S12Ep14: Transforming Safety: How Small Observations Lead to Big Changes

Ever wonder how small, personal observations can lead to massive safety improvements? Today on SafeTalk with SafeStart turning most of your team into an army of risk identifiers making your facility safer for all.

Host: Danny Smith 

https://safetalk.buzzsprout.com/1032442/8198426-s3ep10-safestart-s-individual-organizational-learning-loops

Transcript

Danny Smith

Host

00:07

Welcome back to SafeTalk with SafeStart. I'm Danny Smith. Today I want to focus on how the individual learning loop can help to improve the organizational learning loop. By the way, Tim Page-Bottorff and I did an episode on the learning loops and specifically the human factors framework. I'll attach a link to that in our show notes as well. 

00:28

Now this story comes from an employee who was working at the time for a Japanese auto manufacturer who was a client of ours. He was on their implementation training team and we met him at a trainer certification workshop in Toronto. Now the gist of the story is about how you start noticing things like the situations where the states or the human factors begin affecting people. He said you know, I've started seeing the outcomes of this when human factors start affecting folks. He said he could see how much SafeStart had changed things at their company about the way they were doing things, the way they managed things, even the way they looked for stressors in other people. He said when you understand that state-to-error pattern, as Larry Wilson says, you really begin to see it everywhere when you start looking for it. So this gentleman went on to say that his wife had some health issues and that he had to take her back to the hospital on a regular basis for treatments, and the way it worked was, every time she was in the hospital for her treatment, he would usually step outside for a bit just to get some fresh air and he would often go out by the emergency room and entrance, and it didn't take long to pick up on a pattern that was happening there. So picture this in your mind, if you will. 

01:45

There were two ways to get into the emergency room from the parking lot directly across from the ER. One was a 90-degree walkway that was complete with a curb with cutouts for wheelchairs. The other was diagonal, from the parking lot straight into the ER. However, it lacked the curb cutouts going into the hospital and, as you can imagine, people who were panicking and in a rush to get into the ER would often take that shorter, diagonal path, the one with the curb that they were likely not to see, especially if they're carrying a sick child or maybe have been injured themselves in some way. Now, keep in mind this gentleman is there repeatedly because of his wife's need for this ongoing procedure. So he saw lots and lots of people coming and going into the emergency room. He also saw a number of them either trip or almost fall. 

02:40

So on his third or fourth visit he stopped and he went in and he asked someone. He said can I speak for a minute to the hospital administrator? And you can imagine a bit of questioning there. What do you want to talk to him about? Well, they asked, and he simply said I just want to talk about safety out of the parking lot. Probably a bit of surprise there, I guess. But he did get the quick meeting and he explained his concern once he got in. He told the administrator not only about the physical hazards but also shared about the state-to-error pattern and he asked him to imagine the state of mind of people coming into the ER. Then they both agreed it was probably not a question of if, but more so when was somebody going to trip and fall there on the curb and probably be hurt, probably really badly. Now, obviously the administrator didn't want anybody to get hurt and obviously didn't want the facility to have additional liability there either because of an injury. 

03:42

Now, as the case is, sometimes these things take a bit of time for these changes to take place. The gentleman told us that the next time he came back with his wife for treatment, he walked outside and well, things were the same. But the second time when he came back after that, he noticed that they had shaved the concrete down, they had recreated the little ramp there on that side of things as well, made perfect sense, right, a good solution, a good engineering solution to that. He then told us that he was beginning to see things like that in his plant as well, by noticing the state to error pattern that was happening with others. He said we're starting to see hazards that well, we may never notice before ourselves, hazards that well, we may never notice before ourselves. 

04:30

His comment then was it's like we've gained thousands of risk managers. Imagine if you had 75% or more of your folks uncovering risk as it relates to human errors. A few of them may be things that you know you have to spend some money on, like the hospital did to fix the curb there, but a lot of them are not going to cost you anything more than perhaps just an adjustment to your systems. It may even make you safer and more productive in the long run. Right, the point is, an individual is far more likely to identify risk when they're understanding and seeing some of the human factors that can lead to exposures to those risks. It's like our automotive worker friend said it's really like you're gaining additional risk managers. 

05:11

So that's it for today. If you would please share this with your potential risk identifiers Notice I intentionally use that word identifiers, not the word manager. You probably got risk management covered, but what you really need is more employee engagement. You need more people helping you to identify potential risk in the workplace, and the more people you have looking, the more eyes you have on things, looking not only for physical hazards but also the interactions that could happen with those as a result of the states that we all find ourselves in, all of those human factors, of the states that we all find ourselves in, all of those human factors. Well, it's just going to make the organization safer and it's going to help protect the organization and the individual as well. I'm Danny Smith for SafeTalk with SafeStart. Thanks so much for joining us today. Be sure to share this podcast and we hope you have a great day.