Presence of Power

Inductions are something that most Safety personnel would have delivered at one stage of their career. For most these are seen as an obligatory step and can quickly become stale due to either the content or the presenter.

One slide that I would guess would be in everyone’s induction slide deck would be identifying that individuals have the right to cease work and notify a member of management should there be immediate risk to life of either themselves or others.

Often this is one of those slides which becomes banal as ‘Safety is everyone’s responsibility’ and it rarely has the weight attached to it which it should.

The most impact I have seen in relation to conveying this message was having the most senior operational person in the room delivering this important message.

I remember sitting in a site induction when the mine manager came into the room and delivered this message with such gusto and impact it stayed with me. He picked up off the table the site rule book and flipped it over, the back was bright red and in big writing it said “I empower whoever holds this book to stop any task which they believe will injure someone on the mine managers authority” He said you now have the same power as me, use it wisely but use it.

He meant it too, we all felt it and damn straight did a few of us use it. We were sniggered at within our own organisation, yet when it eventually made its way through to the mine manager and he found out who we were, he paid us a special visit at the wet mess (mine tavern). He thanked us for using the process and bought us a round of drinks. He even stayed with us while we had them and made small talk about how important our work was for the mine, little did we know the road we were widening was due to a death the site had where a driver didn’t see a kangaroo come out from behind some scrub very close to the road. That job was finished on time with no injuries, wonder why..

Wouldn’t it be great if our leaders volunteered to be part of delivering important messages like that and then backed it up with action?