• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

SafetyRisk.net

Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk

  • Home
    • About
      • Privacy Policy
      • Contact
  • FREE
    • Slogans
      • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
      • When Slogans Don’t Work
      • CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
      • BIGGEST COLLECTION of WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2023
      • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
      • COVID-19 (Coronavirus, Omicron) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
      • Safety Acronyms
      • You know Where You Can Stick Your Safety Slogans
      • Sayings, Slogans, Aphorisms and the Discourse of Simple
      • Spanish Safety Slogans – Consignas de seguridad
      • Safety Slogans List
      • Road Safety Slogans 2023
      • How to write your own safety slogans
      • Why Are Safety Slogans Important
      • Safety Slogans Don’t Save Lives
      • 40 Free Safety Slogans For the Workplace
      • Safety Slogans for Work
    • FREE SAFETY eBOOKS
    • Free Hotel and Resort Risk Management Checklist
    • FREE DOWNLOADS
    • TOP 50
    • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS
    • Find a Safety Consultant
    • Free Safety Program Documents
    • Psychology Of Safety
    • Safety Ideas That Work
    • HEALTH and SAFETY MANUALS
    • FREE SAFE WORK METHOD STATEMENT RESOURCES
    • Whats New In Safety
    • FUN SAFETY STUFF
    • Health and Safety Training
    • SAFETY COURSES
    • Safety Training Needs Analysis and Matrix
    • Top 20 Safety Books
    • This Toaster Is Hot
    • Free Covid-19 Toolbox Talks
    • Download Page – Please Be Patient With Larger Files…….
    • SAFETY IMAGES, Photos, Unsafe Pictures and Funny Fails
    • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
    • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • Social Psychology Of Risk
    • What is Psychological Health and Safety at Work?
    • Safety Psychology Terminology
    • Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk – Prof Karl E. Weick
    • The Psychology of Leadership in Risk
    • Conducting a Psychology and Culture Safety Walk
    • The Psychology of Conversion – 20 Tips to get Started
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk And Safety
    • Psychology and safety
    • The Psychology of Safety
    • Hot Toaster
    • TALKING RISK VIDEOS
    • WHAT IS SAFETY
    • THE HOT TOASTER
    • THE ZERO HARM DEBATE
    • SEMIOTICS
    • LEADERSHIP
  • Dr Long Posts
    • ALL POSTS
    • Learning Styles Matter
    • There is no Hierarchy of Controls
    • Scaffolding, Readiness and ZPD in Learning
    • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
    • Presentation Tips for Safety People
    • Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts
    • It’s Only a Symbol
    • Ten Cautions About Safety Checklists
    • Zero is Unethical
    • First Report on Zero Survey
    • There is No Objectivity, Deal With it!
  • THEMES
    • Psychosocial Safety
    • Resiliencing
    • Risk Myths
    • Safety Myths
    • Safety Culture Silences
    • Safety Culture
    • Psychological Health and Safety
    • Zero Harm
    • Due Diligence
  • Free Learning
    • Introduction to SPoR – Free
    • FREE RISK and SAFETY EBOOKS
    • FREE ebook – Guidance for the beginning OHS professional
    • Free EBook – Effective Safety Management Systems
    • Free EBook – Lessons I Have Learnt
  • Psychosocial Safety
    • What is Psychosocial Safety
    • Psychological Safety
      • What is Psychological Health and Safety at Work?
      • Managing psychosocial hazards at work
      • Psychological Safety – has it become the next Maslow’s hammer?
      • What is Psychosocial Safety
      • Psychological Safety Slogans and Quotes
      • What is Psychological Safety?
      • Understanding Psychological Terminology
      • Psycho-Social and Socio-Psychological, What’s the Difference?
      • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures
      • It’s not weird – it’s a psychological safety initiative!
You are here: Home / Communication and Consultation / Doing Away With Health and Safety–Language and People

Doing Away With Health and Safety–Language and People

July 30, 2022 by Admin 1 Comment

Safe Shirt Friday‘Whenever Safety is used as an adjective whatever follows is moronic’ – Dr Rob Long

In his book “Drift Into Failure”, the attention Sidney Dekker gives to the importance of language is critical as he states:

‘What we need is a language that can help us get to a more functional account … whose constructions of meaning co-evolve relative to a set of environmental conditions, and who try to maintain a dynamic and reciprocal relation with the understanding of those conditions.’ (p. 49).

This is a summary of the presentation that Rob Kirkwood and Geoffrey Bourke from EnergyWorks delivered at the recent Safeguard National Health and Safety Conference. First published by Rob Kirkwood here

Doing away with health and safety

“We decided about three years ago we wanted to remove the term ‘health and safety’ from our vocabulary because there’s some really dumb s*** that goes on and we don’t want to be associated with it.”

Not what you’d expect to hear from an organisational performance manager, but Rob Kirkwood of Energyworks went on to tell delegates at last month’s Safeguard conference how the company’s counter-intuitive approach to looking after its people has not only strengthened H&S performance but benefitted the business as a whole

When Kirkwood came to the oil and gas industry from a 20-year career in mountain guiding he was bemused to find people talking about legislation, risk assessments and JSAs, yet sometimes still making bad decisions. “In the mountains you don’t have all the procedures, but you have a lot of competent people, a lot of direct supervision and a lot of capacity,” he said. “It made me really uncomfortable to see it wasn’t like that in the industrial scene.”

