- Totally misses opportunities to come up with useful controls, too!

In addition, I have watched a number of safety practitioners attempt to work as independent contractors, accepting a low hourly rate because they were afraid of missing out.

What I have observed is that accepting too low an hourly rate can mean people feel they need to take on more contracts to earn enough to make ends meet. They often - probably not consciously - say yes to too many projects and / or work that may be a little outside their own expertise, or a contract they don't really enjoy but "it will pay the bills".

We are actively engaged in discussions about health and wellbeing alongside conventional safety and risk management practices. To be credible, we need to be LIVING this.

As a result of taking on work to which they are less than completely committed, safety practitioners go on to provide poor service to their customers - i.e., missed deadlines, poor / reactive communication, incomplete or incorrect advice, etc.

The recent push to find ways to verify professionalism suggests that safety practitioners are already aware that poor performance by any of us affects the reputation of the profession - i.e., we are all in this together.

As Albert Einstein advised, the problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

It is vitally important that all safety practitioners work in a professional manner across ALL our work, not just the safety advice part - e.g., conduct appropriate due diligence, only taking on relevant work (and undertaking to coach and lead to get business leaders to look at safety differently), proactive communication, collaboration with others, greater transparency in our dealings (including remuneration - so thank you for this Peter Bateman), developing personal leadership skills and learning habits so we can model the behaviours we want from business leaders.

Underneath this discussion about pay, we should also be talking about the obligations and responsibilities - overtly assigned or implied by employer position descriptions. Given that so many people acting as Officers have yet to adequately engage with safety and risk management, and that current legislation continuously threatens Officers with dire legal and financial consequences of failure, there is a distinct pattern of Officers scrambling to cover their legal risks, offloading many of these responsibilities to safety managers / advisors who are not provided with sufficient authority or resources to do what is needed. If you have a conscience and half a brain, why would you want to put yourself in the line of fire for people who care more about their bonus and personal reputation than for the team that supports them?

I am not as cynical as that might sound. It's just that I can see very clearly where there are still gaps and flaws in the current approach, and many managers are not ready to hear what is really needed or to commit to doing the work. Instead of seeing the work as an investment, they only see cost and obstacles.

In many ways, safety practitioners who go along with this type of management values become complicit in perpetuating these systemic business failures. And practitioners who are afraid of missing opportunities and undervalue their own role - the knowledge, skills, experience, responsibilities, challenges, the times when people want to shoot the messenger, and all those really difficult aspects of the work we do - if people undervalue this and accept roles that are not appropriately remunerated, it not only limits that person's circumstances; it also reinforces these expectations across the profession (I listened to a very similar discussion amongst freelance journalists a few years ago - remuneration tends to settle around the lowest fee people are willing to accept, which drags everyone else down to that level, then starts leading to unhelpful work practices just to be able to earn enough to live on!).

Then when people accept roles with low remuneration just to have a job (often motivated by the desire to escape from a role that was already doing this to them and they had to get out before they were ground down to oblivion!), resentment builds up. When people don't appropriately value the role with arrangements such as remuneration, allocation of resources, authority, lines of reporting, etc, they are highly unlikely to value the advice and input of that person when they are an employee.

So the cycle is endlessly perpetuated, and we keep seeing high churn rate amongst H&S roles.

Silence implies consent, and we teach people how to treat us by what we are willing to put up with.

- I have long argued against LTI as the focal point for measuring safety performance, because in essence LTI / LTIFR focuses attention on failures and only looking in a rear-view mirror.

I have brainstormed a number of possibilities for lead indicators based on activities organisations already are (or should be) doing, which play a part in preventing injuries. It seems many managers are reluctant for whatever reason to challenge the status quo, even though it is not really serving them, and also that many are reluctant to set targets and objectives because they are afraid they won't meet them....which seems to have an underlying lack of confidence about having safety properly managed and / or a sound grasp of risk management principles.

