Tuesday, March 15, 2016
How to Create a Culture of Safety in Planning Events
blog.propared.com: When it comes to the issue of safety, event professionals spend way too much time thinking about how to react to an accident. Instead, this energy should be directed towards preventing the accident in the first place. Even personal protective equipment is overrated. Important, yes, but overrated. If you’re in a situation where you’re relying on the benefits of your hard-hat, fall arrest system, or high-vis vest, something has already gone wrong. To improve workplace safety at events, we need to reduce the likelihood of something bad happening in the first place.
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This article was very interesting in the way that it spoke upon changing safety theory in a way that would prevent accidents in the first place instead of just taking precautionary safety measures that prepare more for an accident than accident prevention itself. I think many of the individual tips were well thought out, and have definitely been in situations here at school that I could have used some of this safety advice on. Particularly the point about creating a culture of safety instead of a culture of blame, as I definitely think people have a tendency to blame and shame crew members who create a "near-miss" instead of pointing out their mistake in a way that would be less emotionally invoking. When you blame, it makes the crew member remember their accident or "near-miss" as a failure, and may distract them from the actual point at hand.
Oh ho ho. The amount of “near misses” I see on a daily basis here in Carnegie Mellon School of Drama is astronomical. This article does a great job of explicating planning theories of Emma Parkingson and the Heinrich’s Triangle. These theories and diagrams really show that the matter of major accidents does not have to correlate directly to the number of unsafe acts, but instead that they are the accumulation of millions of unsafe choices made in the work place. I really do back the idea that there should be a culture of safety as opposed to a culture of blame in a work environment, especially when pertaining to us in the theatre industry where everyone is already trying so hard and is so hard on themselves that an atmosphere of blame would just put greater pressure on the people working as opposed to making them conscious of how to be safe in the long run.
I think creating a culture of safety and maintaining a safe environment relies a lot on every single person working on the crew being consciously aware (of safety). Just having the person in charge be aware of safety is not enough - something I noticed here is that there's so much going on/to be done and crew heads can't really inspect every single thing the crew does. It's really up to everyone to be responsible themselves, and to teach everyone the importance of safety and look out for near misses. I always try to be conscious of safety and remember to look out for near misses, and I think this article really teaches us how to practically do that. I definitely think it's important but often overlooked that a culture of blame can be easily formed, but it shouldn't be. Because everyone wants to get the task done, the environment can be stressful and people can start to blame another crew member under the fast paced and stressful environment, and keeping it harmonious and peaceful is more important than it seems.
I think this is a good foundation for obtaining safety, but there is a lot more to it. In the end, there is only so much one can do with equipment, procedures and training. My belief is that personal responsibility and safety will be the singular event that leads to “catastrophic events” in an everyday situation (ones that can’t be contributed to things like natural disasters). For example, if an individual decides not to wear steal toed shoes, that could be the root cause for something that could lead to fatality. (I doubt it, but it could happen.) I think the take away from this to come up with a plan, communicate the plan, and to keep communication constant throughout the process. Catastrophic events also may not have a cause that can be traced back to any kind of unsafe act. We are constantly pushing materials and people to their limits. Mistakes and failures are bound to happen, no matter how much we plan. The important part is that we learn from them and plan accordingly for the future.
I am really struck by the application of Heinrich's triangle. So often, we only think about how to deal with safety problems once they've actually hurt someone, but what we can see in this triangle is that it all begins far before anyone gets hurt. I agree that we, just as a society, need to start thinking about preventing the problem from ever happening rather than just how to recover once it's happened. I remember over the summer I was working an event in Philadelphia, where it was very possible that those people in the front row around the dividers could be hit by a flying pogo stick. It seemed almost laughable that I should ask "Why don't we move them further away so that there isn't any chance they'll get hit?" Instead the team decided that we would have the emcee "caution" people about having their kids in the front row every now and then. Low and behold, there was a pogo stick that flew out at the audience, just *barely* missing a woman who was watching. This is the kind of thing that comes to mind when I think of the "near-miss" situation, and how we could have prevented that kind of thing from happening in the first place if we thought as a team more preventatively.
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