Management need to work hard to prevent safety protocols from slipping
At this year’s CHEM UK, two Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) seminars highlighted the influence of leaders and their role in forming a safe (or unsafe) working environment.
These talks, titled ‘Safety Panel Discussion: Leaders – it’s time to refocus on process safety management’ and ‘Safety Culture: Key considerations in pharmaceutical manufacturing’, come months after IMechE’s response to the UK government’s industrial strategy green paper last year.
The green paper stated that a successful industrial strategy can only be delivered if the government works in partnership with all sectors. In the long term, a stable regulatory environment is essential to this.
A vital part to this sort of regulation is safety, which formed a central part of both ImechE seminars.
Both talks reached the same conclusion which underlined the importance of both plant upkeep and proactive leadership.
IMechE process industries division board member Alan D’Ambrogio, talked about the impact of ‘creeping change’ within a plant, referring to a series of small changes that can go unnoticed over time.
These changes can happen as a result of degradation, risk assessments, and changes in equipment, management or ownership. As these changes are gradual, they are difficult to notice from one day to the next, and as a result, psychological shortcuts made by safety managers are normalised.
Most shortcuts are harmless, nothing more than the brain’s way of making sense of the world but where safety is a consideration, such practices can lead to blind spots.
Pharmaceutical committee chair for IMechE’s Process Industries Division Claire Edwards made the same point in her seminar on safety culture.
She likens most of the brain’s shortcuts to putting on your shoes; you do not need to remind yourself every morning what a shoe is and why your foot needs it because your brain has created a shortcut allowing you to understand this.
“Humans are hard-wired to create these heuristics,” she said, “it is therefore inevitable that that plants will degrade, and that operators will try to fill in the gaps. Because of these inevitabilities, a firm safety culture formed out of proactive leadership is key.
Often, people feel pressure to meet workplace standards that prioritise quotas over safety. “As leaders, we can exacerbate this because we’re looking for speed,” she added.
Those in leadership positions have a particular influence over how seriously safety procedures are observed and how well staff are protected in the workplace. If an employee comes to management with an observation about something they believe is unsafe, listening to their concerns is important.
“If anything has that potential to be a serious incident or injury, make sure that is really deeply invested in and investigated,” says Edwards.
More important, however, is to read between the lines of your employee’s behaviour instead of discounting it as laziness.
“Was it actually that they were anxious? Was the task problematic from a safety perspective?” says Edwards. “Leaders should not accept a face-value answer, it might be deeper, be curious and try to understand what’s going on.”
It pays off, then, to have ears and eyes open as a leader to encourage others to feel empowered to bring potential issues to the table. After all, as D’Ambrogio said during his talk: “Learning from other peoples’ fear of accidents is a lot better than learning from an accident after the event”.
For more information visit: www.imeche.org
