James MacPherson, GGF Health, Safety and Environment Manager sets the scene for the next Health and Safety Webinar which takes place online via Zoom on 7th June at 12.30pm.
The biggest challenge in safety and frankly business or even life is managing human error. Influencing behaviors at work is the hardest part of health and safety at work, it’s the hardest part of most things. So we try so hard for so long to restrict human behaviors with our procedures and processes etc, but Grenfell has showed us that mistakes and big mistakes still happen. But our HSE (Health and Safety Executive) statistics have been telling us that for years. For decades, we have been stuck, stuck at on average 140 fatal incidents in the UK each year.
Our safety performance in the UK has plateaued, so what’s the next step, well we don’t really know until we get there, will we ever know? Hopefully not, because once we think we know – we stop learning and growing. There is one thing for sure after this year, we need to find a way to make our humans and our organizations more resilient and give them the capacity to fail safe.
We need our systems, to be robust enough to absorb human errors and sudden change, and we as organizations need to prioritise learning to continue to grow. For the businesses of the future, compliance is only the starting point not the finishing line. Businesses of the future are ones that are resilient and are usually the companies where human error is so normal its almost boring and something that we have built capacity to suffer and cope. We humans are amazing at coping using our intelligence, innovation and creativity, but we are also complex and fallible.
So how do you manage human error? How do you make sure that you as a business have the capacity to fail and learn, to deal with the next global pandemic or major event?
We tend to focus on our businesses, our systems, our processes and our people and we see how they all click together and how they don’t. One of many approaches to help you do that is Human and Organisational Performance, or HOP, or as they call it in America HPI, Human Performance improvement.
And that is why our next webinar on 7th June is an Introduction to Human and Organizational Performance from one of the leading international consultants in this space, who work with some or the biggest names in the world, Paradigm Human Performance Ltd!
Make sure you don’t miss it.
If you want to attend this free GGF Health and Safety Webinar on 7th June at 12.30pm; book your place here
Thanks for the main image for this article to John Mannell of Prentice Glass who is Chair of the GGF Health and Safety Committee.