The Safety of Work

We frame our conversation around the paper, Safety Climate and Injuries: An Examination of Theoretical and Empirical Relationships. Tune in to hear us talk about retrospective studies, the perception of safety vs. actual safety, and the influence of injuries on safety climate. Topics:Retrospective studies.Organizational and psychological safety climates.Perception of safety and actual safety.Designing research to answer your question.Influence of injuries on safety climate.Contamination.Practical takeaways Quotes:“People who say that they think their company cares about safety, those people generally are safer.”“Most safety climate research assumes that safety climate is a good measure, because it is a predictor of injuries.” “Not enough of these studies measure the strength of climate.” Resources:Safety Climate and Injuries: An Examination of Theoretical and Empirical RelationshipsFeedback@safetyofwork.com

Dr. Neale is a Senior Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University. There, he studies human geography and cultural anthropology. We use his paper, Fuzzy Boundaries: Simulation and Expertise in Bush Fire Management, to help frame our discussion. Tune in to hear our insights about the safety community and Dr. Neale’s thoughts on bush fire management. Topics:Dr. Neale’s PhD thesis.How he gained access to the F-band community.The tension between people in front-line occupations and safety professionals.Improvising and standardizing.The tension between individuals and bureaucracy.How to be an effective communicator.What happens after a big fire season.Becoming a fire behavior analyst. Quotes:“When you’re interacting with somebody, what is your expertise based in?”“There’s no one way of doing it right and any attempt to wrangle these people, these professionals into being all one type of person, they will resist it.”“The theme that expresses itself in a particular part of people’s work, expresses itself in many other parts of their work; it’s not a contained problem…” Resources:Fuzzy Boundaries: Simulation and Expertise in Bush Fire ManagementFeedback@safetyofwork.com

The podcast discusses the struggle to define successful safety practices, the importance of risk assessment, and the impact of certain safety rules. They explore the roles of PhD candidates and supervisors, the importance of peer review, and the lack of evidence in safety work. The concept of different types of safety work is also discussed, as well as the relationship between industrial manslaughter laws and safety in organizations.

This topic was a request from one of our listeners. Join us as we dig into this frequently asked question and let you know all about academic journals and what you can take away from findings therein. Topics:Explaining academic journals.The ease of accessing journals in the Internet age.What makes a reputable journal.The peer-review process.Why some peer-reviews take longer than others.Qualitative vs. quantitative research.Why submission numbers are going up.Journal shopping and its risks.Practical takeaways. Quotes:“I still sort of think fondly...of doing my PhD and...you could look up the catalogues online. So, you could sit at your desk and find a reference to the paper, but then you’d need to wander the shelves and find the right volume and pull it down and take it to the photocopy machine.”“Sometimes if a paper hasn’t advanced satisfactorily between reviews, then the editor will just make a call…”“You know that you’re going to get peer reviewers that think that research is quantitative.” Resources:Feedback@safetyofwork.com

This discussion is building off last week’s episode where we focused on blame. We thought we would dig a little deeper into how people learn from incidents. We use the paper, What is Learning? A Review of the Safety Literature to Define Learning from Incidents, Accidents, and Disasters, in order to frame our chat. Topics:Single and double-loop learning.Incident learning models.The least effective method of learning. How to make a safety bulletin effective.Why organizational trust is a factor in learning.Why management is important to creating a culture of safety.Lessons Learned About Lessons Learned Systems.Practical takeaways. Quotes:“Learning from accidents is pretty much the oldest type of safety work that exists...and almost from the very start, people have been complaining after accidents about people’s failure to learn from previous accidents.”“This paper really confirms the answer that we gave last week to our question about, ‘does blame sort of get in the way of learning?’ ““You’ve got to admit that you are wrong now in order to become correct in the future.” Resources:What is Learning? A Review of the Safety Literature to Define Learning from Incidents, Accidents, and DisastersFeedback@safetyofwork.com

