They say hindsight is 20/20, and while past safety performance is not always predictive of future safety outcomes, it’s possible to look back at organizational operations and systems in order to keep a proactive eye on future safety performances.
To that end, there are a number of self-assessment lenses, or operating philosophies, that EHS professionals can use to examine and improve their systems, programs and initiatives to reduce human errors, injuries, quality issues, and other adverse outcomes. The goal is to take your unvarnished view of your organizational safety performance and filter it through a specific lens or framework to help you discover ways to make practical and sustainable improvements to your safety management system.
Among the more useful lenses are Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), High Reliability Organizations (HRO), and the SafeStart Human Factors Framework (HFF), which is often used in conjunction with safety climate success factors (SCSF). A common thread of these philosophies is the human element or human factors, which can often go undetected or be underappreciated in an organization and can influence safety outcomes in a variety of ways.
There is a lot of great literature available on these lenses so I won’t go into too much detail on each of them here. But I will note two areas where they can be particularly useful. The first is to deploy these lenses to improve technical training. Organizations with mature management systems have a training matrix to ensure compliance training (e.g., forklift certification) is completed on time and covers the required topics. But I’ve spoken to many people who admit to repeating the same training (and sometimes to using the exact same PowerPoint slide deck) year after year. This presents an opportunity to examine technical training through one or more of these lenses in order to reinvigorate mandatory safety education sessions.
For example, you could leverage the HOP principles that learning is vital, and that human error is normal, and adjust your training schedule to allow for some time to discuss specific errors people have made (e.g., a close call with a pedestrian while driving a forklift). This offers trainees an opportunity to learn how to mitigate the effects of human error while also providing a different perspective from the same-old training. Likewise, reflecting on your training through a safety climate success factors lens could reveal opportunities for organizational leaders to build and maintain trust and engagement with employees.
Additionally, when we are addressing human error, we tend to default to re-training and re-writing procedures or work instructions, which can cause us to overlook human factors like fatigue, frustration and distractions, among others. Technical training sessions are a great opportunity to identify these potential human factors and then develop strategies at an organizational level to address them—and using a lens to self-assess your training can reveal several ways to do so.
Many culturally mature organizations also include non-required topics in periodic training, including leadership development, hazard identification, and incident investigation. A lens can also help you assess how these are functioning and identify avenues for meaningful improvements.
Of these discretionary training programs, building leadership capabilities can offer many opportunities to improve performance, quality and safety. When organizations articulate expectations to leaders at all levels, they are generally centered on production, quality and safety. Leaders generally know in real time how the team is performing regarding production quotas and quality expectations. But when it comes to safety, the feedback is often reactive and may not accurately reflect the true safety climate.
Leaders can use one or more of these lenses to identify and correct disconnects in the flow of safety information. By focusing on human factors in work systems and in individuals, leaders can gather real-time feedback that allows them to be proactive with safety. The aim is to understand how human factors affect people and systems, and to get real-time inputs on safety. Leaders can then use this information to intervene before a bad outcome occurs, such as when a supervisor recognizes a worker is fatigued and takes steps to mitigate the risk in the moment—while also looking to make longer-term fixes to potential systemic causes, like shift scheduling or overtime.
Organizations that use one or more of these lenses to improve performance can find practical and sustainable opportunities by focusing on specific elements of their management systems. These lenses offer potentially big opportunities to improve technical training and leadership development, and many other management system elements like risk management and communications.
Peter A. Batrowny is an industry-leading and global environmental health, safety, and physical security executive with a progressive career history.