Mentoring for a safer 2017

Advocacy for doing safety ‘differently’ is gaining traction in Australia as many organisations strive for continuous improvement, regardless of current performance. How is this shift in thinking shaping safety in 2017?

The twin concepts of effective safety leadership and a sound workplace safety culture are frequently discussed in terms of the relative contribution of each to a winning safety program. In fact, you’ll find few top performers that don’t maintain a concerted focus on both. Are these beliefs merely theoretical, or are they more accurate predictors of positive safety outcomes?

Leadership in safety vs safety leadership

Popular lore has us believe that there are certain recognised characteristics inherent in all successful safety leaders. Proactivity, accountability, visibility, timeliness, enthusiasm and excellent communication skills are traits that come up time and again in analyses of superior safety leadership.

While these attributes undoubtedly contribute, it can be argued that they are found in any ‘good’ worker, regardless of the position or area of expertise. Are they really at the heart of an effective safety program, or is there more at play?

Much of the available reference material on safety leadership will tell you that guidance comes from the top and that the best companies demonstrate by example what behaviours will and won’t be tolerated.

Shailendra Tripathi is National Manager WHS & Business Continuity at QBE Insurance. In his role, he says a two-pronged approach is what delivers a good safety culture.

“It has to be an equally top-down and bottom-up approach.

“It’s relatively simple to achieve high-level buy-in from management and employees, once the intention is clearly communicated and understood. It is a pretty straightforward understanding when it comes to people on the ground in those important safety roles like fire wardens, WHS committee members, WHS reps and first aiders.

“It becomes challenging in middle management. If a safety system is complex, or viewed only from the perspective of meeting a series of targets because that’s what the law requires, it diminishes the overall intent and threatens success,” Tripathi said.

What can we do differently?

We live in a time full of theories, frameworks and business jargon — and safety is no exception. There are countless tools and resources available to companies that aim to make safety a cornerstone of enterprise.

To illustrate, Work Safe Queensland (WSQ) suggests that there are nine key behaviours, or culture actions, essential to the development of a positive safety culture:

• Communicate company values.
• Demonstrate leadership.
• Clarify required and expected behaviour.
• Personalise safety outcomes.
• Develop positive safety attitudes.
• Engage and own safety responsibilities and accountabilities.
• Increase hazard/risk awareness and preventive behaviours.
• Improve understanding and effective implementation of safety management systems.
• Monitor, review and reflect on personal effectiveness.

At the face of it these are obvious concepts which will ultimately deliver on their intention, but WSQ additionally proposes three questions every safety leader should ask themselves:

1. How important is safety?
2. Is safety important most of the time or all of the time?
3. Is it okay to compromise on safety if it’s going to be more expensive?

These questions speak more to the reality beyond the buzzwords and perhaps better represent some of the everyday practicalities and potential constraints related to achieving safety goals.

Geoff Hoad is the director of Workplace Health and Safety at Optus, where he is responsible for the wellbeing of 10,000 employees across Australia. Under his guidance, Optus has achieved an enviable safety record, boasting a current LTI of 0.4% — that equates to just 25 open claims across a staff of 10,000. Many would be content with that result and consequently reluctant to implement changes, but Hoad thinks businesses are being constrained by such thinking.

“If we think that injury prevention is the be-all and end-all, then we’ve lost the plot in my opinion.

“Current safety systems are pretty much a by-product of the industrial revolution and applying those same approaches while the world changes around us makes no sense,” he said.

Ditch the negative focus

Traditional views of safety tend to focus on the negative — the avoidance of something unwanted. The Safety Differently lobby wants us to rethink that. According to the movement’s website, the increasingly interactive workplace is being subjected to unparalleled rates of technological change and traditional approaches to safety won’t cut it any longer.

It says these outdated concepts are “to a large extent built on linear ideas — ideas about tighter control of work and processes, of removing creativity and autonomy, of telling people to comply”.

Hoad is a proponent of thinking differently and is a contributor to the Safety Differently cache of thought-provoking articles. As he sees it, safety is a journey rather than an arbitrary set of targets.

“You know, you start work at a new company and you’re handed a 60-plus-page document that outlines the safety policy of the business. Having an expectation that people will read and comprehend that is crazy. It’s totally inadequate — a box-ticking exercise. Making safety complex makes no sense,” he said.