And by lead indicators, I mean those things with clearly defined linkages to safe operations. I have had interesting debates at times about meaningful lead indicators - numbers alone are not a useful way to measure -e.g., one former manager wanted to have a lead indicator as the number of permits issued, which depends entirely on the number of jobs being undertaken that required a permit. It might work if qualified by the number (proportion) of permits issued BEFORE work was started, but not as an absolute number.

That was the same manager who wanted me to update a 'risk maturity model' that assigned numbers - 25, 50, 75 or 100% - based on subjective assessment of completion. I refused to accept the assignment and pointed out that it was reckless and misleading to offer such an assessment to the Board as if it could actually provide meaningful data about organisational risk management!

Also...I did ICAM Lead Investigator and refresher training with Graham Platts of ACT Safety - he's an excellent trainer, and when I was involved with ICAM training at Ports of Auckland, Graham Platts even came to the port and went out onto a ship to observe the stevedores at work so he could develop a relevant case study for trainees. Graham understands people and a deep level and does an amazing job of facilitating learning, so trainees complete their training with both verified competence and confidence to do the task. He's one of the few safety trainers I would recommend to others because his trainings are very effective.

ICAM is one of many excellent frameworks, and like so many things, the most important thing is to understand what any particular framework can or cannot do. This requires careful attention to the structure of the framework itself and understanding its own inherent biases and blind spots.

Most investigation frameworks aim to provide a structured set of tools to guide people through an investigation to maximise the information and insights you can get from an investigation, with templates and tools to capture them in an orderly way that will support analysis and reporting on findings.

In my experience, there are aspects of various methodologies that are very useful, and at the same time there is no real substitute for personal 'tools' such as an open mind, genuine curiosity, and the desire to learn and improve. I once conducted a serious harm investigation led by my unfettered curiosity that not only allowed the elements of the incident itself to take shape somewhat like a 3D model; I also became very aware of a number of other issues that were much more subtle undercurrents that could have potentially influenced the incident under investigation, and these could also be addressed in proactive ways to prevent future incidents. I was quite amazed to see how all the pieces just came together to show layers of cause factors.

Several years ago, I attended training in Logical Incident Investigation as part of the integrated safety management approach being implemented by my employer. As a part of that training, we were given this flowchart to assist with identifying the most appropriate corrective action. As you will see from the flow chart, the process first assesses organizational factors and management systems, then if all those are appropriately in order, the process then starts to consider factors such as training and communication. Only when managers have truly addressed all those issues within their power to manage do they start to consider the individual.

A key element of this flow chart is the same point made in ICAM methodology - if you stop the investigation at blaming the person and only address the incident by disciplinary action or prescribing additional training (and what a way to put people off learning, when it is framed as 'punishment' for having an incident!!), you still have not addressed the absence or flaws in a system that led to the failure. If you put a 'disciplined' or 'trained' person back into the same system, the elements that led to failure are still there.

I like the simplicity of this model, and it has wider relevance for addressing any kind of 'failure', not just a safety issue.

Good one! ;-)

- that is going to be a complex one to answer. Just as "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", so too is 'respect'. Add to that the very relevant contribution of our own self-image, which is the filter through which we experience everything in life, and yet we struggle to really see and recognise the filter itself.

US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman whose life was characterised by a painful struggle with her own self esteem, was famously quoted as saying, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." If a person feels weak or inadequate, no amount of well-intended respect or kindness from outside themselves will have any impact on them, because they are not inherently receptive to it. Instead, they will perceive a slight in every comment.

Bullying is a complex social and psychological issue that needs to be unravelled, examined closely, understood in much greater depth, and addressed at its root causes, which is more along the lines of stopping the institutionalised comparisons with others and trying to shape everyone into some kind of homogenised standard for the masses. People who have been able to discover who they really are and what is right for them eventually leave the entire bullying debate far behind them, because they know who they are and who they are not, and they recognise that others need to be who they really are as well, and that we each have our own unique and valuable contribution to make just by being who we really are.

Simple, but not easy!!

Exactly. So instead of focusing on refresher training, we should be focusing on finding better ways to assess meaningful competencies.

