Flex Insights: Instilling a Safety Culture

In our Flex Insights series, FlexManager leaders share their perspectives on key topics to provide context for organisations to guide them in driving smarter, safer, and more efficient operations. Watch the full conversation between George and Peter as they discuss the importance of instilling a culture built around safety and having teams report near misses as soon as they are identified. 

Are a high number of near misses always meant to be perceived as a bad thing? Or are they potentially a result of a strong safety culture that has been embedded into an organisation? 

Peter raises the point that it is a good to view near misses as looking at a potential future problem and resolving it before it becomes a problem. George doubles down on this to state that it is a question of organisational culture: 

If the culture is “we don’t want a high number of near misses”, as a high number of potential incidents is a negative. It is a positive, as every single one of these problems are something that could have gone wrong, but it didn’t

How can we learn from what happened in that near miss to make sure it doesn’t happen again… we are not going to learn from it if we ignore it. 

George elaborates on how companies can learn from near misses:

Analyse the near miss, ask “what is the element that we got lucky on?”, take that off the table, all the elements that went wrong on the lead-up to it…how do we put measures in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. That’s the learning.

Peter follows up on how the promotion of positive safety culture, and taking away the negativity from the reporting of near misses, eases in the shift in culture mindset:

If change occurs with a negative, it is less adoptable, but if you are promoting positive culture…it drives the safety culture throughout the company.

When it comes to near misses, George views them as an opportunity to learn, and it is driven by culture:

If there is a culture of hiding, you are not going to learn. If there is openness and honesty and treating near misses as an opportunity to learn…you get those observations that drive the changes on-site.

As a final discussion point, George and Peter discuss how the creation of a safety culture can guide leadership decisions.

It is a win-win for teams on the ground, supervisors, and the decision-makers in the executive tree. Do we need to do a rollout of a new operator, or supervisor training?

Peter latches onto this idea and expands on it:

Data can tell you all of that, once you make it easy for people to give it to you…you are promoting the idea of something that may be a problem. It is not a problem now but it may be something that could be, if not corrected.

Authored by Gearoid Noone

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