Safety isn't one-size-fits-all, especially for subcontractors who navigate multiple sites with varying rules and equipment. This episode peels back the layers on the practical safety management challenges subcontractors endure, revealing how transient work complicates the integration of safety protocols. 

We scrutinize the institutional oversights and fragmented safety systems that often overlook the needs of these critical yet vulnerable players in the industry. Our conversation isn't just about identifying problems; it's an urgent call to action for better practices and a safer future for all involved in subcontracting work.

Discussion Points:

• The vagaries of subcontracting work
• Background on the paper being discussed
• Findings presented in the paper
• Institutional safety vs. the subcontractor’s work
• Expertise in the work does not equal expertise in safety
• Communication and safety work activities
• Institutional safety mechanisms
• Dangerous environments and lack of safety knowledge in that environment
• Subcontractors in the mining industry and the many layers and risks
• Safety rules are perceived differently by subcontractors
• Financial and other burdens to following safety protocols for subcontractors
• Key takeaways
• The answer to our episode’s question –the short answer in some of it is that there are lots of filtered and missing communication towards contractors' gaps in situational specific expertise that don't get identified and just our broad safety management systems and arrangements that don't work well for the subcontractor context.

Quotes:

"Subcontracting itself is also a fairly undefined term. You can range from anything from large, labour -higher organisations to what we typically think in Australia of a small business with maybe one to four or five employees." - Drew 

“All of the normal protections we put in place for safety just don't work as well when there are contract boundaries in place.” - Drew

“the subcontractor may be called in because they've got expertise in a particular type of work, but they're in an environment where they don't have expertise.” - Drew

Resources:

Link to the Paper

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

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Lastly, we delve into the role of leadership in addressing psychosocial hazards, the importance of standardized guidance for remote work, and the challenges faced by line managers in managing remote workers. We wrap up the episode by providing a toolkit for managers to effectively navigate the challenges of remote work, and highlight the need for tailored safety strategies for different work arrangements. 

Discussion Points:

• Different work-from-home arrangements
• Safety needs of work from home
• Challenges of remote worker representation
• Understanding and managing psychosocial risks
• Leadership and managing technical risks
• Remote work challenges and physical presence
• Practical takeaways and general discussion
• Safety strategies for different work arrangements
• The answer to our episode’s question – the short answer is that there definitely isn't a short answer. But this paper comes from a larger project and I know that the people who did the work have gathered together a list of existing resources and toolboxes and, they've even created a few prototype tools and training packages

Quotes:

"There's a risk that we're missing important contributions from workers with different needs, neurodiverse workers, workers with mental health issues, workers with particular reasons for working at home and we’re not going to be able to comment on the framework and how it might affect them." - Drew 

“When organizations' number of incident reports go up and up and up and we struggle to understand, is that a sign of worsening safety or is that a sign of better reporting?” - David

“They do highlight just how inconsistent organisations approaches are and perhaps the need for just some sort of standardised guidance on what is an organisation responsible for when you ask to work from home, or when they ask you to work from home.” - Drew

“I think a lot of people's response to work from home is let's try to subtly discourage it because we're uncomfortable with it, at the same time as we recognise that it's probably inevitable.” - Drew

Resources:

Link to the Paper

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The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

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The conversation stems from a review of a noteworthy paper from the Academy of Management Review Journal titled "The Paradox of Stretch Goals: Organizations in Pursuit of the Seemingly Impossible," which offers invaluable insights into the world of goal setting in senior management.

Discussion Points:

• The concept of seemingly impossible goals in organizations
• Controversial nature and impact of ‘zero harm’
• The role of stretch goals in promoting innovation
• Potential negative effects of setting stretch goals
• Psychological effects of ambitious organizational targets
• Paradoxical outcomes of setting seemingly impossible goals
• The role of emotions in achieving stretch goals
• Factors that contribute to the success of stretch goals
• Real-world examples of successful stretch goal implementation
• Cautions against blind imitation of successful stretch goal strategies
• The concept of zero harm in safety initiatives
• Need for long-term research on zero harm effectiveness
• The answer to our episode’s question – they're good when the organization is currently doing well enough, but stretch goals are not good when the organization is struggling and trying to turn a corner using that stretch goal.

