National Safety Month
June is National Safety Month, which was established by the National Safety Council in order to remind people of the importance of good safety practices. Here at System Improvements Inc., we have the same goal of furthering workplace safety. So, to celebrate National Safety Month, we’ve compiled a few of the practices your company can enact in order to protect your work environment and those operating within it.
Cultivating a Safety Culture
A safety culture is a culture of trust. In a workplace where employees expect to be blamed for disasters, or where nothing is done to improve the situation when an issue is brought up, no one speaks when they see problems begin. A safe culture works to eliminate these obstacles.
Removing blame from investigations serves both to build a culture of trust and add depth to possible solutions. Employees in a workplace with a safety culture serve as active participants in corrective actions, able to express when something would or wouldn’t work based on their experience on the job. Because of this active role, there is more engagement with the common goal of enacting fixes, an engagement that is missing in a culture where orders come down “from the top” without employee input or understanding as to why.
Using Good Human Factors Engineering
When it comes to tackling a safety problem at its source, good human factors engineering will do more to improve your workplace than any amount of retraining or discipline.
People make mistakes for a reason, and often, that reason is a broken system. Confusing instructions, worn labels, a noisy environment, and unavailable equipment are all examples of how a system might create rules without supporting the people trying to follow them.
A well-engineered system protects employees from making “simple” mistakes. The classic “accidentally pushing the giant red button” scene from cartoons should, ideally, be a completely unrealistic scenario. For example, a protective plastic cover or an “are you sure?” alert would make the mistake less easy to make.
The theme of human factors is “making it easy to do right and hard to do wrong.” When someone makes a “simple mistake” that leads to disaster, it is a good idea to investigate the role human factors engineering played in the incident, and the role it could play in crafting the solution. You can watch our video on human factors engineering here.
Conducting Thorough Root Cause Analysis
Many safety systems break down in their root cause analysis. For example, an investigator that uses the popular “five whys” method to reach their conclusion will inevitably get biased and limited results. You can read more about why the five whys method doesn’t work here.
A good RCA system requires a deeper level of expertise. Any gaps in knowledge create blind spots for the investigator, and investigators typically specialize in one specific area. Thus, a thorough RCA system needs structure, providing the necessary expertise to any given investigator so they do not have to rely on their own experience to make decisions that will affect the workplace as a whole.
Utilizing Available Expertise
The experts at your company should never go underutilized when it comes to developing safety practices. More than any great RCA report or management group, the employees who are experts in the specific area you wish to fix can give you invaluable advice. They will know the difference between “work as imagined” and “work as done” better than most, and have the background to understand the safety practices the job requires.
Beyond the experts available at your company, there are hundreds of collective years of expertise available through blogs and RCA podcasts like ours. We provide training and a system built on the ideas of industry experts such as Heinz Bloch and Admiral Rickover to help you craft the safest, most effective system possible.
Where to Start
If these practices sound like something your company needs, we’re here to help. We collaborate with companies to create safe and working systems. If you’re interested in learning how to improve the system at your workplace, you can contact us for a free briefing here.
If you enjoyed this article, and would like to read more from us in the future, you can sign up for our free newsletter here. We send you a collection of handpicked articles every Tuesday that will help keep your RCA knowledge fresh.
