While the title of this article suggests it is about driving, it really isn’t. It is about safety. And it is not about driving safety either, even though initially, the context may suggest that. This is about a much bigger picture, Safety Leadership. As safety professionals and practitioners, we have to look at things differently, through the lens of leadership. Leaders must be good coaches, engaging others in their work to learn how work is actually performed, which often may be really different than what is planned or thought to be happening. People generally don’t come to work wanting to get hurt, to hurt someone else, or to do a bad job. Leaders teach employees to do what they do because those are the things that make sense to them at the time they are doing them.
We can learn much from the transportation industry, specifically the automotive side. As safety practitioners and leaders, we sometimes don’t have the opportunity to learn from others who also interface with considerable risk on a regular basis and who have learned a few simple steps that we, as safety practitioners, should implement in our safety programs. The steps are as follows:
The automobile industry figured it out but the safety industry has yet to learn some very important truths. People are human and are subject to making mistakes. They are wired to be distracted; will often be inattentive and not pay attention to things, even when the stakes are high; and have lives outside of work. One could argue that the automobile industry does a better job at safety than those of us in the safety industry. The auto industry knows that people will be people and as people, they will make mistakes. In the workplace we assume that people, our employees, are going to always do the right things even in complex situations for which the plans don’t work, the right tools are not always available, and their life is causing them to lose focus. As an aside, we do regular preventative maintenance (PM) on almost every other element of our safety systems. Do we do anything related to a PM with our employees or do we just require and assume that they will never be distracted, never be tired, and never make mistakes.
While the lessons from the auto industry are way longer than we can discuss, here are some things that are done to make your cars safer for you. Perhaps we in the safety world should take some notes and look at ways we can implement these concepts in our workplace.
Our point in all of this is that we as safety practitioners who work in the field of occupational safety have to think differently than we have about human beings and how likely they are to make mistakes. None of us are perfect and if we want to keep our people safe, we can’t do what we have always done and expect that things are going to be better or even the same. Our workplaces are becoming more complex. There are more challenges facing many employees today than in previous times. Our infrastructure is not getting newer and is often aging faster as production pressures push the envelope. Our employees may be receiving less effective training as the need for efficiency pushes the increased use of computer-based-training (CBT). And this does not take into account that employees today often have a lot of outside work complication that we may not even be aware of. If we want to keep our employees safe from the risks that we expose them to, we have to think and act differently. The field of safety is evolving to embrace that we need to implement systems and programs that do what the auto industry does.
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