Business Consort

In order for organisations to become more profitable, they need to become more efficient and more effective. There needs to be continuous business improvement – and to improve the business you have to improve the processes within it.

You can’t just impose a system – you have to ensure that the processes that create the system are tried and tested, work for the people using them as well as the organisation’s bottom line and actively contribute to improved, efficiency, effectiveness as well as the safety of both the people involved and the environment.

A typical example of systems being imposed is when two organisations merge – it often appears to be an arbitrary decision as to which of two systems is kept, rather than an intelligent examination of the two systems to find out what works – and why – so that the best of both are retained and you get a 2+2=22 situation!

This is one of the key concepts behind PROPA – which examines critical risks and addresses them as part of the streamlining process. It allows taking a bottom up approach eliminating bad practices, examining good ones and their robustness. It’s focused on discovering what workers do to make life better for themselves – and, where possible, incorporating those paths of least resistance into the process.

RoSPA’s research shows that systems that are imposed on workers without consultation result in the workers ‘doing it their way’ regardless of what the system actually says. It’s far better to get involvement and understand why people find it easier to do things one way instead of another – and use that for the organisation’s benefit – than to force people into a system they will not follow willingly.

Workers ‘adjustments’ may not be safe, effective or profitable for the organisation – whereas proper examination not only ensures good practice, but also allows a reasonable explanation of ‘why it should be done this way’ to aid understanding. Understanding is half the battle to gaining co-operation!

Get the process right, get the workers co-operation – get much better results!

Recently I was involved in a joint presentation on Risk Assessment at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) along with George Wedgewood, chairman of the IOSH Technical Committee and fellow member of the IET H&S Policy Advisory Group. As one of my core skills is Dynamic Risk Assessment I am concerned that so many people view risk assessment as complex and bureaucratic.

Risk assessment is seen as a barrier to people doing things, preventing them fromtaking any risks at all and viewed as either restrictive or as a huge wad of cotton wool to wrap everyone up with.

Far from being restrictive or over-protective, risk assessment is exactly what it says – it’s for identifying and assessing risks. Risk assessment requires that risks are recognised and that reasonable steps are taken to reduce them, but it isn’t necessary to attempt to remove risk altogether – that is completely unrealistic.

Dynamic Risk Assessment takes it a step further so that work doesn’t have to stop to carry out a risk assessment every time circumstances change. It empowers the worker to assess the situation and make good quality decisions about what action to take to accommodate the risks.

Normal risk assessment is carried out strategically and is generic at that level. At mid-management level it can be more specific – but it doesn’t have any flexibility, it’s a static assessment and workers are rarely involved in the risk assessment process. It’s time they were and Dynamic Risk Assessment is the tool to do it!

Even the phrase ‘Dynamic Risk Assessment’ is misunderstood – managers see it as excuse for allowing people to act on ‘gut-instinct’. However, whilst Dynamic Risk Assessment incorporates an intuitive approach to risk assessment, it still has to be part of a system, with feedback and debriefing.

It allows for the acceptance of mistakes – but also provides for the investigation of those errors so that the system can be improved. In other words, it’s a key element of continuous business improvement!

Every organisation contains knowledge, but how well does your business handle it? Is there a single place of truth where everything that is needed resides - or do you lose information when someone leaves, is away on holiday or sick, or moves up to a higher position?

More to the point - do you KNOW what you’re losing?

• You train people and then they leave - you can’t stop that happening, but how do you retain what they’ve learned?
• You promote someone and they move into a different role - how much do they actually hand over to their replacement? Is that factored into their move?
• People are unexpectedly away from work - perhaps from an accident or off sick, or have to take time off to look after a family member. Does the person who has to cover know where to look to find out what they do - and how?
• In multinational or multi-site organisations, someone gets transferred from one place to another - does their knowledge go with them and leave a gap?

Every organisation needs to have a strategy to handle its knowledge risks. Not only to record systems and processes, but to store information on a wide variety of functions. Ideally, that system also needs to have the flexibility to grow with the organisation, and handle change and improvement too.

There is a cliche ‘Knowledge is power’; but that implies exclusivity of knowledge and in today’s world protecting your personal knowledge doesn’t help the organisation to function effectively - in fact, quite the reverse.

