Skills, Training, CRM, Culture... Safety

[EconomyClass]

I can see personal data being used to improve an individual's training or even deciding to terminate a few. But in my QA days, it was not that necessary to look at the WHO. I took my direction from W E Deming whose mantra was "management has to understand the system". That is, understand how tasks are performed in their proper context. No mistake occurs outside the context in which the necessary task is performed. Till you pursue a complete and accurate understanding of that, your fixes don't take. By focusing on WHAT, you take the fear of scapegoating out of the equation. It is a known fact that systems that try to discover "who is at fault", usually produce no lasting improvement. You get pervasive CYA which delivers up false information. And management expends lots of energy and money on dead ends. And lots more cases where a fall guy has to be found.

I'm convinced from my professional work that there's always a WHAT. And lasting improvement requires knowing that. Bad systems produce bad results.

[ZedFear]

I work in a field where lives are constantly at risk. We have highly trained and qualified staff, and a multitude of equipment which monitors, relays information, and warns of problems. 99.5% of the time everything runs very smoothly and as expected. However, I consistently face a few problems.

1). When a monitor alarms a situation, I'm called because staff believe there is a problem with the monitor, not the parameter being monitored. "-If we do this the same way every time, the machine must be wrong"

2) Personal risk. No matter how much we try to encourage a culture of safety, workers often put themselves at risk for the sake of expediency and (I think) ego. They want to get the job done, rather than retrieve equipment or wait for assistance. At the top of our monthly staff meeting is Safety. However, often I'm the only one to submit topics. I'm the manager, not the union rep.

3) When I am present during working proceedures, and ask questions about why something is being done in a certain way, or just probe questions to discover levels of understanding, I'm often met with defensiveness or hostility. Maybe it's my manner. But I think it is more that some people do not truly understand the information presented to them, and how to react correctly to it.

Encouraging a culture of safety has been my battle for some time. Giving employees the confidence that they wont be judged or criticized for asking for assistance, refusing an unsafe request, or acknowledging a weakness, seems key to me. Education, communication and honest evaluation is the path to improvement. It may be more expensive in the short term, but saves heartache, stress, lawsuits, and workers compensation claims long term.