Worker involvement – the ultimate point of difference in safety culture

By Mark Fielder

In 1995, with the help of a Churchill Fellowship, I travelled to British Columbia to study their health and safety systems. I wanted to benchmark the safety culture in one of Canada’s top producing timber companies – TimberWest.

Sceptics argue that you cannot learn anything from benchmarking. They argue that there are too many differences and variables. However, I believe when it comes to safety culture, there are huge lessons to be gained by studying such variations and seeing how they affect behaviour.

The Workers Compensation Board (WCB) of British Columbia hosted my stay and I visited forestry operations and spoke with crews, trainers, safety officials and inspectors. A common theme came out – the Canadians strongly believe in the Internal Responsibility System (IRS). This is the underlying philosophy of the occupational health and safety legislation in all Canadian jurisdictions. Simply put, the IRS means everyone in the workplace has a role to play and a duty to actively ensure workers are safe. Every worker who sees a health and safety problem, such as a hazard in the workplace, has a duty to report the situation to management. A strong reporting culture is a foundation of safety culture.

The Workers Compensation Board (WCB) is an independent, tri-partite Crown corporation composed of government, employer and worker representatives. Their political legislation forces employee involvement to a level which New Zealand does not compare. When I attended a health and safety committee meeting at a logging operation on Vancouver Island, I observed a high level of employee involvement. The meeting at TimberWest, Honeymoon Bay, clarified my views on employee involvement.

One logger at the meeting told me, "If morale is low you get a lot of injuries. No matter what you do with safety, if morale is low then injuries will be high." Employees and contractors at the safety meeting saw involvement as the major key to boost morale and safety. Effective involvement begins with having good opportunities for frank and honest discussion and feedback from employees and contractors. This is how confidence and trust in the value of the safety meetings is built.

When a Canadian OSH Inspector visits a workplace the first thing he or she frequently does is to browse through the minutes of the previous safety meetings. Then they pick out an issue and want to know how it is being resolved. They speak candidly with the worker rep about the issue. The same OSH inspector has the authority to recommend raising or lowering insurance compensation levies on the workplace by 50 per cent. They inspect how effective the IRS is operating in the workplace. It is a litmus test on safety culture.

There’s been a lot of safety conferences, seminars and talk on safety culture and employee involvement. But you need to benchmark a country or an organisation where they ‘walk the talk’ in terms of employee involvement. Only then does the safety culture grow.

Mark Fielder is director of Transport Efficiency Solutions and a qualified safety auditor.

For further information:
Visit: www.transportefficiency.co.nz
Email: mark [at] transportefficiency [dot] co [dot] nz