Want a good measure to identify how much you can improve your inspection and assurance activities and those conducting them? Consider the below:
- How open are your teams to being inspected by ‘outsiders’? Not just internal personnel but those of different organisations or industries.
- How is this feedback received and actioned?
- Does the team offer to share and inspect others worksites and processes to assist and bring back knowledge?
Unfortunately, the above normally elicits answers from personnel such as:
- If you have to inspect the work I’m doing you don’t trust me
- I’m a subject matter expert who has done this for X years, I know what I am doing
- We don’t need others to tell us what to do
- That would be a waste of time and we wouldn’t learn anything
Intriguingly, often I’ve found that very competent and experienced management personnel when placed in someone else’s area default to other indicators, outside of the work being performed, especially if there is a pre-existing relationship to determine the bar that the work is reviewed.
For instance, a manager who is under pressure to improve is their area may attempt to deflect attention by trying to find and raise non-material safety issues or known issues with limited ability for change. Alternatively, someone who is indebted relies upon or is friends with another areas management team may only provide little rigour to the review in an attempt to curry favour.
I’d like to focus on the latter here, as anecdotally I have seen this play out more often and I choose to believe that most wouldn’t make safety a workplace politics issue, in summary; They are a good person and I’m sure they are doing what needs to be done, if I look too hard they might think that I don’t trust them.
Let’s flip that on the head, typically outside of work the people we love and care about are normally the people we check on the most. I check my 2yr olds seatbelt a 1000 times in the rare case we are in an accident, I even check it if my wife or daughter buckles him in. It’s not because I don’t trust them, it’s because I care enough for them to see if they did it right. Huh, you ask?
We often fail to appreciate the effects of a serious event on the second victims, namely those involved in an incident that (potentially) harms or kills somebody else, and for which they feel personally responsible. Professional culture and the psychology of blame (and shame) influence how second victims are viewed and dealt with.
Most people acknowledge that part of the human condition is to make mistakes, it is nigh impossible to operate perfectly each time due to the ever increasingly complexity and complicatedness of the environment we interact with (include the self-made demands on ourselves). Rarely though do we move past acknowledgement to the point of actioning and then verbalising the why we review others actions.
I would encourage readers to explore the concept of second victims (Dekker amongst others provides resources here – Video, Web, Article, Book) and raise this ‘concept of care’ when reviewing others work to dispell the myth of lack of trust.
Trust is a beautiful thing yet is misplaced if we use it as a crutch for avoiding difficult conversations and real care for the people we work with.
Reframe my Safety Brain 