Suffering from a safety incident is not the preferred way to find out about the weaknesses of your approach to safety management. However, unfortunately this is exactly the way some organisations become aware that the characteristics of their organisational management systems and/or culture are letting them down.
A much more positive experience for PCBUs and their workers is for attention to be paid to the culture of the organisation, so that efforts can be made to develop characteristics that promote good safety management.
Some of the characteristics that assist organisations to manage safety outcomes successfully include:
- Develop workplace skills:
Develop good workplace skills in your staff, such as processes for good quality and regular communication across all organisational levels, provision of leadership training to enable leaders to understand the influence they have on safety outcomes, provision of training for consistent situational awareness and observational skills in all workers.
- Minimise human error:
Employ factors that minimise the possibility of “human error”, such as developing systems such that the systems themselves can be relied on and the amount left to “human intervention” and the chance of human errors, is minimised. This is also aided by recruiting appropriately skilled staff, providing proper training, using fit-for-purpose and well-maintained equipment, employing safety in design principles.
- Establish redundancies:
Add as many layers of protection as possible across the organisation, to mitigate the human and mechanical failures that are likely occur to the detriment of worker safety. This means good risk management practices and the implementation of multiple risk treatment strategies.
- Integrate management systems:
Avoid silos and stand-alone systems and processes across the organisation. Rather, integrate management systems and processes to ensure that they work together properly and efficiently and everyone understands and uses them.
- Cultivate organisational resilience:
Prepare the organisation to react with positive action and certainty in the event of an incident, so that the impacts of the incident are minimised and the organisation can recover quickly. This means implementing good quality, tailored management systems, processes and business continuity arrangements, and providing proper training for your staff in using these.
- Embed safety in the culture:
Ensure leaders personally demonstrate commitment to safety values and model appropriate safety (and other) behaviours. Accountability for safety should be clear, safety considerations should be implemented in all activities, and safety and risk management behaviours should be normalised for all management and staff.
If attention is paid to all of the above, the organisation will be in a very good position to prevent safety incidents, and to manage and recover from them well if they do occur.
Please contact QRMC for more information.
