In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Scott DeBow, CSP, ARM, Director of Health, Safety, and Environmental at Avetta, explains how to look at reporting metrics to ensure contractor safety.
This clip is taken from a webinar titled From Passive Acknowledgment to Active Belief & Capability in SIF Prevention, which is available for free on-demand here. This webinar is sponsored by Avetta.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
DeBow: Here’s the challenge, and I hinted at this earlier when I said what’s at risk if we don’t get better? What’s at risk if we don’t improve? Well, the same. We’re going to see the same and perhaps worse as our world of work becomes increasingly complex, our world of work in terms of traditional employees, company, corporate employees working alongside multiple contractors, subcontractors, temporary labor agencies.
This is complexity, right? It’s getting bigger. How are we doing better at this? This is what’s at stake. And if we just break this down in terms of contractor 1, 2, and 3, so we see company A has four fatalities, one event, a terrible event. Someone’s vehicle was struck by a drunk driver, four fatalities from one event. We don’t want to see any of these, but these are unfortunately from real events.
Company B could be in our procurement system or our health and safety system and we only see two fatalities. Separate events, right? Well, it’s hard to see is that we may not know that these are separate events. One fall from height, one trench collapse.
The difference between the first example and second example is what’s in the control of the employer to prevent, to intentionally focus on preventing. Company B should be giving us more insight and context.
Company C, this is the company that comes in and turns power back on for our hospitals and cities and municipalities after a big storm. And so we may see well set separate fatalities, four total fatalities, but it’s hard to see context with the current status quo.
And by the way, when we start thinking about who do we want in our work system or what kind of decisions are we really making, it’s hard to see what’s going on. So what we really have is an old model that’s alongside new expectations.
So let me just ask you to put in the chat here if in the past three years, if you have come across safety 1 and 2. The safety 1 and 2 in terms of how you’re applying thinking into your safety practice or if you’ve come across human and organizational performance, HOP? If you’ve begun learning about and applying HOP or maybe SIF intervention strategy?
What’s the thing that’s been the bolt of lightning in terms of the safety world in terms of helping you drive better expectations, better practice? Drop that in the chat and share with the rest of us because as we read through this, what we’ll see is we have better going on. We have pockets in and independent areas of new expectations for how we think and how we practice and what we insist on in terms of better outcomes. But we’re kind of stuck in this old model.
And so the example I give here is we can see that traditional expectations in terms of who owns the fatality between a contractor and the hiring employer isn’t really taking us forward. I know that exists in the world of compliance, in the world of transferring risk from one employer to the other. That’s a part of it.
But that’s all that there’s been. And so contractually transferring risk to a third party in a way that says, well, that is their citation, that’s doing nothing to help us meaningfully advance the prevention of serious injuries and fatalities in our world today.
Why this matters is, I mentioned it earlier: we have more contractors, more subcontractors, more late temporary labor agencies in our world of work today. It’s more complex, therefore, our new expectations are right.
What we’re learning about systems frameworks and our approach and we really just are left with the status quo is no longer taking us forward. So what’s taking us forward?