The Safety of Work

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 Re...

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 t...

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 conseq...

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 s...

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...

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 th...

You’ll hear a little about Schein’s early career at Harvard and MIT, including his Ph. D. work – a paper on the experience of POWs during wartime contrasted against the indoctrination of individuals joining an organization for employment. Some of Schein’s 30-year-old concepts that are now common practice and theory in organizations, such as “psychological safety”   Discussion Points: A brief overv...

You’ll hear some dismaying statistics around the validity of research papers in general, some comments regarding the peer review process, and then we’ll dissect each of six questions that should be asked BEFORE you design your research.   The paper’s abstract reads: In this article, we define questionable measurement practices (QMPs) as decisions researchers make that raise doubts about the validi...

In concert with the paper, we’ll focus on two major separate but related Boeing 737 accidents:  Lyon Air #610 in October 2018 - The plane took off from Jakarta and crashed 13 mins later, with one of the highest death tolls ever for a 737 crash - 189 souls. Ethiopian Airlines #30 in March 2019 - This plane took off from Addis Ababba and crashed minutes into takeoff, killing 157.   The paper’s abstr...

The paper’s abstract reads: Healthcare systems are under stress as never before. An aging population, increasing complexity and comorbidities, continual innovation, the ambition to allow unfettered access to care, and the demands on professionals contrast sharply with the limited capacity of healthcare systems and the realities of financial austerity. This tension inevitably brings new and potenti...

The paper’s abstract reads: This paper reflects on the credibility of nuclear risk assessment in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. In democratic states, policymaking around nuclear energy has long been premised on an understanding that experts can objectively and accurately calculate the probability of catastrophic accidents. Yet the Fukushima disaster lends credence to the substantial body...

The book explains Perrow’s theory that catastrophic accidents are inevitable in tightly coupled and complex systems. His theory predicts that failures will occur in multiple and unforeseen ways that are virtually impossible to predict.  Charles B. Perrow (1925 – 2019) was an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University. He authored several books...

The paper’s abstract reads:  The failure of 27 wildland firefighters to follow orders to drop their heavy tools so they could move faster and outrun an exploding fire led to their death within sight of safe areas. Possible explanations for this puzzling behavior are developed using guidelines proposed by James D. Thompson, the first editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly. These explanation...

In 1939, Alfred Marrow, the managing director of the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation factory in Virginia, invited Kurt Lewin (a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the U.S. to come to the textile factory to discuss significant problems with productivity and turnover of employees. The Harwood study is considered th...

This was very in-depth research within a single organization, and the survey questions it used were well-structured.  With 48 interviews to pull from, it definitely generated enough solid data to inform the paper’s results and make it a valuable study. We’ll be discussing the pros and cons of linking safety performance to monetary bonuses, which can often lead to misreporting, recategorizing, or o...

Just because concepts, theories, and opinions are useful and make people feel comfortable, doesn’t mean they are correct.  No one so far has come up with an answer in the field of safety that proves, “this is the way we should do it,” and in the work of safety, we must constantly evaluate and update our practices, rules, and recommendations. This of course means we can never feel completely comfor...

Assessing the Influence of “Take 5” Pre-Task Risk Assessments on Safety” by Jop Havinga, Mohammed Ibrahim Shire,  and our own Andrew Rae.  The paper was just published in “Safety,” - an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of industrial and human health safety published quarterly online by MDPI.   The paper’s abstract reads:  This paper describes and analyses a particular safety pract...

The authors’ goal was to produce a scoring protocol for safety-focused leadership engagements that reflects the consensus of a panel of industry experts. Therefore, the authors adopted a multiphased focus group research protocol to address three fundamental questions:    1. What are the characteristics of a high-quality leadership engagement?  2. What is the relative importance of these characteri...

We will discuss the pros and cons of “Golden Safety Rules” and a punitive safety culture vs. a critical risk management approach, and analyze the limitations of the methods used in this research. The paper’s abstract introduction reads:  Golden safety rules (GSR) have been in existence for decades across multiple industry sectors – championed by oil and gas – and there is a belief that they have b...

The paper results center on a survey sent to a multitude of French industries, and although the sampling is from only one country, 15 years ago, the findings are very illustrative of common issues among safety professionals within their organizations.  David used this paper as a reference for his PhD thesis, and we are going to dig into each section to discuss.   The paper’s abstract introduction...

We will go through each letter of the amusing and memorable acronym and give you our thoughts on ways to make sure each point is addressed, and different methodologies to consider when verifying or assuring that each element has been satisfied before you cite the source. Sarah Blakeslee writes (about her CRAAP guidelines): Sometimes a  person needs an acronym that sticks. Take CRAAP for instance....

An excerpt from the paper’s abstract reads as follows: The proposition is based on theory about relationships between knowledge and power, complemented by organizational theory on standardization and accountability. We suggest that the increased reliance on self-regulation and international standards in safety management may be drivers for a shift in the distribution of power regarding safety, cha...

Wastell, who has a BSc and Ph. D. from Durham University, is Emeritus Professor in Operations Management and Information Systems at Nottingham University in the UK. Professor Wastell began his academic career as a cognitive neuroscientist at Durham, studying the relationships between brain activity and psychological processes.  His areas of expertise include neuroscience and social policy: critica...

While this paper was written over half a century ago, it is still relevant to us today - particularly in the Safety management industry where we are often responsible for offering solutions to problems, and implementing those solutions, requires decisions to be made by top management.  This is another fascinating piece of work that will broaden your understanding of why organisations often struggl...

We will review each section of Leveson’s paper and discuss how she sets each section up by stating a general assumption and then proceeds to break that assumption down. We will discuss her analysis of: Safety vs. Reliability Retrospective vs. Prospective Analysis Three Levels of Accident Causes: Proximal event chain Conditions that allowed the event Systemic factors that contributed to both the co...