Quotes:

"The basic idea [of ‘zero harm’] is that companies should adopt a visionary goal of having zero accidents. Often that comes along with commitment statements by managers, sometimes by workers as well that everyone is committed to the vision of having no accidents." - Drew 

“I think organizations are in this loop, where I know maybe I can't achieve zero, but I can't say anything other than zero because that wouldn't be moral or responsible, because I'd be saying it's okay to hurt people. So I set zero because it's the best thing for me to do.” - David

“The “stretch goal” was credited with the introduction of hybrid cars. You've got to have a whole new way of managing your car to get that seemingly impossible goal of doubling your efficiency.”-  Drew

Resources:

Link to the Paper

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

Feedback@safetyofwork

You’ll hear David and Drew delve into the often overlooked role of bias in accident investigations. They explore the potential pitfalls of data collection, particularly confirmation bias, and discuss the impacts of other biases such as anchoring bias and hindsight bias. Findings from the paper are examined, revealing insights into confirmation bias and its prevalence in interviews. Strategies for enhancing the quality of incident investigations are also discussed, emphasizing the need to shift focus from blaming individuals to investigating organizational causes. The episode concludes with the introduction of Safety Exchange, a platform for global safety community collaboration.

Discussion Points:

• Exploring the role of bias in accident investigations
• Confirmation bias in data collection can validate initial assumptions
• Review of a study examining confirmation bias among industry practitioners
• Anchoring bias and hindsight bias on safety strategies
• Recognizing and confronting personal biases 
• Counterfactuals in steering conversations towards preconceived solutions
• Strategies to enhance the quality of incident investigations
• Shifting focus from blaming individuals to investigating organizational causes
• Safety Exchange - a platform for global safety community
• The challenges organizations face when conducting good quality investigations
• Standardization, trust, and managing time and production constraints
• Confirmation bias in shaping investigation outcomes
• Techniques to avoid bias in accident investigations and improve their quality
• Safety Exchange - a safe place for open discussion
• Six key questions
• The answer to our episode’s question – Very, and we all are as human beings. It does mean that we should probably worry more about the data collection phase of our investigations more than the causal analysis methodology and taxonomy that we concern ourselves with

Quotes:

"If we actually don't understand how to get a good data collection process, then it really doesn't matter what happens after that." - David 

"The trick is recognizing our biases and separating ourselves from prior experiences to view each incident with fresh eyes." - Drew

"I have heard people in the industry say this to me, that there's no new problems in safety, we've seen them all before." - David

"In talking with people in the industry around this topic, incident investigation and incident investigation quality, 80% of the conversation is around that causal classification taxonomy." - David

Resources:

Link to the Paper

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

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The research paper discussed is by Anita Tucker and Sarah Singer, titled "The Effectiveness of Management by Walking Around: A Randomised Field Study," published in Production and Operations Management. 

Discussion Points:

• Understanding senior leadership safety visits and management walkarounds
• Best practices for safety management programs
• How management walkarounds influence staff perception
• Research findings comparing intervention and control groups
• Consequences of management inaction
• Effective implementation of changes 
• Role of senior managers in prioritizing problems
• Impact of patchy implementation
• How leadership visits affect staff perception
• Investigating management inaction 
• Effective implementation and consultation
• Key Takeaways:
• The same general initiative can have very different effectiveness depending on how it's implemented and who's implementing it
• When we do any sort of consultation effort, whether it's forums, walkarounds, reporting systems, or learning teams, what do we judge those on? Do we judge them on their success at consulting or do we judge them on their success at generating actions that get taken?
• The answer to our episode’s question – Your answer here at the end of our notes is sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on the resulting actions.

Quotes:

"I've definitely lived and breathed this sort of a program a lot during my career." - David

"The effectiveness of management walkarounds depends on the resulting actions." - David

"The worst thing you can do is spend lots of time deciding what is a high-value problem." - Drew

"Having the senior manager allocated really means that something serious has been done about it." - Drew

"The individual who walks around with the leader and talks about safety with the leader, thinks a lot better about the organization." - David

Resources:

Link to the Paper

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

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The paper reviewed in this episode is from the Journal of Applied Psychology entitled, “A meta-analysis of personality and workplace safety: Addressing unanswered questions” by Beus, J. M., Dhanani, L. Y., & McCord, M. A. (2015).

