Resource dearth is something we, as a company, have suffered so regularly we often chuckle at the fact we have survived at all. At the same time, we have learned a lesson along the way that directly affected our solution-set: resources are the key reason for safety failures, either because the resources are lacking or, more often, because they are misapplied.
If the emptiness of words gets in the way of correct actions, and mistaken focus on the wrong details drives resource scarcity, the real killer for most unsafe workplaces (in the literal sense) is that the human beings applying the resources are doing so poorly. Even the best safety personnel do so, because they are applying them almost always in the near timeframe, often reactively, and almost never with any ability to directly connect the outcomes with valuable metrics.
Try selling any system to an executive who manages on quarterly returns (almost all in this age), where the execution is being left to a group that is viewed as pure-cost. Even asking for a hundred thousand dollars to deploy a perfect solution exceeds tolerance when that hundred thousand dollars is viewed as being thrown away in a pure-cost activity. Take a qualified, capable, smart safety person into the position of having to manage a group that has been reactive for years, and no one would envy them the task of selling that this time it will be different. It is no wonder that status quo is so acceptable, given the focus ends up being cost suppression rather than operational risk suppression.
The reality though is that resource dearth is often illusionary, since we hear people say “it costs a million dollars to do safety right.” The entire statement is flawed deeply because it creates a mistaken view that safety is done. It will always cost endless millions to pour money into a false process, because ultimately you are not building anything to return value. You are pouring cash into a money pit. Lack of metrics does that every time.
The actual resources to implement risk-management are significantly smaller than maintaining status quo safety, because risk-management is an integrated process model – it makes safety a by-product of required operational management that has inherent value outside “safety.”
We have been guilty of saying aloud, “Safety personnel need to focus on important realities, not fumbling in the dark.” The first step to refocus is to recognise that safety isn’t a process, but the outcome of the larger process of risk-management. As soon as that happens, we can observe three factors that come into play to reduce resource consumption: first, you can measure value returns, meaning you won’t continuously expend resources against poor value; second, you raise the profile of the safety concept to engage all operational management aspects, reducing the workload at any one point and enhancing the productive shared value; and, third, you commit existing resources so much more effectively the trend is toward cost reduction over time, often rapidly, since the entire organisation creates a self-reinforcing model of operational risk awareness and management.
It is easy to forget that all of it boils down to a simple statement: the resources already exist to risk-manage because more is spent on crisis handling than will ever be spent of avoidance and suppression. The simplest proof of that is an example found in a single fire extinguisher. You invest in an extinguisher to put out fires, not because you expect a fire, but because when one happens it costs many times more than the cost of being prepared to put it out.
The ten minutes a safety person spends on meaningless paperwork rather than actually conveying knowledge is wasted time, because the return on the time invested is not measurable. The same ten minutes spent talking to a supervisor about new ideas for reducing a primary workplace risk, and asking them to put their ideas down in writing for distribution is invaluable – and if even one accident is avoided by it, you can measure the effect. Accountability imparts trust, and trust develops a relationship model where the resources wasted in pure expense today are deployed to prevent losses tomorrow.
Unlike our experience, which is that resources are simply not easy to generate, most of the client companies we have dealt with (all, in fact) have fallen into a resource trap where they spend enormously to stay in the same place, avoiding disaster more by happenstance than planning for better controls. They tend to be stunned when the disaster strikes, though predictive analysis of their systems always makes the failure inevitable – when analysis has any data to be performed upon.
Outside the idea of pure costing, the resource being cash, our experience has created a strange awareness that another enormous resource is ignored, and in fact often creates even higher cost/loss ratios. This is the knowledge base that can be generated by risk-management. The creation of safety as by-product is achieved by generating data that can be analysed to focus resource application, and that cycle creates consistently higher quality data that can be used to manage risks more effectively over time.
We have yet, in a decade of analytical effort, to encounter a single company that can quantify what their employees actually do. In most cases they cannot even list a set of occupational names that makes rational sense. In many cases the list of “occupations” will number in the hundreds for workforces that number in the hundreds, with dozens of variations, making or thousands of scraps of paper that cannot even be related, let alone analysed. Even when those occupations can be quantified, the quality consideration that comes into play is instructive: almost no real description exists to assist Human Resources in hiring personnel to positions, creating a pre-hire analysis fault, increasing the risk of untrained personnel on the operational floor. But then again, since we have yet to find a single company whose training records are even accessible, let alone probably correct, perhaps this is an irrelevant concern.
The point is that resource dearth can be real, but it is almost always imagined in the realm of safety. It isn’t that resources don’t exist, but that they are misapplied, immeasurable as to effect, and represent a pure irrecoverable cost of operations.
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