Get workers to think for themselves
We found an interesting article earlier this year
in the Building.co.uk website by Greg Verhoef, Director
of London based Construction company Szerelmay. Greg
voiced his personal opinions about individual employee
safety responsibilities and a phenomenon called "alpha
sleep". Perhaps in a deliberately realistic way,
Greg prefers to call this "not thinking".
"If you want workers to be safe on site, you have to get them to think
for themselves. So, we need less bureaucracy and more reliance on our natural
sense of danger", says Greg.
Readers of these pages will know I have a particular
interest in the notion of individual responsibility
in safety, so I wanted to add Greg's ideas to
the mix and present it as part of my general rant.
(See these related articles on this website):
What works with safety systems? Less may be more
How about a little risk in
our lives?
Switching off
His concern is that people tend to "switch off" to
danger when responsibility is largely removed from
them, such as when a work environment is cluttered
with safety systems and controls. He goes on to name
this phenomenon "alpha sleep", which is
clearly just a euphemism for "switching off" or "not
thinking". (It's just that we can't
say things like that, can we?)
Now, alpha sleep is actually the initial stage of sleep
as you drop off. It is characterised by thoughts becoming
less realistic and a feeling of floating. It lasts
for 5 – 10 minutes and you are not normally aware
of being asleep and can wake up easily from it. People
woken up from it will often claim they were never asleep
at all.
It would appear that calling the aforementioned state
of mind "alpha sleep" is therefore technically
incorrect. But descriptively, I think it serves a purpose.
What it says is that people sometimes subjugate their
responsibilities and perhaps go into a state of dependency
when they perceive safety decisions and precautions
are "being taken care of by someone/something
else".
Mr Verhoef is clearly very concerned about this. He
cites the example of one of his craftsmen who, to gain
permission from authorities to operate a building site
goods hoist which used only an "up" and
a "down" button, had to attend a one and
a half day course and assessment. "I
believe that certain aspects of health and safety take
away the responsibility that should remain with the
individual", he says. "I would
rather employ a man who chooses to operate a hoist
safely than one that relies on a sign telling him to.
Like other specialist contractors, we employ highly
skilled craftsmen and my attitude is that I expect
those highly skilled craftsmen to use the same common
sense approach in looking after their own safety, and
the safety of others, as they do when carrying out
their craft".
Why do people switch off?
There comes a point when the workplace and the methods
have been made as physically safe as is reasonable.
But people should still perceive they have personal
responsibility for themselves and others. It does not
mean we should throw caution to the winds or neglect
safety systems and making workplaces inherently safe.
It means that we need to leave a reasonable component
of human intervention and initiative as part of the
safety system. The current obsession with systematising
everything simply has its limits. Here are some of
the reasons: (Refer to the above articles for more).
- People appear to have a "target level" of risk. That means that as things get safer, people compensate by increasing their risk levels. I will go further: I believe risk taking is one of the characteristics that have led to the rapid development of the human species. A "target level" could be described as "pushing opportunities and stretching the boundaries". If we can save time, get more satisfaction, discover a new way, achieve something at less cost, we will do it to "get ahead".
- People are individuals. Individually, we don't care a damn for the Safety Guy's systems. In my opinion, we will conform as long as we perceive some or all of the following:
- It gives us a personal advantage or reputation.
- People we like or respect will like us, reward us or value us. (Intrinsic rewards work well).
- It's staunch "team" behaviour.
- The consequences of not doing it are personally dire enough, for example serious injury (penalties for non compliance are a blunt instrument, but it's appropriate for some "black and white" things like wearing seat belts).
- Others are not "cheating" and gaining advantages over us by circumventing rules.
- We have some degree of personal choice (we are not treated like robots).
- I also think it's worth mentioning that people can get tunnel vision when everything is "system centred". When compliance with a rigid system is required, the system, not safety, can become the sole objective, leading to blind acts of token compliance without the accompanying safe behaviour.
Bloody "safety culture" – what's
that all about?
We see a lot in safety discussions about "safety
culture" (recently BP are doing the most talking
for obvious reasons). My opinion is that managers and
boards of directors don't have the first idea
about what safety culture is. I don't even think
it really exists. Look just below the surface in any
organisation that claims to have a safety culture and
you'll quickly find skeletons in the cupboard.
Call me a grumpy old cynic, but I have audited hundreds
of organisations and the bigger they are, the worse
the tokenism.
I think safety culture is actually about the quality of the organisation
and people taking ownership of their roles and duties. It's about the
internal health of the organisation, about good and open lines of communication
and about teamwork. It's not about safety alone. Managers inevitably
believe it's about chest beating, table thumping and more safety systems.
They are too scared to create an environment of more individual responsibility,
because it feels like loss of control.
Conclusion
Ultimately, safety is about what individuals do every
minute of the day, about the choices they voluntarily
make while no one is watching - the responsibility
they feel for themselves and others. It's time
we all grew up and instead of talking about safety
per se, put more attention towards developing good
leaders, the sort of leaders that set expectations
and support individuals or teams to achieve and engage
with the business. For more on leadership, see
another of my previous articles.
Without personal engagement and with too much focus
on safety systems, we quickly get into the area of
diminishing returns and this means that huge resources
are needed to make only incremental improvements. The
depressing thing is that major accidents are still
possible (in fact, in some ways more likely), when
safety systems are relied on at the exclusion of any
personal level of thought and interaction. People take
things for granted, get confused or abdicate responsibility.
To provide the environment for this – the elusive "safety
culture"- we have to make it attractive and desirable
and this, in my opinion, means good leaders, more individual
choice and more discretion, not less.
But, hey, on a lighter note, this does give us an opportunity
for accident investigations. As we all know, the most
common and most pointless conclusion is "Told
him/her to be more careful in future". We can
now add "Told him/her to avoid alpha sleep in
future".
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