Today’s world is based on sharing openly for the benefit of your environment, whether that’s family, community or employer. Just look at the explosion of social media - all based on sharing information and knowledge.

How does your organisation stand up to the knowledge risks?

There are four steps to wisdom:

1. Acquiring data
2. Turning the data into information
3. Using the information to gain knowledge
4. Applying wisdom to the use of that knowledge.

The current health and safety legislation and guidance has an abundance of data - and some of it is presented as information, however, it’s confusing. There’s so much duplication as each new law repeats what’s gone before - with a few extra twists. It’s no wonder that organisations are confused, let alone the individual members of staff who have to apply them on a day-to-day basis.

Most employees only understand risk on a surface level - they’re told ‘do this’ and they do it (or, in some cases, don’t do it). Most of them don’t really think about it much, other than as a bit of a nuisance.

People are swamped with information, policy documents, safety regulations, warnings, manuals - who has the time to read it, let alone try to understand it or apply it intelligently?

When people are taught dynamic risk assessment all that changes. In order to assess a rapidly changing set of circumstances, they have to think! They have to understand what is happening and then make good quality decisions - in other words they are forced to apply wisdom before taking action.

If the skills of dynamic risk assessment were taught throughout your organisation from the top down, how much better would your operation function and how much more effective would you be?

When things go wrong but, it doesn’t actually result in an accident where someone gets injured, everyone heaves a sigh of relief and you hear phrases like ‘it was a near miss’ and ‘there was an incident’. Consider that a near miss is also a near hit – and an incident that is out of the ordinary and unplanned needs looking into – or it will almost certainly happen again – perhaps with a less fortunate outcome. So why are ‘incidents’ and ‘near misses’ often not investigated?

An accident is not simply a description of a situation where someone gets hurt. An effective organisation uses the tools of accident investigation as a business improvement tool.
1. To explore any unplanned occurrence – and find out why it happened and what could be done to prevent it happening again.
2. To investigate conditions that staff experience – such as back pain – to find out what activities are causing this or exacerbating it.
3. To discover the causes of industrial diseases – where people suffer from certain ailments that may be related to their working environment.
4. To reveal the root cause of injuries; for example, if someone injures their hand in machinery, the investigation may discover that they were not wearing their safety gloves – but, that wasn’t the cause of the accident. The root cause has everything to do with the process or the way in which the machinery is being used – everyone doesn’t get their hands trapped, even with gloves on, so something needs to change – maybe additional training in machine usage for the injured operator or the addition of safety guards on the machine.

Seeing incidents that don’t cause injury as ‘a lucky break’ is simply short-sightedness – and missing an opportunity to make your organisation more efficient, more effective and more profitable.

This is an unashamedly ‘grumpy old man’ item - but it needs to be aired.

Local councils seem to have their focus on unnecessary cotton wool, instead of practical action. There was a news item last summer was about the need for hanging baskets to be far enough above head height to ensure people don’t bang their heads on them.

I don’t know how much consideration they’ve given to the fact that most people have eyes at head height and tend to avoid anything coming at them around that level! We manage to avoid lamposts, pavement cafe tables, greengrocers displays, and men at work barriers blocking the pavement - ah, yes; and that’s another issue.

It’s common knowledge that severe weather damages road surfaces. It’s also common knowledge that, in the UK, there’s a reasonably good chance we’ll get snow and ice at some point (or several points) during the winter. So why is it that the local councils don’t plan ahead to ensure that, as soon as possible there are teams out filling in the ruts and potholes that have appeared and making the roads safe for us again?

It’s bad enough when you’re driving a car to hit a pothole; it rattles your teeth and can ruin your suspension (even if the garage repair people are rubbing their hands in glee). But what happens if you’re on a bicycle or motorbike? A pothole can cause a real accident, with injuries. What happens if you’re driving an open vehicle and the jolt dislodges something - and sends it flying into the path of another vehicle, or to hit a pedestrian?
Of course, things should be secured, but that doesn’t mean they can’t work loose with enough jolting and lurching.

When will the councils understand that planned preventative maintenance (PPN) - and contingency planning - would be far more useful than getting excited about flower pots that most of us can easily avoid?