Discussion Points:

• Overview of the intersection between psychology and workplace safety
• How personality tests may predict safety performance
• Accident proneness theory to modern behaviorism
• Research on personality and safety performance
• Personality traits influencing work behaviors
• The influence of institutional logic
• Personality tests for safety performance
• The need for further research and standardized measurement methods
• Examining statistical evidence linking personality to safety performance
• Personality traits and their impact on work behavior
• Analysis of research findings on personality and safety performance
• The practical implications of the research findings
• The intriguing yet complex relationship between personality and safety
• Takeaways:
• While not total bunk, we definitely don't understand the impact of personality on safety nearly enough to use it as a tool to predict who will or won't make a safe employee
• There are lots of different ways that we could use personality to get some insights and to make some contributions
• We need people using those measurements to find out more about the relationship between personality and behavior in different situations in different contexts with different choices under different organizational influences.
• The answer to our episode’s question – Maybe. It depends. Sometimes, in some places not yet. I don't want to say no, but it's not yes yet either.

Quotes:

I have to admit, before I read this, I thought that the entire idea of personality testing for safety was total bunk. Coming out of it, I'm still not convinced, but it's much more mixed or nuanced than I was expecting.  - Drew

If there was a systemic trend where some people were genuinely more accident prone, we would expect to see much sharper differences between the number of times one person had an accident and all people who didn't have accidents. - Drew

I think anything that lumps people into four or five categories downplays the uniqueness of each individual. - David

There are good professionals in HR, there's good science in HR, but there is a huge amount of pseudo-science around recruiting practices and every country has its own pseudoscience. - Drew

Resources:

Link to the Paper 

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

Feedback@safetyofwork

Show Notes -  The Safety of Work - Ep. 109 Do safety performance indicators mean the same thing to different stakeholders

Dr. Drew Rae and Dr. David Provan

The abstract reads:

Indicators are used by most organizations to track their safety performance. Research attention has been drawn to what makes for a good indicator (specific, proactive, etc.) and the sometimes perverse and unexpected consequences of their introduction. While previous research has demonstrated some of the complexity, uncertainties and debates that surround safety indicators in the scientific community, to date, little attention has been paid to how a safety indicator can act as a boundary object that bridges different social worlds despite being the social groups’ diverse conceptualization. We examine how a safety performance indicator is interpreted and negotiated by different social groups in the context of public procurement of critical services, specifically fixed-wing ambulance services. The different uses that the procurer and service providers have for performance data are investigated, to analyze how a safety performance indicator can act as a boundary object, and with what consequences. Moving beyond the functionality of indicators to explore the meanings ascribed by different actors, allows for greater understanding of how indicators function in and between social groups and organizations, and how safety is more fundamentally conceived and enacted. In some cases, safety has become a proxy for other risks (reputation and financial). Focusing on the symbolic equivocality of outcome indicators and even more tightly defined safety performance indicators ultimately allows a richer understanding of the priorities of each actor within a supply chain and indicates that the imposition of oversimplified indicators may disrupt important work in ways that could be detrimental to safety performance.

Discussion Points:

• What we turn into numbers in an organization
• Background of how this paper came about
• Four main groups - procurement, incoming operator, outgoing operator, pilots
• Availability is key for air ambulances
• Incentivizing availability
• Outgoing operators/providers feel they lost the contract unfairly
• The point of view of the incoming operators/providers 
• Military pilots fill in between providers
• Using numbers to show how good/bad the service is
• Pilots - caught in the middle
• Contracts always require a trade-off
• Boundary objects- what does availability mean to different people?
• Maximizing core deliverables safely
• Problems with measuring availability
• Pressure within the system
• Putting a number on performance 
• Takeaways:
• Choice of a certain metric that isn’t what you need leads to perverse behavior
• Placing indicators on things can make other things invisible
• Financial penalties tied to indicators can be counteractive
• The answer to our episode’s question – Yes, metrics on the boundaries can communicate in different directions

Quotes:

“The way in which we turn things into numbers reveals a lot about the logic that is driving the way that we act and give meaning to our actions.” - Drew