This is a particularly controversial topic, so we are going to attempt to be as neutral as possible. We refer to the sources, A Review of Literature: Individual Blame vs. Organizational Function logics in Accident Analysis and Antecedents and Consequences of Organizational Silence to help frame our discussion. Topics:Accountability in regards to safety in the workplace.The papers referenced are commentaries, instead of studies.Policy shifting to no-blame reporting systems.A Tale of Two Stories gives two narrative perspectives on one incident.Employee voice.A climate of voice vs. a climate of silence.Creating communication opportunities.How blame can be a default.Practical takeaways from the discussion. Quotes:“ ‘Employee voice’ covers a whole range of behaviors that people can do in organizations that are discretionary.”“Ironically, when they spoke to a number of managers...as part of the study, managers believed they were encouraging employees to speak up, but on the other hand, they’re employing all sorts of informal tactics to silence this dissent.”“There’s so many broader forces in their organization that are seeking resolution...that if you enable an approach where an individual can be blamed, then I think that will be the dominant logic in your investigation…” Resources:A Review of Literature: Individual Blame vs. Organizational Function logics in Accident AnalysisAntecedents and Consequences of Organizational SilenceFeedback@safetyofwork.com

We are fortunate to have a few resources we can reference for today’s topic. Please see below for links to the papers we mentioned in our conversation. Topics:Defining risk compensation.Risk compensation in road traffic.Argument by analogy.What causes people to believe in risk compensation.Why robust data equals a real effect.Practical takeaways. Quotes:“...I think this is the sort of phenomenon that causes people to believe in risk compensation.”“Basically, what they’re saying is, if there was a real effect, it would be robust regardless of how you crunched the data.”“Just because someone does lots of citing of literature or quotes from scientific literature, doesn’t mean that their interpretation of that literature is rigorous and scientific.” Resources:Bicycle Helmets and Risky Behaviour: A Systematic ReviewRisk Compensation Literature - The Theory and EvidenceDriver Approach Behaviour at an Unprotected Railway Crossing Before and After Enhancement of Lateral Sight DistanceThe Effects of Automobile Safety RegulationThe Theory of Risk HomeostasisFeedback@safetyofwork.com

We use the paper, Analysing Human Factors and Non-Technical Skills in Offshore Drilling Operations Using FRAM, in order to frame our discussion of this topic.Please let us know if you have any experience with FRAM or similar models. We’d love to hear your feedback. Topics:Using FRAM.Vulnerable Systems Syndrome.STAMP diagrams.How the researchers collected their data.Functions that are common and functions that are outliers.The benefits of implementing a FRAM model.Conclusions drawn by the research paper. Quotes:“Every function of a system is a hexagon and every vertex of that hexagon stands for a different way that, you know, this function can be connected with the next function.”“The authors say that the interviews had just one question, which was ‘how do you perform your job?”“What I like about the use of a FRAM model would be, I think it will allow organizations to narrow that gap between work as imagined and work as done.” Resources:Analysing Human Factors and Non-Technical Skills in Offshore Drilling Operations Using FRAMFeedback@safetyofwork.com

To frame our discussion, we reference the paper What We Talk About When We Talk About HSE and Culture.Please send us your further questions of safety culture, so we can dig into more specifics in later episodes. Topics:How “safety culture” came about in the 1970’s.What Chernobyl has to do with safety culture.Safety culture vs. safety climate.What the paper studied and what it concluded.The factors that influence the definition of safety culture.Who studies and talks about safety culture the least.Types of studies done on safety culture.Practical takeaways. Quotes:“The argument is, really, that culture only matters, because it influences climate. And climate’s what we measure and what we try to change.”“42% of the papers are by engineering authors. 30% of them are by psychology authors. 14% from the health sciences. 10% from the social sciences. 3% from business. Which I find remarkable, given that organizational culture comes out of social science of organizations.”“...That’s remarkable that 30% of the papers weren’t empirical in any sense. They were just people talking about safety culture as if they knew about it or summarizing other people who had talked about it.” Resources:What We Talk About When We Talk About HSE and CultureFeedback@safetyofwork.com

We reference the paper Six Ways of Understanding Leadership Development in order to frame our study.Tune in to hear our discussion and more about this paper. Topics:Defining leadership development.The idea of taking on the mantle of “leader”.The six different ways of understanding leadership.Developing leaders who further the goals of the organization.Stretching people’s views of leadership.Practical take-aways. Quotes:“...And in some sense, they’re almost like stages that leaders go through in their evolution of thinking about themselves like a leader.”“People didn’t fall in a category. THe researchers were just trying to see how far they could stretch people’s views of what leadership [is] and where they stopped.”“Unless you can have an aligned and good understanding of those things, the researchers suggest...there’s not much point in getting started with leadership development activities.” Resources:Six Ways of Understanding Leadership DevelopmentFeedback@safetyofwork.com