A presentation by Safety-II exponent Dr John Green provided a catalyst, and Kirkwood began collaborating with Energyworks managing director Geoff Bourke to find ways to put Green’s ideas into practice. “We fumbled away in the background for a while, then three or four years ago we decided, let’s just do it – push play and go forward.”

What they rolled out was a radical new way of doing business – “A people-centric approach rather than a compliance-centric one.” There’s a no-blame culture, in which mistakes – even expensive ones – are valued as learning opportunities, workers are active participants in important operational decision making, and physical or mental incapacity is accommodated in worker-friendly ways. The results, Kirkwood said, have been “significant”, although the new way of doing things is not always an easy fit in the compliance-heavy oil and gas industry, and there have been clashes.

Sharing the podium, Bourke said the company’s readiness to put injured workers on leave has been a source of friction at times. “I’ve had some challenging conversations with clients who think an LTI should be an MTI, but I don’t have any problem sending someone home to recuperate instead of bringing them in and demoralising them – having them licking stamps in a white collar environment.

“Morally it’s the right thing to do. It shows we care about the person over the statistics.” Another key aspect of the strong people focus is a ready acceptance that mistakes are part of life. “We embrace bad news,” Kirkwood said. “When our people make a stuff-up or see something that needs reporting they tell us, because they know we understand they didn’t do it on purpose, and blame isn’t part of what we do.”

A culture that blames and punishes when things go wrong is one where learning and improvement won’t occur, he said. “You need a really safe psychological environment, and deep-seated compassion and empathy in your top leaders, before that stuff is going to work. “And if you’re not using learning teams, you need to, because the results are far superior to any other process.”

In this environment, Bourke said, the company can always find positives in adverse events. He cited a situation where a misunderstanding resulted in a work team drilling through the reinforcing steel in a structural column at a high-hazard site. No one realised there was a problem until Bourke, a structural engineer by training, checked in with the site supervisor when the job was done.

“As soon as he told me they’d hit steel I knew it wasn’t a good scenario, so I was straight on the phone.” It cost Energyworks $50,000 to fix the problem, but Bourke believes it was money well spent.

“We have a company-wide tool box talk every Wednesday and were able to do a really good presentation around what we’d learnt. “We turned the event into a solid learning experience for our teams, and actually grew our relationship with the client because they were so grateful for the way we responded.”

Please share our posts

  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Communication and Consultation, Psychological Health and Safety Tagged With: dekker, language, safety 2

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Rob Long says

    July 31, 2022 at 7:52 PM

    What a wonderful resolution. Most often that not Safety speaks nonsense to people. Any casual analysis of safety language reveals an industry struggling for an identity whilst projecting the mythology of professionalism, with no ethic.

    Reply

Do you have any thoughts? Please share them belowCancel reply

Primary Sidebar

Search and Discover More on this Site

Never miss a post - Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,509 other subscribers.

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Recent Comments

  • Rob Long on The Blessings of Fallibility
  • Simon Cassin on The Blessings of Fallibility
  • Rob Long on Validating, Endorsing and Supporting Zero
  • Rob Long on The Global ‘Zero Event’, This is Safety
  • Rob Long on The Global ‘Zero Event’, This is Safety
  • Matthew Thorne on Validating, Endorsing and Supporting Zero
  • rosa a carrillo on The Global ‘Zero Event’, This is Safety
  • Matthew Thorne on The Global ‘Zero Event’, This is Safety
  • Rob Long on Hopkins-Dekker on Reason and Other Laughs
  • Matt Thorne on Myth Making and Why it Matters to Safety
  • Rob Long on What’s Funny About Safety?
  • Rob Long on Perfection is Safety Child’s Play
  • Rosa Carrillo on Hopkins-Dekker on Reason and Other Laughs
  • Brent Charlton on Perfection is Safety Child’s Play
  • Anonymous on What’s Funny About Safety?
  • Rob Long on Zero Hour part 6 Knowing Yourself
  • Rob Long on Safety Cops and Safety’s Adoration of Power
  • Rob Long on Book Launch – “Zero, The Great Safety Delusion” – Free Download
  • Rob long on Don’t Be Dumb Like Me, the Typical Safety Keynote
  • Anonymous on Don’t Be Dumb Like Me, the Typical Safety Keynote

RECOMMENDED READING

viral post – iso 45003 and what it cannot do

Introduction to SPOR – FREE!!

Psychosocial Safety and Mental Health Series

Have You Had a Drink of SafeTea?

