In this episode of The Interesting Health and Safety Podcast, Colin discusses Learning vs Punishment when you want to positively improve upon a mistake.

Colin has just been with a client, discussing what they do in these kinds of situations. The example described is one of the client's employee’s has been driving a large piece of machinery, aiding the maintenance team moving a barrel of oil. After dropping of their load, he reversed into the maintenance team’s van!

The client's question is as follows;

“Should I discipline the employee”

Colin delves further into what happened, how it happened and perhaps even why. After some thought, Colin considers the following; 

“The minute you do ‘discipline’ you actually lose the opportunity to learn”

obviously the employee made a mistake, and many companies would go down the disciplinary route. However, Colin wants to know

• What benefit does it give the employee who made the mistake? People make mistakes.
• What benefit does it give you, the employer? Are you looking to make an example of the employee?
• What benefit does it give your other employees; are they going to realistically benefit from the disciplinary action against the individual who made the mistake?

After exploring these questions with the client, Colin understands that you need to have rules and strict policies regarding disciplinary action within the workplace. But Colin doesn’t believe people will always look at a situation and use that negative example to further reinforce compliance with workplace rules and guidelines.

 

Colin also suggests that this negatively impact your workplace and employee compliance further by doing so. Employees may feel less inclined to report accidents, mistakes or dangers for fear of disciplinary action against them should they be blamed.

 

Let us challenge this norm and what was going on in this situation with Colin's client.

• Perhaps the planning of this particular job was not good enough? Using a larger piece of machinery to transport the (comparatively) smaller barrel was the wrong thing to do. This could be argued as the root cause of the mistake.
• Further exploring the incident itself, what was around the van to stop anything coming into contact with it?
• Could the van have been parked elsewhere or restrictions on how close machinery could be operated to the van?
• The employee operating the machinery was actively trying to help the maintenance task and speed up the completion of the job. He was actually encouraged by the maintenance team to get the oil, as they were busy. Perhaps changing this scenario could have prevented the mistake?

 

Now if this mistake had never occurred and the job was completed without issue, we would never be looking at all of these potential hazards and areas of improvement.

 

Colin argues it was better to have this minor incident, without injury or major accidents, as we now have a much better insight on how to improve health and safety within the business and prevent a much worse mistake or accident occurring. So why would you punish, rather than learn in this scenario?

It was a positive failure.

ABOUT THE HOST
Colin Nottage

‘Making health and safety as important as everything else we do.’

This is the belief that Colin is passionate about and through his consultancy Influential Management Group (IMG) is able to spread into industry. Colin works at a strategic level with company owners and board members. He helps business leaders establish and achieve their health and safety ambitions.

He has developed a number of leading competency improvement programmes that are delivered across industry and his strengths are his ability to take a practical approach to problem-solving and being able to liaise at all levels within an organisation.

Colin also runs a company that vets contractors online and a network that develops and support H&S consultancies to become better businesses.

Colin chairs the Construction Dust Partnership, an industry collaboration directly involving many organisations, including the Health and Safety Executive.

He is a Post Graduate Tutor at Strathclyde University and a highly sought-after health and safety speaker and trainer. He has a Post Graduate Certificate in Safety and Risk management, an engineering degree and is a Chartered Member of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH).