The Safety of Work

The paper we use to frame today’s discussion is Leading or Lagging? Temporal Analysis of Safety Indicators on a Large Infrastructure Construction Project. Topics:Similarities between Economists and safety professionals.Definitions of performance measures.The researchers methods for this study.What the data showed about this particular organization.Errors in human reporting.Practical takeaways from the study. Quotes:“One definition of a performance measure or indicator should be...the metric used to measure the organization’s ability to control the risk of accidents.”“There’s lots of things in nature that aren’t supposed to generate bell curves.”“Safety is performed by humans, who react to the things that they see.” Resources:Lingard, H., Hallowell, M., Salas, R., & Pirzadeh, P. (2017). Leading or lagging? Temporal analysis of safety indicators on a large infrastructure construction project. Safety science, 91, 206-220.Feedback@safetyofwork.com

Tune in to hear our discussion and insights.Topics:Journals and how content gets submitted.Using Google Scholar instead of Google.Search tips.How to request copies of papers.University access to research papers.How to determine what is being measured in a paper.Internal and external validity.The difference between papers and books.Why you shouldn’t pay for papers. Quotes:“The basic rule for what is legal and what is not, is authors own the text until they submit it to a publisher.”“Anyone who’s got even just a student account at a university, shares in the subscription. So if they log in, while they’re on campus, then they have free access to a lot of stuff which is paywalled, when they’re off campus.”“Internal validity is how much within the scope of the paper it has correctly answered the question.” Resources:Feedback@safetyofwork.com

The discussion centers around institutional logics and their impact on safety culture. The hosts critique traditional safety management approaches, emphasizing the need for a contextual understanding. They explore how local rationalities influence decision-making within organizations. The complexities of safety practices in the railway construction industry showcase competing logics of safety and cost. Insights reveal that changing these entrenched logics is challenging, underscoring the importance of understanding them for improved safety outcomes.

We use the paper, How Institutions Enhance Mindfulness, to help frame our discussion.Topics:Mindful organizing.How the researchers conducted their survey and how it affected results.When the regulators are from the government.Four key activities that enhance safety.Why the org in the study leaned towards punishment rather than education.The two disparate views within the paper.How to create an environment that supports good decisions.Shifting blind reinforcement to reasonable reinforcement.Quotes:“So, they talked about this collective mindfulness as emerging out of the five principles of high-reliability organization theory.”“I was trying to interpret how much of this was down to national culture and how much of it was down to the research itself. And it certainly appears that in this situation, the primary regulator...the government regulator is the police.”“Initially operators must learn and follow the rules. But to function effectively as operators, they can’t mindlessly follow the rules, because the rules are sometimes irrelevant or unhelpful, leading to unnecessary violations.” Resources:Kudesia, R. S., Lang, T., & Reb, J. (2020). How Institutions Enhance Mindfulness: Interactions between external regulators and front-line operators around safety rules. Safety science, 122, 104511.Feedback@safetyofwork.com

We use the papers to frame our discussion: A Systematic Review of the Effectiveness, Compliance, and Critical Factors for Implementation of Safety Checklists in Surgery; Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effect of the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist on Post-Operative Complications; and The Effects of Safety Checklists in Medicine.Tune in to hear our thoughts on this potentially life or death issue.Topics:The good reputation of checklists.Equipment Failure.The decrease of information loss.Do checklists slow things down?How closely checklists are followed.The rhyme of reason for checklists.Quotes:“Checklists are one of those things that have been associated with safety for a long time and associated in a way that gives them quite a good name.”“Lots of stuff being recorded as positively improving with the introduction of a checklist.”“If you can’t convince a multidisciplinary team that this belongs on the checklist, because they all agree there is a clear link between this item and a particular accident that they all know about, then you don’t get to put it on the checklist.”Resources:Borchard, A., Schwappach, D.L., Barbir, A., & Bezzola, P. (2012).A Systematic Review of the Effectiveness, Compliance, and Critical Factors for Implementation of Safety Checklists in Surgery Annals of Surgery, 256, 925–933. Bergs, J., Hellings, J., Cleemput, I., Zurel, Ö., De Troyer, V., Van Hiel, M., ... & Vandijck, D. (2014). Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effect of the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist on Post-Operative Complications. British Journal of Surgery, 101(3), 150-158.Thomassen, Ø., Storesund, A., Søfteland, E., & Brattebø, G. (2014). The Effects of Safety Checklists in Medicine: a systematic review. Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica, 58(1), 5-18.Feedback@safetyofwork.com

