W4: Revitalise Your Safety Observation System

Safety observation systems are wonderful tools that can be used quickly and non-threateningly on a daily basis to help people work safely and to build a brilliant safety culture. Unfortunately, with time, their value is eroded by bad habits.

For example:

• Often the initial, training isn’t done properly. It’s too long and drawn out, theoretical and sometimes not related to the workplace.
• People are asked to reveal names of people observed which defeats the system.
• People take offence and retaliate verbally thus inhibiting people from making more observations.
• It becomes a tit-for-tat exercise.
• They become ends in themselves, with fancy pie charts and statistics we cannot use to fix things.

Let Safety Improvers help re-energise your SOS by:

1. Ensuring the SOS procedure is explained in plain English and as concisely as possible.
2. Giving short (1.5-hour) refresher workshops using a behavioural approach (three short role plays) to stress the helpful nature of SOS and how to make observations without insulting others.
3. A simplified SOS card.
4. A simplified recording and reporting system

Let’s cut the bureaucracy and focus on what really matters. Getting people to keep aware, stop unsafe acts and report them so we can prevent similar ones.

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