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Three Key Reasons why Organizations Fail to Effectively Prevent Accidents
Health, Safety, and Environment
2017-03-23
First Reason
Firstly, that the health and safety objectives are not clear. Frequently organizations do not understand why it is in their best interest to manage the health and safety aspects of their business. Whilst Occupational Health and Safety practitioners will put to their senior managers, the moral, economic and legal arguments for their case. Often business leaders will not understand nor believe these are persuasive factors. And often they do not know what their own business risk profile is. The real reason most leaders will act to improve health and safety is the financial business case, which is often obscured in making those other arguments. By doing this, there is a tendency to view health and safety negatively and with little commitment or passion. Therefore, resources deployed in implementing effective policies are minimal and lack leader’s commitment and involvement. What should be done to change those attitudes? The answer is to make a business case, express the argument as a financial judgment where leaders can see the price of failure. Show the headings of those costs such as loss of production, loss of orders, loss of reputation, loss of customers and the cost of repairs and temporary staff and don’t forget those punitive fines. Furthermore, for larger scale organizations there is the impact of a fall in their share price.
Second Reason
Secondly, it is often the fact that leaders are not visible and not actively engaged in promoting health and safety. It follows that if leaders don’t know what the objectives of their health and safety policy are, they will not understand the importance of it. Consequently, they will not commit themselves to its effective implementation. They will, therefore, delegate responsibility to someone else. Perhaps to a safety practitioner or another manager who can be equally uncertain or uncommitted. In the worst case, the delegation of the responsibility will continue downwards to the frontline employee who is after all the person most at risk. They will work out the health and safety performance level for themselves, they will undertake work around, they will have to take the blame if something goes and harm results. In this type of regime, because leaders are unclear about performance standards and why they should be enforced, they will not check for the simple signs of compliance. This could be the most basic level, failure to wear personal protective equipment. Indeed, very often the leader personally fails to comply with their own standards.
Third Reason
Finally, organizations are not learning from experience. They fail to take on board conclusions of accident reports and fail to implement the recommendations. Mistakes continually happen in any business, some of which are not obviously relevant to health and safety practices. Nevertheless, if either the product or service or working practices are not to standard, health and safety performance will be threatened. For instance, the failure to maintain a float switch in a petrol storage tank resulted in a loss of product when it over floated in large quantities, which is what happened in Buncefield in the UK where the inevitable source of ignition caused an explosion. Whilst there were a few injuries, this failure in maintenance resulted in a cost of £2 Billion for the damages for equipment, to persons, and fines levied. On a different scale, mistakes often lead to minor injuries or indeed no damage at all. For instance, the investigation if any of a simple slip, will often focus on the individual and their lack of attention to where they were walking. However, investigators need to focus on the facts and underlying causes in order to prevent future incidents. These may not necessarily be slips, but by addressing failings in one area it will lead to improvements in other activities. It is the failure of many investigation methodologies not to provide for an action plan to address the underlying causes of accidents. In turn, this results in failures to identify strategic actions that leaders should take, so quite often, improvements are localized whereas they should be corporate-wide. So, I will leave you with the thought:“Good health and safety is good business”. Thank you for watching.
Speaker
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Christopher Ward |
