During the Greyhound’s practice, Coach Lasso gets upset. The team isn’t practicing correctly. Ted screams out ‘the day we stop doing things the right way means we are one day closer to doing everything the wrong way!” I’ve certainly felt that way as I’ve observed employees performing their work. They skip steps. Like the players, employees will take shortcuts. Sometimes they completely ignore procedures. They improvise procedures. It frustrates me.
I grew up under the mantras of ‘inspect what you expect’ and ‘what’s important to my boss is fascinating to me.” If workers didn’t follow procedures, it was a simple diagnostic. 1)The boss didn’t make his expectations important enough; 2) the employee didn’t know what was expected; 3) the employee didn’t know how to perform the task, or 4) they didn’t want to perform the task. The first three were the manager’s responsibility. The fourth was on the employee, and it was a rare occurrence.
Sydney Dekker and Todd Conklin have a different view. A ‘Safety II’ view. It’s intriguing. People make mistakes (Six Sigma tells us that without automation, we will only achieve 4 Sigma, or 6,210 defects per million). Dekker and Conklin want people to fail safely. We should focus on the stuff that will kill people. They advocate engaging the workers in a discussion on how they do their work safely most of the time and learning from them. This, too, makes sense.
On the other hand, if you’re flying a plane, operating a control board, or caring for patients, rules matter. You follow procedures. Cue the Ted Lasso quote.
How do you reconcile these two seemingly opposite concepts? A few thoughts:
- Confirm that the procedures exist, were available and were written in an easy to understand way; even better if employees wrote the procedures.
- Engage your employees in dialog and understand, in a curious way, if they have a better and safer way to perform the tasks.
- Use ‘appreciative inquiry’ to find out what’s working here (and elsewhere) that keeps people safe, learn from it and apply it.
- Have a risk discussion to understand why things are safe and what keeps things going right.
- Understand why employees are taking shortcuts and skipping steps (hint: it might be you or the organization sending a production over protection message).
What other thoughts do you have?
If you see employees taking shortcuts, skipping steps, or going against procedures, it doesn’t mean that your moments away from “doing everything wrong.” It might be an opportunity to engage your teams better and improve.
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