We use David’s paper, Benefactor or Burden, to frame our discussion today.Topics:The distinction between role and identity.The stereotypes about the safety profession.Saturation.What to consider when hiring safety employees.Tertiary education.Change and the journey of safety.The values of safety professionals.What is important to talk about, when talking about safety professionals.Quotes:“Very few safety people describe themselves as bureaucrats.”“...Just that word, ‘Professional’. It tended to be the case that people who had tertiary education thought of that as being important as part of being a professional.”“We value belonging and involvement, but we also require authority to do some of our role.”Resources:Provan, D. J., Dekker, S. W., & Rae, A. J. (2018). Benefactor or Burden: Exploring the professional identity of safety professionals. Journal of safety research, 66, 21-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2018.05.005Feedback@safetyofwork.com

We use the paper, What Constitutes Effective Manual Handling Training, in order to frame our discussion. The paper is a systematic review that looks at fifty three intervention studies performed over a number of years.Topics:Why training is the cornerstone of the workplace.Why it’s important to evaluate training.The results of the various studies discussed within today’s paper.The varying qualities of studies.Finding what type of manual training is effective.Quotes:“The idea of having some sort of formalized weighting system, is it gets around the accusation of researcher bias.”“There’s maybe something to say that some of that training was actually counter to the way that we now understand, maybe, that people can exert safe and maximal force.”“If you do have residual risk leftover...person-task-fit is directly relevant around this residual risk…” Resources:Feeback@safetyofwork.com

Dave is joined by special guest, Dr. Laura Maguire, a researcher at the Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab at Ohio State University. Her recent research pertains to the topic at hand. Tune in to hear our informative discussion. Topics:● Dr. Maguire’s personal relationship to safety.● Exploring coordinated joint activity in the tech industry.● The difficulty of doing research in the natural laboratory.● What Dr. Maguire noticed during her research.● Why breakdowns in common ground occur.● Why a phone call can involve effortful cognitive work. Quotes:“In cognitive systems engineering, we’re most interested in what are the generalized patterns of cognition and of interpreting the world…”“Doing research in what we call the ‘natural laboratory’ or trying to examine cognition in the wild, is really, really hard.”“Tooling is never going to solve all of the problems, right?”Resources:Feedback@safetyofwork.com

We use the paper, Embracing Complexity, to frame our discussion. Tune in to hear our chat about this important issue. Topics:The definition of a team.What unit to study when researching teams.Compositional and structural features.Mediating mechanisms.Average member attributes and how they contribute to performance.How diversity affects teams.Fault lines.How to measure a team’s success.The positive effect of innovation. Quotes:“A topic that comes up a lot in the research is virtual teams. Who would have guessed that teams meeting over Zoom was going to be a topical and relevant hot-button topic?”“...The research suggests that functional diversity, as well as individual educational diversity have positive relationships with team performance.”“There were some studies that said if there is a general climate in the organization around innovation, then the team will display more innovative characteristics and things like that.” Resources:Mathieu, J. E., Gallagher, P. T., Domingo, M. A., & Klock, E. A. (2019). Embracing Complexity: Reviewing the past decade of team effectiveness research. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 6, 17-46.Feedback@safetyofwork.com

Explore the intriguing connection between leadership styles and safety outcomes. The discussion delves into transformational leadership's impact on workplace safety and how specific training can enhance leadership effectiveness. It examines the nuances between safety-specific and general leadership, revealing that tailored approaches yield better results. Key findings suggest that focused messaging can drive specific outcomes, while a leader’s actions can either bolster or undermine safety commitments. The hosts emphasize the importance of translating safety values into tangible behaviors.