Gibbs Leading Positive Safety

Why 86% of safety cultures are negative, and how yours doesn't have to be
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-923078-42-0
Verlag: Vivid Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Reihe: Leading Positive Safety

Despite the tremendous evolution of workplace safety, from the industrial revolution to the challenges of the 2020 global pandemic and beyond, 86% of organisations are still operating with a negative safety culture. What holds us back, trapped in a compliance-driven mindset that stifles innovation and engagement? And how can we broaden our understanding of safety to manage the physical and psychosocial risks we face today? The heart of the book lies in a paradigm shift - one that focuses on the presence of safety rather than its absence. This shift begins with investing in the three dimensions of the safety experience - physical, social, and psychological - to inspire safe, well and engaged brains within the workplace that create the conditions for a safe and successful, thriving business. Drawing from over two decades of extensive research and client engagement, the authors introduce eight principles grounded in science, presented through the enlightening real-world insights from safety professionals across diverse industries. This book provides a practical playbook for leaders at every level, offering clear, actionable steps to create a positive safety culture that delivers improved safety results and operational productivity and performance. Leading Positive Safety is not just a book; it is a call to action. Equip yourself with the tools to attract and retain top talent, uplift leadership capabilities, and create teams that are diverse, inclusive, and supportive. In doing so, become a great place to work where safety improvement naturally cascades into business profitability. The safety journey has evolved. It is time to make safety positive.

As the visionary CEO of Sentis, Anthony Gibbs spearheads the organisation's transformative mission to enhance the lives of individuals and organisations each day. Anthony embarked on his career in psychology within the complex addiction and clinical areas, later applying his expertise in interpersonal dynamics and behaviour change to the intricate landscape of organisational settings. During his impactful 15-year tenure at Sentis, Anthony has cultivated robust relationships and partnerships with organisations worldwide, helping them to understand safety drivers within their workplace, and crafting strategies to improve safety, wellbeing, and overall organisational performance outcomes. Bringing a unique understanding of varied industries including mining, utilities, oil and gas, construction, healthcare, and retail, Anthony has skilfully steered the dedicated Sentis team who play a pivotal role in delivering exceptional safety outcomes for the organisations they serve. Through mentorship and educational outreach, Gibbs constantly strives to elevate and empower others. At the core of Anthony's leadership philosophy is a commitment to positive safety - a conviction that leaders who genuinely care about their people and their experience of safety will drive behaviours beyond compliance, ultimately leading to increased commitment, care and effort.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gibbs, Anthony