Tripathi agrees, “The more we simplify the safety process, the better it becomes. Some safety professionals make it too complex. It’s really not that hard to create a great safety culture within any organisation. We provide tools that make it as simple as possible, like online incident reporting, simpler forms and a user-friendly portal. Part of gaining acceptance is by not overdoing everything.”

Is there really safety in numbers?

Keeping things simple is all well and good, but there’s still the small matter of compliance, benchmarking and measurement… all the red tape that comes with safety policy and programs.

“Safety comes with a huge bag of rules — legislation has been fantastic, but it has also limited people. Do we measure traditionally?  Sure we do and we benchmark against it, but we use it as a form of guidance rather than something to live by. I’ve never been able to make the connection between planning to do safety and measuring safety outcomes. Last year’s performance isn’t relevant to this year’s because it means you are still planning to fail.

“As important as measurement and benchmarking targets are in theory, I’m far less interested in outcomes than I am in understanding risks and whether we could have reasonably predicted something,” Hoad said.

By his own admission, he is a big picture man.

“I’ve got a macro view and the rest of the team provides insight at a micro level. I’ve also got strong opinions on where safety sits within the business. If you don’t have recognition of convening within a commercial enterprise, then you don’t have the full picture. Without that, how can you possibly determine risks?” he said.

And it seems the risks are even broader these days.

Mental health in the hot seat

“There has been a seismic change in the area of mental health. It is a major challenge now and will continue to be so in the future. I think it’s just indicative of the stresses of life in general. For all the talk of work/life balance, the reality is that we are all on and answerable to our employer 24/7.

“Equally, people are taking work pressures home with them. It becomes a spiralling situation and believing that these things are separate is misguided. If a staff member is having problems in their personal life, that translates to problems at work, so we see it as our responsibility. There is no dividing line,” Hoad said.

This thinking differs markedly from the days of old, when problems at home may have garnered you a cup of tea, a quiet chat and perhaps a couple of days off work to pull yourself together — and only then if you happened to work for a sympathetic manager.

Tripathi echoes this.

“The whole business landscape is changing in Australia as we move from a production economy to the provision of services. This inherently means more interactions with people, which can be both good and bad. Negative interpersonal experiences can take their toll on people, causing things like stress, anxiety and depression. These types of issues are always going to impact on productivity and companies now have a social obligation to address this.

“These problems have always existed, but the awareness level just wasn’t there in the past. The ambiguity of definitions has been an issue for business, but something that is improving,” Tripathi said.

According to Hoad, a lot of organisations still elect to compartmentalise issues and draw the conclusion that they are either not relevant or that offering assistance means accepting liability where they shouldn’t be.

“Ask someone responsible for a sales team about safety and they’ll probably tell you it’s not a huge consideration. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Sales can be a really high-pressure environment, so if you notice someone is in poor physical or mental shape, it’s logical that it is — at least in part — attributable to their livelihood.

“We’ve put mental health front and centre at Optus. Anyone who manages another human being — from the top down — has been trained in how to identify early signs of stress or when all is not well. Our biggest objective is to offer support when that level of intervention can be of most benefit. We really don’t care what the problem is or what caused it. Our program favours robust identification first and prevention second.

“Advances in technology are really helping us to do that. We capture incidents and use that information in an interpretive way — we’re doing interesting stuff with big data and getting views that we’ve simply never had before,” he said.

Tripathi favours a proactive approach as well.

“There are key indicators that we look for in our people — sickness and absenteeism for example. We ensure that even minor incidents are reported, such as aggressive and abusive phone calls from external parties, and we offer support and building resilience programs. All of these actions enable us to identify potential problems and to intervene at early stages,” he said.

What does success look like?

The flow-on effect of these strategies is that employee satisfaction increases, as this type of behaviour signals a level of care and commitment to the workforce beyond what is traditionally expected. Hoad rationalises any associated expenses as an investment in people.

“While some companies may question the outlay, we have found that claims dropped by 50% in one year and the cost of treatment is actually a fraction of what we would have incurred if these situations had progressed.

“In some cases, individuals opt not to make a claim against the company as they already know they will be taken care of,” he said.

It’s one thing to aim for a good workplace safety culture driven by a sound leadership philosophy, but how do you know you’ve achieved it? For Tripathi, it’s simple.

“We knew we had reached a turning point when employees and managers proactively reach out to the WHS team, rather than us having to follow up with them. To me, that means we’ve embedded a great safety culture and are viewed as a genuine business support function,” he said.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/fotomek