10 Sure Fire Ways To Stuff Up a Safety Management System

10 Sure Fire Ways To Stuff Up a Safety Management System

This paper is a summary of the paper 30 Sure Fire Ways To Stuff Up a Safety Management System which is available from fgrobotham@gmail.com. The paper What Makes A Safety Management System Fly goes into detail on establishing a safety management system.

10 ways to stuff up a safety management system

1. Lack of management commitment, leadership and drive from the top of the organisation.
2. Too much concentration on lag indicators such as the Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate at the expense of leading indicators.
3. Thinking minor personal damage is a good predictor of life-altering personal damage.
4. Not using the continuous improvement philosophy and other facets of Quality Management in your safety approach.
5. Lack of succinct paperwork. There is not much point in having detailed paperwork that is too much like hard work to read.
6. Not using face to face communications whenever possible. Research by Harvard professor T.J. Larkin suggests when communicating change with the workforce use the supervisor not senior management, use face to face communications and frame communications relevant to the immediate work area and processes.
7. Not using a needs analysis to guide all your actions.
8. Not training formal and informal leaders in Safety Leadership.
9. Not having simple, succinct Safe Working Procedures, aim for 2 pages at the most, use pictures, diagrams, flow-charts etc.
10. Not using team-building approaches in your safety approach

F.G. (George) Robotham,

George can be contacted on fgrobotham@gmail.com, he welcomes debate on the above (it would be indeed a boring world if everybody agreed with George)