Leseproben

1.
HOW SERIOUS ARE WE ABOUT SAFETY, REALLY? “With integrity, you have nothing to fear, since you have nothing to hide. With integrity, you will do the right thing, so you will have no guilt.” ~ Zig Ziglar “Safety is our number one priority,” was something Stockton Rush said a lot. The founder and CEO of submersible company OceanGate took an unorthodox approach to the design of the company’s underwater vehicles. As a result, the safety of their vehicles often came up in interviews. “Safety is our number one priority,” Rush wrote in a 2018 press release announcing the launch of Titan, a submersible designed to explore the wreck of the Titanic. “We believe real-time health monitoring should be standard safety equipment on all manned submersibles.” Titan’s real-time monitoring system was designed to check the condition of its hull during deep dives, when it would be subjected to extremely high pressures. With nine acoustic sensors and 18 strain gauges, the monitoring system would keep tabs on the cylindrical carbon-fibre hull and its interface with the titanium domes on each end. The intention was that the sensors would give the pilot sufficient advance warning of a potential problem to allow a safe return to the surface before a catastrophic failure. The problem was that the safety system Rush was describing was, in fact, no safety system at all. Yes, the analysis that his system conducted would detect when a component was about to fail – it was designed to do that during hull testing as part of the design process. What it wasn’t designed to do was provide operational feedback, because, in practice, the time between a warning and failure of the hull was highly likely to be far too short to allow resurfacing in time. Nevertheless, Rush, who preferred to label the cutting of corners as innovation, had made the decision to sidestep the independent testing usually imposed on new submersible designs. This was despite the fact that Titan used materials and a design philosophy that were quite different from any previous submersible used to dive four kilometres deep. Rush managed to spin the fact that his sub required a hull warning system to sound like it was safer and more advanced than others, when clearly the opposite was true. Ironically, it would seem that “Safety is our number one priority” were Stockton Rush’s famous last words. In June 2023, the world learnt that Titan had very likely suffered a violent and cataclysmic implosion that killed Rush and his four passengers in milliseconds. In the aftermath of the tragedy, evidence of behaviours in stark contrast to Rush’s verbalised commitment to safety would come to light. Rush had been incredibly strategic in ensuring he was legally protected, by operating outside US jurisdiction. He had intentionally ignored industry standards – and the laws of physics – in the name of minimising costs masquerading as innovation. In one almost comic example, OceanGate had apparently used a Sony PlayStation 3 controller to operate the submersible. Rush had allegedly disregarded advice and fired people, including experts in the field of submersibles, who had raised or reported safety concerns. Other favourite sayings of Rush came to light after the much-publicised loss of Titan, which highlight attitudes very much at odds with the “Safety is our number one priority” mantra. These include such comments as, “If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” and that he’d “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation,” and the particularly horrifying, “We have heard the baseless cries of ‘You are going to kill someone!’ way too often.” The tale of Stockton Rush, OceanGate and the Titan is a particularly grim example of how proclaiming safety as the top priority and enacting that commitment can be two entirely different things. Similar discrepancies between a publicly voiced commitment to safety and the demonstrated behaviours, actions, and decisions have underscored many disasters throughout history. Few will forget the harrowing images of the tsunami that swept across the Japanese region of Tohoku and the city of Sendai following a massive earthquake on March 11, 2011. The disaster triggered subsequent serious damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, including core meltdowns and the release of a large amount of radioactive material into the environment. An independent investigation report found that the causes of the Daiichi accident had been foreseeable and that the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), had failed to meet basic safety requirements such as risk assessment, preparing for containing collateral damage, and the development of evacuation plans. The company admitted that they could have taken steps to prevent a catastrophic accident by adopting more extensive safety measures. The investigation also discovered years of collusion between TEPCO, industry regulators, and politicians and that senior leaders had actively hidden safety concerns. The company dismissed the possibility of it being hit by a massive tsunami, even though they could not produce supporting data. There had also been no safety improvements to the Fukushima Daiichi plant since 2002. Ultimately, at the heart of this disaster was the influence of leaders in positions of power, combined with a culture that does not empower people to speak up. The chair of the investigation, Kiyoshi Kurokawa, wrote: “Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience, our reluctance to question authority, our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’, our groupism, and our insularity… This conceit was reinforced by the collective mindset of Japanese bureaucracy, by which the first duty of any individual bureaucrat is to defend the interests of his organisation. Carried to an extreme, this led bureaucrats to put organisational interests ahead of their paramount duty to protect public safety.”2 The Fukushima accident was a profoundly humanmade disaster – and while Japanese culture may have played a part, it was by no means the sole cause. Any culture in which challenge is unwelcome and people capitulate to the will of higher powers would have had the same outcome. This accident could and should have been foreseen and prevented. A similar, if less explosive, story plays out in any number of workplaces in Australia and beyond. Enter almost any industrial site – mining, manufacturing, construction, and so on – and a commitment to safety appears to be everywhere. Even before passing through the gate, you’ll likely see the literal signs of a strong safety focus, such as billboards with safety messages and an electronic counter displaying the tally of injury-free days. For anyone working on site, there are safety briefings, safety equipment, risk assessments, and safe operating procedures. There are the posters and targets, the espoused values and the slogans, the regulations, and the incentives. Metrics of safety performance are tied to individual performance, perhaps including remuneration. In short, safety is everywhere, and the casual visitor would be right to believe that this equates to a genuine commitment to safety from the company. But does it? The reality is that around the world, hundreds of people lose their lives at work every year, and thousands are injured. This is no surprise to many workers whose felt experience of safety is very different to that espoused by their leaders. As we will unpack in more detail, many workers live with a sense that their leaders’ real priority is making money. “They don’t care about us; they don’t care about safety. They care about production”3 is a sentiment that comes through all too often in our own research. This needs to change. If companies are serious about safety, then they must address the gap between what they say and what they do. The term ‘companies’, of course, speaks to leadership. Addressing the safety attitudes and behaviours of employees and individual contributors is important, certainly. But leaders need to take responsibility for the powerful influence that their decisions and behaviours, and the felt safety climate, have on those they lead. Unequivocally, this can be done. A less well-known story that came out of the Tohoku disaster is that of another nuclear power plant, at Onagawa, 100 kilometres north across Sendai Bay from the Fukushima plant. Operated by the Tohoku Electric Power Company, the Onagawa facility was 60 kilometres closer to the epicentre of the earthquake than its counterpart, and it shared similar disaster conditions. Yet its three operating reactors were shut down successfully and safely, and the plant remained remarkably undamaged. The fundamental difference between the two cases boils down to leadership and their genuine prioritisation of safety. One difference between the two nuclear sites was that Onagawa’s reactor buildings sit at a higher elevation than the Fukushima reactor buildings. This was not a coincidence or good luck. Before beginning construction in 1980, Tohoku Electric conducted surveys and simulations aimed at predicting...