Safety is a printing business not a risk management business.
As long as you have put the right paperwork in place and completed it the right way (usability mapping – https://safetyrisk.net/paperwork-and-usability-in-tackling-risk/ ) then all is well. How delightful to find the right template, fill it out correctly, change logos and keep the Auditor and Regulator happy. What a relief to download a template so that you don’t have to think. How wonderful to get a checklist and tick those boxes. What a breeze it is to keep some irrelevant bureaucrat happy with the form they like to see. What a strange industry that thinks the outcome of safety is the production of a piece of paper.
Of course all templates are dangerous and illegal. A template is just a trap that makes you think you have fulfilled some requirement. Paper safety is not safety (https://www.waylandlegal.com.au/post/paper-safe). The production of paperwork, no matter how you fill it out (usability mapping) simply promotes more of the delusion that paperwork has some relationship to action. When you are on the frontline where all the risk is, paperwork is irrelevant, that is not how workers make decisions (https://vimeo.com/471823469).
How Workers Make Decisions? from CLLR on Vimeo.
Of course, the purpose of any piece of paper is as an aide to thinking. A risk assessment is not the paper but what conversations and engagement one has in the field about the reality of risks in the job. The focus on templates and paper outcomes is the grand safety delusion. In all my 20 years in safety and in every fatality I have been involved in, the paperwork has always been completed. Paperwork (https://vimeo.com/162034157) and paper safety saves no one.
3. PAPERWORK from Human Dymensions on Vimeo.
I was on a mine site this week and the over-regulation is mind blowing. Every time we get yet another engineer (https://safetyrisk.net/an-engineering-dreamworld/) to do yet another review of safety (https://safetyrisk.net/brady-review-nothing-new-no-way-forward/) we end up with more bureaucracy, more templates and more delusion about the purpose of safety.
I know businesses now that have to employ two safety people, one full time to do all the paperwork and updates and the other safety person to actually do safety. What a crazy world safety is and none of the peak bodies do anything to change this insane and growing delusion with paperwork.
On the same mine site I we spent 3 days working with supervisors and safety people on the basics. Put away your checklists, leave you bits of paper behind, bin the templates and actually learn how to engage people with effective conversations about risk. There was no surprise to learn that no one knew how to ask an open question but they were so proficient at working over an auditor app. There was no surprise they knew how to collect lists of hazards but no idea of how to engage others in Workspace, Headspace and Groupspace (https://vimeo.com/143710374 ). So many templates, so much regulation and such little idea about the skills required in tackling risk.
This is the template trap, this is the grand safety delusion that all comes undone when the court smashes what this industry has concocted and reality bites that none of this is about Due Diligence. Indeed, the template trap is a demonstration of negligence.
Workspace, Headspace, Groupspace from Human Dymensions on Vimeo.
Dr Rob Long
Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)
- Safety Cosmetics - October 18, 2021
- The Myth of the SWMS Manifesto - October 16, 2021
- Visual Thinking and Risk - October 15, 2021
- Zero is a Delusion - October 12, 2021
- A Semiotic Understanding of Culture - October 10, 2021
Bernard Corden says
Most safety management plans for construction projects are merely boiler plate replicas. The only change is the project number and the date.
The tier one contractor typically engages a safety consultant for the project who then charges $300 per hour to produce the document and supplementary SWMSs and checklists.
Admin says
I frequently have a little chuckle about a daily safety prestart checklist I was once shown when up in Cairns – one of the the tick boxes was to “ensure that snow is removed from sidewalks”
Rob Long says
As long as the peak bodies and tier 1s continue the mythology it will simply become more unwieldy, more irrelevant and less meaningful to workers in the field.
Rob Long says
I saw a SWMS once on a building site that asked for the conductor to make sure the platform was clear before blowing the whistle.
The sad thing is, none of the peak bodies do anything about the bureaucratical joke indeed they encourage it.
Jason Martell says
The irony is when these things go before a court the paperwork is usually the thing that hangs the organisation trying to cover its butt.
Information, instruction, training and supervision is a requirement of the harmonised legislation for a PCBU’s duty, most get the information, etc, mostly right, although there sometimes it is a case of forest and trees. Butt coverer’s seem to forget their obligation to supervise once the information has been shared. Trying to shift responsibility onto workers without ensuring what you told the worker is expected from them is what does the damage it seems.
This behaviour is naïve and dumb in the extreme. Expecting organisations to step up to their responsibilities rather than spend the time attempting to shift blame may be naïve on my part but I also hope that Zero Harm disappears fully from the narrative of safety too. Its nice to have a dream!
Bernard Corden says
Zero harm will not disappear and it certainly won’t be renounced by our insipid peak safety body.
The intent of the Onepercent Safer cult is an otiose attempt to attenuate the irreparable damage created by zero harm but the ISSA, IOSH, AIHS, NSCA and many others remain extremely reluctant to dispense with the ideology, which masquerades corporate turpitude under a rubric of righteousness.
Bernard Corden says
A SWMS will not put out a fire although I have seen many that would provide sufficient fuel.
I can recall a risk assessment which was over eight pages long covering the use of a domestic household sanitiser Glen 20, for cleaning dining tables in a crib room on a major oil and gas project.
It took almost a week to complete and was invoiced at $2400 per day and it was approved for payment.
This horse manure remains prevalent throughout the safety sect and is now being applied to mental health risks during the coronavirus pandemic.
It further substantiates that our peak safety body has lost any remaining skerrick of its already diaphanous integrity and it has the gall to promote itself as a profession.
Shane Hodges says
#globalwarming??…. :-:
Rob Long says
Dreams aren’t real and it seems safety is great at dreaming up more nonsense by each day. Similarly, most SWMS are fiction.