In line with increases in support for Worksafe WA, the bill for industrial manslaughter is in place and starting a few conversations. While it’s reserved for the more extreme cases, it’s not to be ignored if you’re working in a position of responsibility in a workplace with hazards significant enough to cause a fatality.
Without effort in the HSEQ space, plenty of workplaces still get finely rewarded for their laziness. It’s fundamental. It’s easier, often faster and you often then make more money etc. etc.
It’s a common thing to see work occurring for an organisation which I know has strict HSEQ requirements of their team members and/or contractors. At a contractual level, the businesses doing things well can often get beaten into submission by the race to the bottom when they get out bid by a competitor who undercuts them – but them makes profit by failing to follow through with any of their HSEQ commitments.
Now I’m not talking about general ones about “duty of care” and “work safely” which can have a wide range of interpretations. I’m talking about ones where the commercial client has made those tendering for the work to state they’ll comply with very specific requirements and provide evidence of this in order to be in the running. That’s not a bad thing and in today’s age of cost effectiveness and efficiency, I’m the first one to agree with reducing wastage and that includes money wasted in the HSEQ space. The issue is when a contractor bids at a price they know they cannot achieve, so does the high risk work at 3-4am in the morning – clearly and knowingly breaching the explicit requirements they said they’d achieve in order to generate a profit margin where before there was none.
The sad thing is that, it’s probable they’ll get away with it most of the time. That’s the nature of risk – you’re basing things off a probability, and it might work out ok. It also might not.
The ISO 31000:2018 definition of risk is “the effect of uncertainty on objectives”, so are you willing to put catastrophic consequence potential into a job just to make a profit? I hear and see (including just today…) this still commonly.
But, I am not here to police people to do the right thing when they’re only going to hurt themselves. If they wish to do dumb stuff, then that’s their call. What I am concerned about is the ubiquitous race to the bottom for price and the impact it has on those doing the right thing to cut corners in order to win work. My morale challenge is knowing despite increasing pressure to demonstrate how they’ll do the right thing, but budgets and market pressure encouraging them to not follow through. It’s perfectly understandable that people give up and leave their relevant industries or just end up cutting corners knowing they’ll likely get more reward for the wrong thing than the right thing……..well that is until someone falls out of their EWP or gets hit by a car that never saw them working there.
My advice is always that the cowboys are getting less and less now given most people don’t do the wrong thing out of clear knowledgeable violation. They generally do it thinking they’re OK. So while organisations are asking for contractors to demonstrate they’re going to be doing the right thing, those who don’t know what the right thing is are going to win less and less work, and get forced into smaller and smaller sections of the market. Once this is occurring, the impact of price becomes less of an issue because then the true positive impact of reliability and good HSEQ outcomes will be far more profitable than risking everything on a small gain.
To summarise, I’ll say to keep on doing the right thing regardless of these cowboys out there. They’ll be winning less work and be having more incidents. When you’re talking about significant falls from heights, or a fire at a fuel station, or a worker or member of the public getting hit by a vehicle in your workplace, it’s not likely to be cheaper than all the profit margins you’d save by cutting a few corners. In fact, for most small to medium sized businesses, it’s unlikely they’ll still be in business afterwards.
And all that will be left are those doing the right thing. Then you’ll be thankful for the outcomes you deserved from your hard work. And the cowboys will be regretting the outcomes they deserved…
Worksafe are still campaigning the wine industry throughout 2019. It’s always better to be proactive, so drop us a line and we can have a chat about some things you can do to help.
All puns aside, look after yourself at this holiday period.
Another tragic event where a family operated business has suffered the loss of one of it’s team in a workplace incident.
Without knowing the details, and based only on the media reports, we are reluctant to draw conclusions from this event. In saying that, there is no point waiting for a formal report to use the event as a learning opportunity and reminder about line of fire. This does not mean that it was a large factor in this particular incident, but there are few injuries in workplaces that the worker is not in some way exposed and would be safer in a different position.
Having worked in the same industry in the same job in the same suburb seeing the same types of situations, it hits harder than most.
This meme captures the very much the premise of any good incident investigation.
No matter how much one think they’ve got the answer or likely cause of an incident, by going into it in that mindset, they’ve failed before they’ve started.
It is the single most common barrier I see with an organisations own investigations. They may sometimes be in the ballpark, but it’s very rare they’ll be seeing much more than the basics or immediate causes. They’re missing valuable learnings and almost definitely destined to repeat incidents caused by many similar factors if they don’t approach it with an open, yet curious mind.
It’s costly and just bad business to jump to a conclusion too promptly or before gathering the spectrum of data.
So our advice is to make a conscious effort to don’t close your mind with an existing likely cause of an incident investigation. Do the data collection and then rule out what’s not a factor and you’ll often be surprised that there are many more significant factors than one where an individual has screwed up or a single factor has failed. Once you’ve gotten these elements of data together, then put them on a single page and rank them in a hierarchy of most to least significant or systemic. You may actually be surprised that you weren’t as accurate with your initial reasoning as you thought.
Another sad day where a worker was killed at work. The farming community is often close making it even more painful when these things happen.
Please, if the only thing between life and death is a slip of the clutch or selection of the wrong gear, then re-think how you’re doing the job. Regardless of rules or compliance, look after those around you in the workplace and speak up if you think there may be a better way to do the job. After all, no one wants to go through this.
Seek out the painful facts, debate them in a way that gets everything, whether moose, elephant or boogey monster into the table so the final outcomes is the best one you can come up with.
Pretending it’s not an issue or avoiding the hazard because of a fear of conflict is a sure way to have it simmer, grow and rot away at things until the level of harm it shows is more than you’re prepared for. Hiding it is not the way to learn.
A learning culture needs debate but in a healthy way, and it will likely have elements of conflict. Ray Dalio goes deep on the topic in his book Principles, and worth a read for anyone interested in how to get painful topics debates openly. It’s critical to achieving greatness, yet to often avoided. The outcome? Incidents that people say – Wow, where did that come from? Well it was inside all along.
Are you focussed on addressing the right risks?
Too often misinformation can redirect valuable finite resources from the right risks to other less critical places due to fear or distraction.
Use a professional to help you determine where your risk management efforts should be spent.