“You’ve got these different measures of the service that are vastly different, depending on what you’re counting, and what you’re looking for..” - David

“The paper never draws a final conclusion - was the service good, was the service bad?” - Drew

“The pilots are always in this sort of weird, negotiated situation, where ‘doing the right thing’ could be in either direction.” - Drew

“If someone’s promising something better, bigger, faster and cheaper, make sure you take the effort to understand how that company is going to do that….” - David 

Resources:

Link to the Paper 

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

Feedback@safetyofwork

This report details the full findings of the world’s largest four-day working week trial to date, comprising 61 companies and around 2,900 workers, that took place in the UK from June to December 2022. The design of the trial involved two months of preparation for participants, with workshops, coaching, mentoring and peer support, drawing on the experience of companies who had already moved to a shorter working week, as well as leading research and consultancy organisations. The report results draw on administrative data from companies, survey data from employees, alongside a range of interviews conducted over the pilot period, providing measurement points at the beginning, middle, and end of the trial.

Discussion Points:

• Background on the five-day workweek
• We’ll set out to prove or review two central claims:
• Reduce hours worked, and maintain same productivity
• Reduced hours will provide benefits to the employees
• Digging in to the Autonomy organization and the researchers and authors
• Says “trial” but it’s more like a pilot program
• 61 companies, June to December 2022
• Issues with methodology - companies will change in 6 months coming out of Covid- a controlled trial would have been better
• The pilot only includes white collar jobs - no physical, operational, high-hazard businesses
• The revenue numbers
• Analysing the staff numbers- how many filled out the survey? What positions did the respondents hold in the company?
• Who experienced positive vs. negative changes in individual results
• Interviews from the “shop floor” was actually CEOs and office staff
• Eliminating wasted time from the five-day week
• What different companies preferred employees to do with their ‘extra time’
• Assumption 1: there is a business use case benefit- not true
• Assumption 2: benefits for staff - mixed results
• Takeaways:
• Don’t use averages
• Finding shared goals can be good for everyone
• Be aware of burden-shifting
• The answer to our episode’s question – It’s a promising idea, but results are mixed, and it requires more controlled trial research

Quotes:

“It’s important to note that this is a pre-Covid idea, this isn’t a response to Covid.” - Dr. Drew

“...there's a reason why we like to do controlled trials. That reason is that things change in any company over six months.” - Drew

“ …a lot of the qualitative data sample is very tiny. Only a third of the companies got spoken to, and only one senior representative who was already motivated to participate in the trial, would like to think that anything that their company does is successful.” - David

“I'm pretty sure if you picked any company, you're taking into account things like government subsidies for Covid, grants, and things like that. Everyone had very different business in 2021-2022.” - Drew

“We're not trying to accelerate the pace of work, we're trying to remove all of the unnecessary work.” - Drew

“I think people who plan the battle don't battle the plan. I like collaborative decision-making in general, but I really like it in relation to goal setting and how to achieve those goals.” - David

Resources:

Link to the Pilot Study

Autonomy

The Harwood Experiment Episode

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

Feedback@safetyofwork

Summary: 

The purpose of the Australian Work Health and Safety (WHS) Strategy 2023–2033 (the Strategy) is to outline a national vision for WHS — Safe and healthy work for all — and set the platform for delivering on key WHS improvements. To do this, the Strategy articulates a primary goal supported by national targets, and the enablers, actions and system-wide shifts required to achieve this goal over the next ten years. This Strategy guides the work of Safe Work Australia and its Members, including representatives of governments, employers and workers – but should also contribute to the work and understanding of all in the WHS system including  researchers, experts and practitioners who play a role in owning, contributing to and realising the national vision.

