Uncover the True Strength of Your Safety Measures
When considering workplace safety, overlooking crucial procedures can lead to dire consequences. Consider this: a single safety lapse can not only jeopardize the well-being of your employees but can also pose a significant financial and reputational risk to your company. As company owners and safety professionals, we invest substantial time and effort in developing procedures that are clear, concise, compliant, effective, and realistic. However, there's a crucial step that often gets overlooked — piloting. Piloting safety procedures is not just about compliance; it's a strategic investment that safeguards your employees and therefore, your bottom line. Before we get to piloting, let’s ensure we are on the same page with what makes an impactful procedure.
Crafting a Procedure: A Checklist for Impact
Developing a procedure demands more than just effort; it demands precision and purpose:
Crystal Clear: Every word serves a purpose; confusion has no room. When people read it, understanding should be easy and anticipated questions addressed.
Conciseness is Key: No fluff, no unnecessary words. Time is valuable, and every moment spent reading should yield value. Each word counts, contributing to a streamlined and impactful document.
Compliance is Non-Negotiable: The integration of legislative requirements is a must. From procedural details to role assignments that ensure accountability. Those held responsible must understand their role in executing the requirements outlined within the procedure.
Effectiveness at Its Core: A procedure without tangible results is futile. Does it truly minimize the risk of injury or illness? If not, the procedure’s existence warrants questioning. An effective procedure must have measurable objectives to assess its success and justify its continued use.
Reasonable, Realistic, Do-able: Unattainable procedures hinder rather than help. If any aspect is deemed unreasonable or unrealistic, even the most compliant procedure won't ‘hit the floor’. Practicality is paramount — it's not just about having a compliant document; it's about guaranteeing that compliance becomes a routine part of the work process. Are the established mechanisms operational? Can workers effortlessly engage with them as expected? This is precisely where the strategic implementation of piloting comes into play. Piloting a procedure is necessary to ensure its feasibility.
Navigating the Significance of Piloting in Procedure Development
Piloting is a late-stage essential in the procedure development process. By this point, all the required components to make the procedure functional have been procured, aligned with the scale of the pilot. The management has acknowledged the need for the procedure, showing commitment. While worker feedback has been obtained, it has been primarily theoretical, revolving around how they envision the procedure working in practice. During the pilot phase, the primary objective is to evaluate whether workers can effectively execute the procedure as intended.
Striking the Right Balance: Determining an Optimal Pilot Size for Procedure Success
Choosing a suitable pilot size is crucial. It should strike a balance - large enough to instill confidence that the procedure can effectively scale across your organization or relevant departments, yet small enough to facilitate the collection of meaningful feedback. This ensures that feedback can be thoroughly examined, even on an individual basis, if necessary.
Unveiling the Evolution of a Safety Procedure: A Real-Life Pilot Experience
In a previous pilot initiative I spearheaded, critical flaws in the assessment tool used to complete the procedure surfaced, leading to a complete overhaul following feedback from pilot participants. Let me elaborate on the journey.
The catalyst was a severe incident where a worker, while transporting a client, sustained a physical assault while driving. If the worker had not been stopped at a stop sign during the assault, the incident could have been even worse. As it was, the incident led to years of pain and suffering. What became evident when scrutinized by occupational health and safety regulators is that risk was not being assessed prior to transporting a client. Although the worker was able to attest to having completed a risk assessment, it was informal and undocumented. To any Canadian regulator enforcing occupational health and safety legislation, the rule is: if it wasn’t documented it wasn’t done.
To address this gap, the organization aimed to develop a comprehensive, yet simple, risk assessment to be completed by workers before each client transport. My role involved extensive research, drafting the procedure, creating supporting tools, and collaborating with management and frontline workers. After numerous revisions, the pilot was set in motion, reaching two department managers overseeing around 50 workers, with aspirations to scale to approximately a thousand workers across multiple sites across a large geography.
However, when gathering feedback from the workers involved in the pilot, it became apparent that the procedure did not resonate well. Initially disheartened, it was crucial to set aside any sense of failure and focus on understanding workers' needs. Their feedback revealed complexities, especially with another mental health evaluation tool that fed into the assessment but that was understood primarily by clinicians but not universally by all workers engaged in transporting clients. Maintaining a curious mindset, I continued to delve deeper. I also discovered that the system we initially created that relied on point tallying to determine the course of action was cumbersome and required simplification. Exiting the meeting, I felt deflated, yet with a heightened understanding of the necessity for a more streamlined, user-friendly assessment tool.
Equipped with worker feedback gained from the pilot, I re-envisioned the assessment tool into a streamlined Visio decision tree. This new tool categorized four key assessment areas: self, vehicle, environment, and client. It featured straightforward yes/no questions in each category, leading to immediate directions, including a stop sign visual when more guidance must be sought before transportation can occur. Starting with self-assessment (for example, is the worker fit to drive) the assessment process began with easier questions and culminated in evaluating the client, ensuring a logical and efficient progression through the assessment. The revised assessment was well received by workers piloting the it and, ultimately by all the workers on final roll out.
This underscores the ongoing necessity to adapt, glean insights from feedback, and reshape procedures innovatively to align with the authentic needs of the workforce. Additionally, piloting becomes crucial for gaining support and fostering the adoption of procedures among those involved. Active participants in the pilot are more likely to embrace and champion the procedure, influencing their colleagues to do the same.
Conclusion:
In the area of workplace safety, the stakes are high, and the repercussions of neglecting crucial procedures can be profound. A single safety lapse not only endangers the well-being of employees but also poses substantial financial and reputational risks for the company. While considerable effort is invested in crafting procedures that are clear, concise, compliant, effective, and realistic, the pivotal step of piloting is often overlooked.
Call to Action:
Equipped with these insights, the call to action is clear: Embrace the strategic power of piloting in procedure development. Adapt, learn from feedback, and innovate to meet the genuine needs of your workforce. The journey to a safer workplace must be intentional and strategic and it includes piloting to ensure that procedures are not only theoretically sound but practically feasible.
Call Jennie Hogan at 250.641.9575 for further support with policy, procedure and program development that forms your safety management system.
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