2- Accountability
Holding people positively accountable to do the things that create safe production makes it much more likely to succeed in achieving safety results. Managing this factor poorly will just as assuredly result in frustration and unintended results. Holding people accountable for the wrong things can get people injured and killed. This is the fundamental reason that a management systems fail to get the wanted safety results, when it artificially do safety tasks that are added onto the way the work is done – it’s not part of the way the work gets done.
3- Safe Environment
The tools, equipment, materials and work environment that we supply and manage have a huge impact on what happens to us. The more we manage these things the better are our results. Using the wrong tool or an inappropriate piece of machinery will predictably result in an unintended consequence. In some cases this will result in a serious injury or death. The materials we use in our business have a huge impact on our health and safety and need to be constantly managed. The work environment in which we do our work or provide our services also impacts our results. Managing this factor can improve our results in measurable ways.
4- Safe Behaviours
Managing the safe behaviour component is as simple as developing an understanding of how humans are. How we act and why we act in certain ways. We don’t behave in a vacuum; many exterior factors contribute to our behaviour for many logical and manageable reasons.
The best safe behaviour management comes from doing this with people and not to them. Helping people understand why they do what they do and to manage the factors that will help motivate them.
These four Factors of Safety Integrated Management System are forever linked. The way we manage them, have a huge impact on the safety outcomes. This brings us to the crucial four Methods we need to manage the factors.
1- Encourage
Delivering safety programs to uninspired passive employees is doomed to failure. Safe production of our company’s products and services needs the people who do the work to do the work safely. Practical human management principles tell us that without encouragement, people just won’t do the things needed to help our company be successful. How could they? More importantly, why would they? Would we?
2- Engage
The tasks required to do safety require the people who do the work to use the safe methods to make it safe. The failure of safety programs can typically be tracked to doing safety to people rather than with them. Engagement gets almost immediate results. It’s a logical and practical way to do work without taking unnecessary risks.
3- Evolve
We, as humans, evolve in our thinking and our physical being. Over time we change, and not always for the better. Safety management is not immune to this natural evolution process. Over time we learn what works well and what doesn’t work so well. We learn from our experiences. Things that bring us positive results are likely to become the way we do things over time. We constantly need to learn from our previous challenges and problems in order to successfully deal with the new challenges we face. It’s natural and expected to have to evolve your efforts over time.
4- Evidence-Based
This is the real power of Safety Integrated Management system. The evidence will prove to us that we are doing the right things to make our production safe.
This new vision will help us know what we need to do next to make safe production a natural and logical way to do the work that needs to get done for our customers. The results will tell us when we are successful, and they will tell us when we’ve failed.