Much of safety is about discipline. Protocols, guidelines and programs are really only on paper – it takes good manager and worker discipline to turn the paper into practice and keep workers safe while on the job (and in some cases, at home too).
Discipline is inherent with many workers, but not everyone is so willing to toe the line and stick to protocols – even some supervisors with responsibility for ensuring compliance among workers, will once in a while let workers cut corners if it means they don’t get hurt and yet work more efficiently.
As the saying goes, that works great until it doesn’t.
Christopher Goulart wrote about discipline to make a difference in safety as an article in a recent issue fo Professional Safety magazine, and this blog piggybacks on the first one from Tuesday, that introduced the tools available in the toolbox to help supervisors and managers promote discipline among workers when it comes to safe actions and behaviors.
Quick Recap
The first part of Goulart’s article talked about the toolbox that supervisors and managers can use to promote effective work behaviors and actions, both with positive and negative reinforcements. From coaching to feedback, applying accountability to discipline to punishment, five specific tools were laid out, each of which serve a specific purpose to get a certain result that will balance enforcement of safety with strictness that may cause rebellion among rank-and-file.
Know Your Safety Goals
Yes, this is something to think about. Goulart’s piece goes into two types of safety goals, and they are based on each company or organization’s culture. While the underlying goal is better safety and fewer incidents, the difference is in the details of what you want to put your focus on when you apply these various disciplinary tools.
One set of goals for safety are what Goulart calls proximal – this means having negative incentives in order to correct mistakes, alter behaviors by workers, or to prevent intentional violations of the best-practices of the company’s safety program.
On the other side of the coin, there are the absolute goals, which are having more efficient work done, risks in the worksite mitigated or eliminated, and fewer incidents and illnesses. They do not go hand-in-hand all the time; how you handle certain situations may determine which set of goals you are looking to achieve, which means it is good to be thoughtful about that before you impose any kind of negative consequence to an action or behavior.
Goulart goes into an example of how these two sets of goals can be different. Let’s say there is a situation where a worker could learn something that maybe wasn’t covered in a training seminar. But instead of coaching and using the learning opportunity that exists, you decide to either apply accountability to the worker or punish him or her for ignorance, essentially.
Without the learning opportunity, the worker may decide to avoid doing the action or behavior that got them punished in the first place. For those of us in safety, we know the action or behavior alone isn’t the risk to be eliminated; so in this case, having them avoid the activity or behavior altogether won’t reduce the risk of harm in that situation. A proximal goal may be met with punishment or accountability, but an absolute goal can be missed. That could mean a lack of future engagement by workers, which of course takes out the linchpin of the whole process; safety never works without employee buy-in.
You could probably see why it’s such a balancing act. Things can be on a razor’s edge and using the right tool in the right circumstance is vital for long-term success in safety.
Judicious Punishment
While punishment is one of the tools of discipline, it is most effective when it is not used as one of the options as is instead more of a “in emergency break glass” option – where the other tools just won’t work or they haven’t worked when tried previously.
Punishment may be most effective, Goulart writes, in situations where an employee willfully or intentionally breaks a safety rule or guideline, despite knowing what the safe action or behavior is for that situation. Mistakes or lapses in judgement are one thing and could be reminded in different ways. But when someone knows what is right and chooses consciously to do the opposite and put themselves or others in possible harm (especially others), then a severe punishment may be justified, up to and including immediate termination.
As with disciplining kids, handing out punishments for virtually every transgression dilutes the effectiveness of the punishment and in the end won’t really affect positive behaviors. Punishment that is severe but used in very narrow constraints can make a real statement that can keep workers disciplined even when they are doing things that would not cross the Rubicon into being punishable.
Next time, we’ll look into problem-solving and the role of blame in effective safety.