- this is the key challenge - to evaluate competency requirements and design suitable assessments to verify those. The assessments need to be designed by people who understand the intricacies of assessment (evaluation) as a key part of instructional design so we are actually assessing the competence we intend to assess and not muddying the waters.

In addition, assessments need to be free of other motives that have the potential to distort the results. For example, if pass rate becomes a KPI, there is greater incentive to get the desired number of pass marks than to carry out meaningful assessments of competency (this is all too often the case with NZQA unit standards).

Workplaces will also need to give more consideration to competencies of assessors who verify competencies - ie what knowledge, skills, experience and personality traits they will need to be effective in this role.

This approach does face some near-term obstacles and challenges, but in the longer term it would really benefit organisations.

Prequalification is yet another example of trying to put processes on 'automatic' to avoid having to do any real thinking or decision-making, using systems that are riddled with blind spots and dangerous assumptions.

Isn't this true of ANY system that 'outsources' or otherwise relies on automated processes or external / third party qualifying agencies to make those decisions? The same can be said of many HR talent software platforms that screen applications against pre-set criteria without realising they are likely to be eliminating some of the best candidates because of the assumptions they have made - I have been developing an article on this very topic, which I intend to post on LinkedIn.

And it doesn't help that most NZQA unit standards and assessments are primarily designed to ensure people pass the assessment, often including elements that have little relevance for being able to actually do the work. NZQA needs a major overhaul.

The emphasis on refresher training overlooks some very important points. The intention is for people to be kept up to date and to remain competent, and training is only one of a number of possible inputs to competency.

If we stepped back and comprehensively assessed the actual competency requirements for each task or activity, using learning and development frameworks such as Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning to develop meaningful competency criteria, we would be in a much better position to manage workplace competencies.

At the moment, there's too much reliance on qualifications and certificates provided by third parties, with insufficient rigour in assessing the frameworks behind those qualifications.

The methodology used by learning and development professionals would start by conducting a learning needs assessment, based on a set of competency criteria.

It seems to me, especially in a day and age where every work activity must return appropriate value for the investment, that it would make sense on so many levels to reassess competency requirements and what is really needed.

If we have a robust competency framework, we can develop meaningful assessments to determine competency and then use those assessments to verify ongoing competency. The assessment would itself provide a review of critical points, and if a person can demonstrate that they remain competent, why would you need to spend the time and effort of attending a training for something they already know? Just verify their competence and certify them for the next validity period. If they are unsuccessful in their assessment, you need to determine whether really don't know and need to re-sit training and assessment, or whether they just need practice or some kind of coaching.

I personally find it appalling to send people back to so-called refresher that requires trainees to sit through the same full programme they have previously attended, as if they had not listened properly the first time. And making people repeat training for something they already know is likely to turn people off training as well, because 'refresher' training is rarely 'fresh', and if it was poorly designed and delivered the first time around, it is unlikely to be any better the next time.

If we changed the focus from training (an input) to one of competency (the outcome) and managed competency from this perspective, we could save a lot of time, money and wear-and-tear on people.

I've copied and pasted to a LinkedIn post on your behalf. All the best with your research.

I have copied and pasted, edited a little to fit the word limit, and posted on LinkedIn. All the best with your study!

In the age of Google, there's really no excuse!

- I would be interested to learn more about what you've been doing.

Thank you for posting this.

- that's a great start.

Many people also use audit interchangeably with inspection, which further muddies the water!!

Here's how I think of these:

Inspection: physically looking at workplace conditions and work being carried out - a simple snapshot of what is happening at a moment in time.

Audit: look at work planned (procedures and other elements of the management system) vs work done - comparison between what the system says people do and what they actually do. In an audit, we talk to people about what they do and how they do it, look at work being done, look at records of the work to verify whether or not work is being carried out as planned - completely and consistently. The auditor's findings are then collated into a report with any recommendations for follow-up actions.

Review: Analysis of relevant information from audit findings, performance data, budgets, and other factual information about relevant processes and systems, to make decisions about the effectiveness of the management systems and plan actions for improvement where appropriate.

I hope that helps a bit. All the best with your report!