Discussion Points:

• Background on Safe Work Australia 
• The strategy includes six goals for reducing:
• Worker fatalities caused by traumatic injuries by 30%          
• The frequency rate of serious claims resulting in one or more weeks off work by 20%       
• The frequency rate of claims resulting in permanent impairment by 15%    
• The overall incidence of work-related injury or illness among workers to below 3.5%         
• The frequency rate of work-related respiratory disease by 20% 
• No new cases of accelerated silicosis by 2033
• The strategy is a great opportunity to set a direction for research and education
• Five actions covered by the strategy:
• Information and raising awareness
• National Coordination
• Data and intelligence gathering
• Health and safety leadership
• Compliance and enforcement
• When regulators fund research - they demand tangible results quickly
• Many safety documents and corporate safety systems never reach the most vulnerable workers, who don’t have ‘regular’ long-term jobs
• Standardization can increase unnecessary work
• When and where do organizations access safety information?
• Data - AI use for the future
• Strategy lacks milestones within the ten-year span
• Enforcement - we don’t have evidence-based data on the effects
• Takeaways:
• The idea of a national strategy? Good.
• Balancing safety with innovation, evidence
• Answering our episode question: Need research into specific workforces, what is the evidence behind specific industry issues.  “Lots of research is needed!”

Quotes:

“The fact is, that in Australia, traumatic injury fatalities - which are the main ones that they are counting - are really quite rare, even if you add the entire country together.” - Drew

“I really see no point in these targets. They are not tangible, they’re not achievable, they’re not even measurable, with the exception of respiratory disease…” - Drew

“These documents are not only an opportunity to set out a strategic direction for research and policy, and industry activity, but also an opportunity to educate.” - David

“When regulators fund research, they tend to demand solutions. They want research that’s going to produce tangible results very quickly.” - Drew

“I would have loved a concrete target for improving education and training- that is something that is really easy to quantify.” - Drew

Resources:

Link to the strategy document

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

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Baron's work focuses primarily on judgment and decision-making, a multi-disciplinary area that applies psychology to problems of ethical decisions and resource allocation in economics, law, business, and public policy. 

The paper’s summary:

Recent efforts to teach thinking could be unproductive without a theory of what needs to be taught and why. Analysis of where thinking goes wrong suggests that emphasis is needed on 'actively open-minded thinking'. including the effort to search for reasons why an initial conclusion might be wrong, and on reflection about rules of inference, such as heuristics used for making decisions and judgments. Such instruction has two functions. First. it helps students to think on their own. Second. it helps them to understand the nature of expert knowledge, and, more generally, the nature of academic disciplines. The second function, largely neglected in discussions of thinking instruction. can serve as the basis for thinking instruction in the disciplines. Students should learn how knowledge is obtained through actively open-minded thinking. Such learning will also teach students to recognize false claims to systematic knowledge.

Discussion Points:

• Critical thinking and Chat AI 
• Teaching knowledge vs. critical thinking
• Section One: Introduction- critical thinking is a stated goal of many teaching institutions
• Section Two: The Current Rationale/What is thinking? 
• Reading about thinking is quite difficult!
• Baron’s “Myside Bias” is today’s confirmation or selection bias
• Reflective learning- does it help with learning?
• Section Three: Abuses - misapplying thinking in schools and business
• Breaking down learning into sub-sections
• Section Four: The growth of knowledge - beginning in Medieval times
• Section Five: The basis of expertise - what is an ‘expert’? Every field has its own self-critiques
• Drew’s brain is hurting just getting through this discussion
• Section Six: What the educated person should know
• Studying accidents in safety science - student assignments
• Takeaways:
• Good thinking means being able to make good decisions re: experts
• Precision is required around what is necessary for learning
• Well-informed self-criticism is necessary 
• Answering our episode question: Can we teach critical thinking? It was never answered in this paper, but it gave us a lot to think about

Quotes:

“It’s a real stereotype that old high schools were all about rote learning. I don’t think that was ever the case. The best teachers have always tried to inspire their students to do more than just learn the material.” - Drew

“Part of the point he’s making is, is that not everyone who holds themself out to be an expert IS an expert…that’s when we have to have good thinking tools .. who IS an expert and how do we know who to trust?” - Drew

“Baron also says that even good thinking processes won’t necessarily help much when specific knowledge is lacking…” - David

‘The smarter students are, the better they are at using knowledge about cognitive biases to criticize other people’s beliefs, rather than to help themselves think more critically.” - Drew

“Different fields advance by different sorts of criticism..to understand expertise a field you need to understand how that field does its internal critique.” - Drew

Resources:

Link to the paper

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

Feedback@safetyofwork