I hear this from so many employers. They get that health and safety is “just common sense after all is said and done,” and they know that there needs to be some discipline (doing as one is told) surrounding accident prevention. However, most businesses don’t seem to know how to get these two concepts linked together and moving. It’s like joining a train to a carriage.
First I will talk a little about ‘common sense’. In its most basic form its like, ‘it’s not a good idea to go around punching people in the face, when they don’t deserve it!’ and ‘stealing money off elderly couples will get you into a lot of trouble’. However when it gets a little more complicated it begins to fade a little in value. By this I mean that it doesn’t always apply when you are dealing with the day to day things we do when we are at work. Some of the things done in businesses for example are definitely not common sense (don’t get me started!), so how can we expect employees to be driven by an unwavering adherence to it!
So what we can take from this is that we cannot put common sense on a pedestal. It depends a lot on who you are, where you come from, how you have been brought up and how you have been trained and educated, and probably a whole lot more. So what we can put in its place?
Another definition of common sense is that they are rules, general ones by which we have learned to get on reasonably well with each other. If there aren’t universal and universally enforceable rules of common sense then it comes down to writing another more useful set of rules by which we shall live and work with each other IN THIS WORKPLACE!
Some examples of useful rules might be:
In this workplace
- We will take good care of each other (essentially our safety commitment!)
- We will point out things that could hurt us (hazard identification)
- We will train and be trained so that we can do our work safely (training)
- We will let new people know how we expect them to behave when they join us (Induction)
- We will all try to prevent accidents and if one happens try to prevent it from happening again (Accident Investigations)
- If someone is injured we will first of all take care of them while they recover and then try hard to get them back into their job. (Rehabilitation and Return to Work)
Now a little about DISCIPLINE
It’s quite often seen as a bit ‘not politically correct’ nowadays. I don’t hold that view. I define discipline as ‘Everything we do that is good and of value either to ourselves or others we do through the disciplined application of our skill’. It’s like when you join the army, a lot is made of discipline and for very good reason. You get killed quicker if you don’t obey the instruction “keep your head down”!
The same principle applies when building a frame on a house. If the boss says “do not, under any circumstances, try to jump across the void where the stairs will go”, he’s saying it because he’s looked at it and knows from experience that it’s too far to jump and if you fall you will hurt yourself (he’s probably done that!). So those who are disciplined will NOT jump and therefore will not fall. Easy? However those who are not, will and may NOT fall – this time! However the more often they jump the more likely they are to fall. It’s the odds.
So how do we link them? Well, I think that the RULES or procedures we apply have to make sense to those who will use them. This simply means that a) we should write, or otherwise communicate the rules in ways (and languages) that our workers will understand about the things that will hurt them and b) the rules have to be simple, straightforward and easy to implement BY THE EMPLOYEES. It’s no good asking them to read the HSE Act is it?