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| The point at which your safety program becomes irrelevant |
There is a huge difference between having a safety program and operating safely. The difference can mean life or death. A few examples:
1. September 18th, 2008. An Army National Guard helicopter crosses from Kuwait into southern Iraq for the first time since arriving in country for a nine month tour. The organization at all levels has school trained safety officers, trained at the Army Safety Center at Fort Rucker, which believes (and practices) that enough micromanagement can achieve a zero accident rate in the Army. There are safety conferences, safety meetings, safety councils, safety surveys, safety briefings, risk assessments, and safety is preached and drilled constantly during a months-long train up for the deployment.
But that evening, it doesn't matter, as inexperienced pilots take off in marginal weather into the dark featureless desert. Within minutes after crossing into country, the third aircraft in the formation, Red River 44, crashes into the desert floor at 130 knots, killing the crew and passengers.
2. April 20th, 2010. BP has a great safety program, if not a great safety record. Contract employees are subject to intensive interviews before being allowed to work for BP. Many of these third party providers fail to live up to BP's safety standards. New arrivals at BP facilities are shaken down for contraband. Passengers must be escorted by approved escort personnel to aircraft that are shut down, no hot refueling, no hot passenger loading. Safety is practiced well past the point of operational intrusion. There are safety audits and safety consultants and safety inspections and safety meetings and long safety conventions, and awards and accolades given to the safest of the safe operators.
But that evening, it doesn't matter, as the Deepwater Horizon crew, recipients of a recent safety award, bypass all manner of established protocols downhole and cause a blowout that kills 11, and an epic oil spill that the domestic offshore drilling industry will take years to recover from.
3. Ongoing. A major provider of worldwide offshore helicopter services hosts an expanding safety department that issues frequent safety alerts on such imperative workplace dangers as:
a. People walking into trailer hitches in the parking lot at company headquarters.
b. People walking into filing cabinets at company headquarters.
c. People injuring themselves standing up from chairs at company headquarters.
4. Have you taken a state approved Defensive Driving Course lately? Enough said.
It is a given that people will often brush safety concerns aside in favor of getting the job done, absent any controls. It is also a given that safety programs are often born out of industrial accidents, that the rules are written in blood, and that THE PROGRAM IS PUT IN PLACE LARGELY TO COVER MANAGEMENT'S REAR END AFTER AN ACCIDENT. Later, the overly restrictive new programs are at least partially ignored on the line, and the process repeats itself, sometimes at the cost of many lives.
So what exactly can be done? How can a safety program be engineered so that it actually makes a difference and a meaningful connection between the program and the employees? A few ideas from the field:
1. The safety department must be trusted and respected both up and down. Safety must report directly to top management so as to minimize political interference, and personnel on the line must be able to bring their concerns to the safety department where they will be given a fair hearing, without fear of retribution. The moment that the line perceives that the safety department is blowing off their concerns, or worse, is a hit man for management, the safety department will have forever lost the cooperation of the line. Moreover, if the line is engaged in operating, maintaining, and fueling aircraft in harsh conditions worldwide and your safety department is primarily focused on office hazards... your safety program has become a JOKE.
2. The safety department needs to be out in the field. Often the best thing that safety personnel can do is push back from the desk and get out in the field to beat the bushes for potential problems. Not with a checklist and a charter to document the sins of the field, but to talk to people and to understand that they alone do not understand the whole picture. They might be surprised to find out that they can learn more in one afternoon of walking around than they would on several out of state safety conferences where they hobnob with equally clueless safety program managers from across the industry.
3. Standards must be enforced. Much as I hate to admit it, the proliferation of exceedance monitoring and tracking equipment in the industry has had a dramatic effect on standardization. What that means is that if you have a little box in the aircraft that is tracking everything you are doing, and management can see what you are doing any any given time... guess what? People will behave better. They won't like the intrusiveness, but they will behave better, because they really won't have a choice. What management ultimately does with this data is a whole nuther topic, and one that will set the tone for the acceptance of the program, grudging or otherwise.
Ideally, if the line and safety work well together, the majority of threats will be identified and managed. There will always be unsafe people, unsafe acts, and stupid policies, and they will all have to be dealt with. But no one at any level should ever confuse a safety PROGRAM with a SAFE program.
