Hi,
Geof Fountain wrote:
>The goal was lost,
If the goal was;
X projects completed within X time period while maintaining
worker well-being and worker safety,
how would the company know if they had achieved their goal or
were continuing to achieve their goal?
One thing I notice is that one of the ways they determine if
they are on track is by not having LWC's. That assumes they will
have LWC's. Unfortunately, management looks at LWC's as a
problem rather than saying, "Isn't it great that we didn't have
LWC's for so long?"
I think management could determine how they would know if the
workers were maintaining worker safety and worker well-being.
This could be in the form of what safe acts are observed by
workers and by the safety engineer as you wrote in your post.
Someone wrote on Learning-Org that Deming warned against setting
numerical goals. Setting numerical goals led to all sorts of
wierd system behaviour. (I don't have the post handy
unfortunately.) If I remember correctly, Deming advised
determining the actions required to achieve the goal and
including those actions into the goal statement.
So the goal could be;
X projects completed within X time period by
X actions
while maintaining worker safety and worker well-being.
I also think that there needs to be motivation for maintaining
worker safety and worker well-being at each level of the
organization all the way to the CEO. Assuming that the CEO is
accountable to the company's customers, I think that the
customers could be a source of motivation for maintaining worker
safety at all levels of the organization.
One of the variables influencing worker safety that is
determined by customer input is the time period for completion
of projects. Maybe the customer could be persuaded to make
maintaining worker safety a condition of product or service
delivery by graphs of the inverse correlation of product quality
to worker safety caused by rush jobs. Of course, this depends on the
customer's values.
If the motivation for worker safety and well-being doesn't exist
at all levels of the organization, I doubt that worker safety
and well-being will be maintained. Incentives for safe on the
job behaviour would work for some people in the organization,
but it wouldn't work for others. Some people aren't motivated by
incentives.
>Possible precursors could be the quality of housekeeping,
>the number of unsafe acts observed (or safe acts observed). The previous
>contract had programs that tracked performance in these areas. They died
>under the new contractor. Another question may be "what can you do to
>keep the sensitivity up, ie, tighten the swings in the limits on the
>balancing loop ?" Perhaps the old contractor had it right. They had
>safety policies that were obvious overkill. "Keep to crosswalks, even if
>you have to walk an extra hundred yards." They would go to extraordinary
>lengths to get a person to work to prevent an off-the-job injury statistic
>from occurring (and keep the safety record intact). The safety engineer
>had tremendous authority - which helped to keep a high sensitivity level
>in the field (sometimes it had a negative effect - "stop work, here comes
>the safety engineer"). Although these practices seemed a little
>outrageous, and perhaps not cost-effective in isolation, they definitely
>served to sustain an ongoing high sensitivity level amongst the
>organization.
>So the high leveraged thing to do seems to be to design a bypass around
>the LWC behavior by monitoring "precursors", ie, behavior indicators
>that show the direction of safety behavior. Possible precursors are
>unsafe acts and housekeeping. By monitoring the quality levels of
>these precursors, downward trends can be identified before things get
>bad. Perhaps just the act of monitoring them would keep the
>sensitivity level high and complacency level low. Having to live to
>seemingly outrageous rules and having a safety engineer whose authority
>is never questioned (which seemed to keep the sensitivity level high on
>a daily basis) may be daily structures that keeps the the safety
>behavior at a balance below the LWC threshold.
I agree with most of your views. It's interesting you mention
"direction," because this is related to a question I'd ask which
is, "What needs to be there in the organizational system for the
organization to continue to maintain worker safety and
well-being."
One comment I'd like to make is that any monitoring of system
behaviour should be kept extremely, extremely simple, possibly
in the form of paper checklists. I was told that having the
write checklist at the right time was 98% of genius. Anything
computer based other than plain text files is probably not
simple enough to use and probably won't be used.
Andrew Moreno
-- amoreno@cyberspace.org amoreno@broken.ranch.org http://www.ranch.org/~amoreno