If You Can’t Manage Fallibility, You’ll Never Tackle Psychosocial Health

Embodiment, Myth and Psychosocial Risk

7 Golden Rules that are NOT Golden

Why Zero Vision Can Never Tackle Mental Health

If Psychosocial Health Matters, Stop Hot Desking

Effective Strategies in Mental Health at Work

CLLR Newsletter July 2023

Playing With Mental Health in Safety is Dangerous

STOP ‘BREAKING’ PEOPLE! The notion of Psychological Safety

More Posts from this Category

NEW! Free Download

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Footer

Top Posts & Pages. Sad that most are so dumb but this is what safety luves

  • CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
  • When You Don’t Know, Just Make S4*t Up
  • BIGGEST COLLECTION of WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2023
  • Free Safety Moments and Toolbox Talk Examples, Tips and Resources
  • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS, CHECKISTS, REGISTERS, TEMPLATES and APPS
  • Workplace Safety Poems
  • CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
  • Free Risk Assessment Template in Excel Format
  • Road Safety Slogans 2023
  • 15 Safety Precautions When Working With Electricity

Recent Posts

  • When You Don’t Know, Just Make S4*t Up
  • The Critical Outcome is to Improve Safety
  • Zero is Founded on Deceit and Lies
  • Have You Had a Drink of SafeTea?
  • The Blessings of Fallibility
  • Safety as Zero, The Perfect Event
  • Validating, Endorsing and Supporting Zero
  • The Global ‘Zero Event’, This is Safety
  • If You Can’t Manage Fallibility, You’ll Never Tackle Psychosocial Health
  • Embodiment, Myth and Psychosocial Risk
  • Embodied Enactivity in Safety
  • The Meaning of Myth in Risk
  • Myth Making and Why it Matters to Safety
  • Icebreakers and Games that Safety Trainers Play
  • The Power of Safety Myths
  • What Do You Mean By Performance?
  • Hopkins-Dekker on Reason and Other Laughs
  • Perfection is Safety Child’s Play
  • Podcast – Dr Rob Long With John Morlan and The Risk Matrix
  • What’s Funny About Safety?
  • Zero Hour part 6 Knowing Yourself
  • Free Videos, Podcasts and Books on Zero
  • Don’t Be Dumb Like Me, the Typical Safety Keynote
  • If You’re Happy in Safety, Clap Your Hands
  • Safety Cops and Safety’s Adoration of Power
  • Zero Hour Part 5 – Surfacing the Unconscious
  • Zero Hour Part 4 – Zero and the Unconscious
  • Auditing the 7 Golden Rules of Zero, A Miserable Fail
  • 7 Golden Rules that are NOT Golden
  • The Non-Golden Rules for Leadership in Zero
  • Seven ‘Golden’ Rules for Zero and Yet No Ethic
  • Why Zero Vision Can Never Tackle Mental Health
  • Is this Your Safety?
  • SPoR Workshops Canberra 18-21 September
  • The Dominance of Zero as the ‘Common Denominator’ of Safety
  • Zero Hour Episode 3
  • Goal Setting and Zero
  • Zero as a Worldview
  • If Psychosocial Health Matters, Stop Hot Desking
  • Book Launch – “Zero, The Great Safety Delusion” – Free Download
  • Breach of Faith and Psycho-Social Risk
  • Zero Harm is Never Zero Harm
  • Why Would You Want to be a Safety “Geek’ or Hero?
  • The Mental Illness of Identifying as Safety
  • Zero Hour – Zero as a place holder
  • Zero Hour – Zero as a Philosophy
  • CARING ABOUT PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY
  • Care is NOT a Factor and Yes, Your Model Matters
  • Care Ethics and the Ethics of Care, in Risk
  • FEAR AND CONTROL – Dialogue in a technological society

VIRAL POST!!! HOW TO QUIT THE SAFETY INDUSTRY

FEATURED POSTS

How to Do the Best Risk Assessment

Subjecting and Objecting About Risk

A Culture of Care (and sackings…)

The Emperor has no Clothes – Beyond Behaviour-Based Safety

Not Much Like Safety…

The Safety Worldview

Just Culture or Toe Cutting

Diagnosing Safety

And the Enemy of Safety is? … Humans!

Safety is the Wrong Anchor

Hoodwinked by Heinrich

Holistic Well Being in Risk Differently

The Fallible Factor and What to Do About It

The Seduction to Simplify Safety

Daydreaming and Safety

SPoR Workshops Vienna 26-30 June

Non-Binary Decision Making in Risk

You Can’t Will Attentiveness

Desensitisation–the by-product of ill-conceived safety initiatives

Safety is an Art

We can Value Safety but Safety is not a Value

The Sully Effect

Sergeant Safety

The Banned Objects Index – A New Development in Safety Culture

Understanding Conscience and Safety

Risky Conversations Book Launch in Perth

Nothing is Learned Through Brutalism

Failure Must be an Option

Understanding Habit, Habituation and Change

Concept Mapping Risk iCue

The Dynamics of Dehumanisation

Embodied Risk

Perfectionism in Safety and the Denial of Humanity

Investigations and Power

New Year Safety Trade-Offs and By-Products

Safety-as-Persona

The Sacred Bra Tree

Safety Leadership Training

Personhood and Risk

The Visionary Imagination and Marion Mahoney Griffin

More Posts from this Category

VIRAL POST – The Risk Matrix Myth

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address and join other discerning risk and safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Join 7,509 other subscribers.

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY?

What is Psychological Safety at Work?


WHAT IS PSYCHOSOCIAL SAFETY