You can have all the safety systems in the world, but they are useless without buy in from the people them
Every workplace is required to have safety systems in place for its people. But there is a gulf of difference between having a safety and having a safety system that enables and encourages safe work practices.
In this blog post, we look at how everyone involved in a project has an active role to play in developing a safety system that is focussed on the people it is meant to protect and not just the having a system for the sake of it.
The purpose of a system is what it does
This phrase, coined by the management consultant Stafford Beer, is used to counter the idea that the intentions of the creator or implementer of a system can control what the purpose of that system is.
In terms of workplaces, it can be used to interrogate just how meaningful the practices and procedures relating to safety are based on what their actual function is, as opposed to what their intended function is.
Are the procedures, methods and practices followed? Or are they just documents that sit in a folder on a shelf in an office never looked at, never read, never followed?
What does your safety system – in the broadest sense – do? What is its purpose?
Does it protect people? Or does it just mean that a box has been ticked?
Designing safety with people in mind
To make the purpose of the system to be one of protecting people, the system must be designed from the ground up with people in mind, and it must have buy in from all parties involved. This includes everyone from the individual workers attending site all the way through their employers, the builder, and the site owner or developer.
So what does designing a people-first safety involve? Let’s break it down.
Fundamentally, it must be understood that a task or given piece of work takes an amount of time to complete and often requires a certain number of people to complete it along with specific equipment.
The environment in which the work will be completed will likely have a few different hazards present in it. These must be identified, mitigations of those hazards developed and then implemented. This also takes time, people to complete and is likely to require equipment.
While many workplace hazards, especially in the building and construction sectors, are common in how they present, their specific risk factors will vary from job to job and site to site.
When considering all this, it is important to understand what the worker is doing, and how many proposed mitigations is going to impact their work. One of the leading causes of workers disregarding safety systems is their perception that using one will make the job harder or more difficult to complete.
For example, it is not enough for the safety plan for working at heights to be “use a fall protection system”. Consideration needs to be given to the exact types of fall risks that are present, what the potential mitigation techniques could be, their impact on the type of working being done and the length of time workers are going to be exposed to the risk in individual instances and over the course of the entire project.
But how do we go about putting that framework into practice?
Putting people-centric safety into practice
How a people-centric safety system gets implemented will look different depending on the role.
Running down from the list, starting at the very top.
For site owners or developers, it can look like having an understanding about the time, and people needed to complete a job and keeping that front of mind when comparing proposals and quotations.
The nature of a competitive environment is for each party bidding for the work to aim to submit the lowest price possible. This creates an incentive where timelines get compressed, the number of people proposed to carry out the work get reduced. This leads to time not being allowed for safety systems, and the creation of an environment where an attitude of “just get it done” takes over. This increases risks on a variety of fronts and can lead to accidents occurring.
Having an understanding around what is required and what timeframes are realistic, looking beyond the dollar figure, has a big influence in the attitudes towards safety overall that will be present once work commences.
For principal contractors and builders, much the same logic applies when receiving proposals from subcontractors for specific parts of the work. Although a contract manager would not be expected to know all the exact details of what is required to install and air-conditioning system, for example there should be a level of knowledge present that can identify when a proposal is making promises that mean the work cannot be completed safely.
At the subcontractor level putting people-centric safety into practice takes on a variety of different forms. It starts with making sure that workers are given adequate time to complete work. This must happen in both the original proposal or quote stage and when the work is scheduled for completion.
All the equipment required to complete the work safely should also be supplied.
Subcontractors should also invest in training their team and creating an environment where they are not pressured into placing themselves in situations with otherwise avoidable risk.
Once all that is done, the system is in place and an environment is created where workers are expected to follow the safety procedures and encouraged to stop work and raise safety issues rather than just put their heads down and get on with the job.
It is all or nothing, sadly
The unfortunate reality of building a safety system that is more than just a box-ticking exercise is that it requires buy in from every level of the chain to work. The moment a single link decides to make a different choice to everyone else, it can all fall apart.
If just one party makes a choice that removes the focus on creating a people-centric safety system, then the system will fail.
It could be the owner or builder decided to go with the cheapest quote, even though what it proposes is completely unrealistic.
It could be the subcontractor decided that even though they won the job with a proposal that allowed for adequate time, being able to reduce that would make the job more profitable for them.
In every case, it is the workers that are going to be placed at risk of physical harm once the safety system breaks down like this.
