October 2011 Safety Message:

Ownership in Safe Work Procedures

In everything we do we engage our employees. When it comes to safety we all recognize and understand the level of engagement in our processes and how we do things every day can have an impact on our safety performance. The people that know the processes the best are the ones performing the task. These same people need genuine empowerment to own the process. And we must all recognize ownership is not the same as compliance.

We often comply with rules, regulations, operating procedures without ownership. Ownership on the other hand will help facilitate internal control, self-accountability and self-directed behaviour that can all contribute or help eliminate incidents causing injury. By instilling a level of ownership in the things we do, we begin to motivate people to make personal choices and the right choices in the decisions we face every day at work or at home when it comes to working safely. The level of involvement in developing safe work procedures by employees with ownership will increase when they see their input can have an influence.

At the same time as we have employee engagement, it is equally important that our management and supervision provide the right structure, instruction and support in developing strong safe work procedures, and all the while providing opportunities for employees to develop procedural options and to choose among these. This reinforces the ownership aspect and the motivation to choose what’s best for the health and safety of all those involved.

It is through experience and feedback from employee engagement, that a level of common sense is informed when developing safe work procedures. If our employees are genuinely engaged and we empower them to own the process when developing specific work procedures and our supervision and management support the process, the choices that these same employees will make when carrying out the tasks will be the right ones to ensure the task is completed without harm.

By only educating our employees on safe work procedures explains the “why”, and training around safe work procedures shows the “how” but it is just as important that we understand and learn the motivation – what to do – the Safe Work Procedure – and the underlying rationale which are our guiding principles.