive influence on safety performance, competitiveness performance, and economic-financial performance. Hence they provide evidence of the compatibility between worker protection and corporate competitiveness.”
The full article is available in Safety Science (Volume 47, Issue 7, August 2009, Pages 980-991).
B Fernández-Muñiz, J Montes-Peón and C Vázquez-Ordás, ‘Relation between occupational safety management and firm performance’ (2009) Safety Science 47: 980-991.