When we look at OHS legislation from throughout the world we see a strong emphasis upon the need for workplaces to be safe. Now we can argue the reasons behind this, and that alone could make up many chapters of a significant tome. Do we need to though? Is there much value in getting “down and dirty” in this world? Let me leave you with those questions for a while.
Our real-world observation though is that, despite the best of efforts, accidents continue to occur within many of our workplaces. At extreme levels these accidents result in the death of someone involved. Only recently within the US mining fraternity a worker dropped a wrench and it landed on a ledge well outside of the “safety zone”. To access the location where the wrench landed the worker had to step over a physical barrier and past a “Do Not Enter” sign. He did enter, lost his footing, and fell to his death. Why?
Now I know that many readers will be thinking that he contributed to his own death by stepping outside the defined safety zone. It’s hard to argue that point. My question remains – why?
Let us now explore some of the “why”. Take a look at the image of the brick wall. Except do me a favour and become part of a little experiment with me for a moment. Reach into your wallet, billfold, or purse and remove a license, credit card etc. Place the card over the bottom half of the image. Now here is the tester for you. Close your eyes and imagine this shall be the first time you have seen the brick wall. What do you see? Hopefully you are seeing a pretty reasonable formed “wall”. It may not appear to be up to a mason’s best effort but it certainly is standing, and more than likely performing its function of being a wall.
So, when we first look at our wall everything seems to stand up pretty well. We might even say that this wall has stood the test of time?
Now remove the card or license and the wall looks a little different, does it not? We now see that all is not as it should be. It is only when we look far closer at the “construction”, maybe more toward what we might call the foundations, that we begin to see some potential risks to the integrity of the system (in this case, a wall) becoming exposed. You might be mistaken here to thinking that we are actually talking now about the system of safety, and we certainly could be!
More often than not our safety systems appear to function and work well; it is as the “stresses” on that system are increased that we find that the absence of a certain brick in the wall might contribute to failure of our safety system. How is it that we generally recognise “failure”; most sadly it is often because of injury to one of our employees. Consider here the example cited previously.
Now why did the mine worker step outside of the parameters of safety that had been “defined” by the system. There are of course a number of possibilities here, and I am only going to explore a few. Firstly, whilst there were signs and barriers evident in the workplace, was it standard practice to abide by those structures within this workplace? We actually do not know. What we do see is that a “stressor” was placed on the workers internal “system”. In this particular case the worker elected to take those fatal steps literally.
What we do know is that there are also a population of workers who, when confronted with the identical “stressor”, elect to leave the wrench where it is and make arrangements to have it safety collected. This is the essence of our missing brick in the wall. As we go deeper toward the foundation of the system we start asking questions about the personal values of the workers concerned, the behavioural practices that are commonly observed at all levels within the workplace etc.
It is often at this point that all the managers, safety bodies, incident investigators, government regulators etc., all come riding in to try and work out “what happened”. Sometimes we do, more often than not, end up with as many questions as when we started. We develop more systems and procedures that are designed to minimise the likelihood of the accident happening again. Finally we stand back and pray that it all comes together and nothing happens (in other words our “controls” result in no further system failures). Guess what? It DOES NOT work!
We find ourselves lamenting that despite the best of intentions and the most robust of efforts there are still situations where people step outside the barriers (systems) and become involved in fatal outcomes.
Clearly there is something going on here, both within the psyche of individual workers and within the psyche of collectives that is able to have greater influence on behavioural outcomes than the most robust of safety systems. By the way, don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s all about “compliance”; if only he did as he was told none of this would happen. That also is NOT true.
So what are the bricks missing in the wall? It is my contention that for any wall to be able to successfully sustain the pressures that will be brought to bear, then these missing bricks need to be identified and replaced. By so doing we are able to better engineer greater integrity into the structure itself.
Allow me to deal with something which is becoming increasingly popular; and I am reluctant to acknowledge being spruiked from within my own profession of applied psychology. That is the burgeoning “safety recruitment” industry. So what is being promoted here? We have organisations purporting to be able to identify, by way of psychometric tests etc., the “safe” people. Now that would sound attractive wouldn’t it? If we could “weed” out all those potentially unsafe people, who might not only hurt themselves, they might also contribute to hurting those around them, would we not be doing everyone a favour.
Now here’s the rub. It DOES NOT work. Sure we can “test” for safe thinking etc. (assuming the instrument itself is valid and psychometrically robust). The evidence though is very scant. In contrast the US National Safety Council has specifically looked at this whole question of recruiting “safe” people and found that the contribution it offers toward reduced workplace injury is less than four per cent. The sample size was almost 20,000 – this is a result too powerful to ignore. Cleary the missing brick is not “recruitment” despite there being a cohort of behavioural scientists trying to convince you otherwise.
So what is it then? After all, I am not suggesting that the above organisations are not actually providing what they say they are. Indeed I would suggest that they are. They are delivering, out of the population of potential employees they have been “given”, the safest in terms of thinking and behaviour. So what goes wrong? There is something far more discreet, yet powerful, down here amongst the foundations of our wall. It is the “culture” of the place. All those unwritten “laws” that determine how people behave within certain circles including, of course, our workplaces.
Allow me to give a recent example. Late last year I found myself in a reasonably remote mining community giving feedback to several hundred miners about the safety behaviours being practised within their site. Due to the global minerals boom accommodation was scant so I found myself living in a miner’s camp and sharing a “mess” for meals. It took me less than one meal to learn what the “norm” or “accepted cultural practice” was for that mess. At the conclusion of your meal you carried your plates, cutlery etc. across to a “hole in the wall” and scraped the plates and left them in a dish full of detergent. You did not just get up out of your chair and leave them upon the table at which you had just been seated.
How quickly I was able to “learn” the “rules” to be practiced within this system. There were surprisingly no signs (or none that I saw), there was nobody actually giving instruction. It was a case of absorbing what was going on around you and modifying your own behaviour to fit within the cultural expectation of where you find yourself.
Now when I am home it is not standard practice in my household to complete a meal and go and leave the remains in a “hole” to be dealt with by somebody else. I thus modified my behaviour for this particular environment.
In essence this is why the “recruitment” approach does not work. People may arrive “safe”, so to speak, but it does not take too long and they absorb the practices of the culture within which they find themselves. If they do not modify their safe behaviours to “fit in”, then they experience a process we call cognitive dissonance. The result is they leave to find a workplace that is more in line with what they believe safety should be.
In other words the evidence is pretty clear now. Our missing bricks in the wall have much more to do with the prevailing cultures of safety being played out within the workplace. It becomes imperative then to explore the foundations of our walls to more clearly identify the actual types of bricks we need to manufacture.
In the next edition I shall delve deeper into the brickworks.
David G Broadbent
David G Broadbent is the director of global safety consulting firm, TransformationalSafety.Com. He is recognised as a world leader in the areas of safety culture and safety leadership and the impacts that these constructs have upon accident causation. David is a regular contributor to international safety forums. He is also the creator of the SAFE-TNET Technologies – the world’s first fully integrated first language safety management system.
David was a Metallurgist with BHP, prior to changing career paths toward the field of applied psychology. This makes him one of a handful of safety psychologists in the world who also has a powerful “hands-on” industrial background. He is known for his ability to chat with workers at the “coal face” right through to the “board room”.
More recently David was involved in a near-fatal accident himself which has led him to focus even more heavily on accident causation and the interaction with perceived risk. His recent introduction of “risk tolerance” into the global safety vocabulary is developing significant interest worldwide. David can be found on Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-In or his email is broadbentd@transformationalsafety.com
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