Developing Successful Safety Management Systems

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Dr Nektarios Karanikas, Associate Professor in Health, Safety & Environment at Queensland University of Technology.

Dr Karanikas truly understands the importance and complexity of safety management systems because this subject was the focus of his doctorate research.

Therefore, he is a leading authority for all safety professionals looking to maximize the effectiveness of their safety management systems.

Nektarios explains that safety management systems are far more than a directory of documents or processes and must consider the entire holistic safety environment. He shares the critical success factors and - just as importantly - the key reason why safety management systems fail.

A key theme throughout Dr Karanikas’ interview is the importance of human factors in safety management systems. You’ll discover they are not simply collections of technical processes that can be rebuilt by safety professionals using a manual. Instead, they are complex, evolving ecosystems with many variables, including culture and relationships - which cannot always be controlled.

Nektarios spent nearly two decades working in safety management in the Hellenic Air Force and holds a Master's of Science in human factors and safety assessment in aeronautics.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport.

In other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff. ♪ [music] ♪ Hi, there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." Developing a safety management system is a huge undertaking and involves accounting for many variables, some of which can be controlled and some of which can't.

So, how do you set yourself up for success? Today, we're talking about why safety management systems succeed and why they fail. Joining us is Nektarios Karanikas. Dr. Karanikas is an Associate Professor at the School of Public Health and Social Work at Queensland University of Technology.

Prior to his academic career, he reached the rank of Lt. Colonel through an 18-year career in the Hellenic Air Force. While in the HAF, Nektarios designed and delivered safety and human factors courses and promoted mature safety culture and strategies for proactive, predictive, and reactive safety management.

He holds a master's of science in human factors and safety assessment in aeronautics and his doctorate research focused on the transformation of a safety program of a complex organization into an operational safety management system. Dr. Karanikas joins us from Brisbane. Welcome.

- [Dr. Karanikas] Hello. Nice to meet you again.

- So, I'd like to start by asking you to define what constitutes an occupational health and safety management system?

- Yes, that's a great question because the way we define things will drive what we will do with our systems. While I was writing the most recent chapter for the body of knowledge here in Australia, at the Australian Institute of Health & Safety, I started reading literature once more to see if we have any updated definitions and what different authoritative books talk about, even the new standard, the 45001.

So, the impression I got when we talk about those systems is that we present them as tools. So, they define them as a set of processes that you need to have in place in order to manage occupational health and safety, which I think is not what we expect from a system itself.

So, if we're going to define, we need to take, of course, those terms separately and then join them together. Occupational. Occupational means that our main focus is the worker. But in many jurisdictions around the world, occupational also includes how others are affected by workplace activities.

Nevertheless, the worker is the focus. Now, what does this include and exclude? Depends on the organization. If a large organization has a separate process safety management system, then the occupational OHS system does not include that, but needs to have connections with the process safety management system.

If they have a fire safety management system separately, then once more, we need to find the intersections. If they don't have as processes and any other interactions in the environment can affect worker health and safety, they need to incorporate in this occupational health and safety management system. So, the scope, we need to define the scope, what we include and what we exclude from our system.

Second is the health and safety. There are several definitions about what they mean. I'm not going to use the time now to debate about what we mean. However, we consider them together. Health and safety go hand in hand, go in tandem. Because problems in health can cause problems in safety, and vice versa.

And good health can be a great prerequisite for good safety and, you know, and the opposite. And then we're talking about management. Intrinsically, we're not talking about control. We're talking about management.

And management actually acknowledges that we don't have direct, you know, control of resources, humans, equipment, maybe the environment, but we manage them. Meaning that we recognize there's variability, that things cannot be fully prescribed and we must be agile and adaptive to see what actions, what decisions match the context that we have, our workforce, our internal and external environment, so that to steer the resources towards health and safety.

And the last and most suffering part, it's the system. We don't really understand what systems are. We think that systems are documentations. I've met professionals and several of my students who start the course at QUT, one of the first questions when they enroll in the unit of OHS management is, "What is the system?" And say, "Ah, we have the documentation."

Well, documentation means little. It's just the process we have in place and the activities are just vehicles to enable the system. So, the system includes the humans, includes the supervisors, the line managers, the workers, senior management, safety professionals. We are part of the system. It includes the equipment, the hardware, the software we use.

It includes the physical environment, includes infrastructure. And then this is the system enabled through the processes that we have agreed and documented and we believe that contribute to occupational health and safety. So, one of the problems, when we define the systems, is that we feel like we use a system to achieve outcomes.

We are part of the system. We're not using a system. We are building a system in which we are parts. So, when we put all those together, we can define an occupational health and safety management system as actually an environment, a system where all elements, tangible elements, like humans, equipment, visible elements, and intangible, like culture, like processes interact together with a common purpose to protect and promote the health and safety of workers and everyone affected by their work activities while at the same time acknowledging that those interactions cannot be always protected, that the performance of individual elements vary with time.

And we must see how the system as a whole functions and behaves, not just the single elements of it.

- So, would you say that seeing it as a system where we're...we being, you know, managers and employees management, the humans basically, are part of it rather than the more traditional seeing it as a tool, is that a big change? Is that a new focus?

Is that distinction commonly understood, I guess, is what I'm asking?

- No, it is not. And I will give you an example. Yesterday, I ran a webinar here in Australia to launch this new chapter in the body of knowledge. They have a graph there with all activities and processes, which we believe could represent a complete health and safety management system.

So, risk management, investigation, audits, inspection, communication, participation, consultation. Everything. And I asked a very tricky question, what is the most critical element in your system? And I have different answers. Like, somebody said consultation. Somebody else said leadership and commitment.

And everything was great, but they actually, I think nobody replied that the human. And when we're talking about the human, we're talking about not just the worker. The system does not exist to benefit the worker alone. It does not exist and is not implemented for the benefit of a specific group.

It is something that needs to connect everyone around health and safety. And how rich your system will be depends on what you need. You don't need to take a book that describes a complete health and safety management system regarding the processes and say, "Okay, I have to put all those together in my organization."

No. The human, once more, everyone, must be the focus. We need to understand the needs to build the system, not to impose a system just because we think, "Ah, we listened to Nektarios. We listened to Mary. We read the book. We joined a webinar. We followed the training course in health and safety manage systems. Ah, that's a great system. Let's put it in place."

No. That's not a good approach because then it's not the human, your center, it's you.

- That's true. And it doesn't take context into account, right? Two organizations can be very different from each other.

- Yeah. And we recently completed a project with Cranfield University, sponsored by the Lloyd's Register Foundation about context. And we found that interventions, because when you introduce a system, it's an intervention, do not really consider the context. We talk about context all the time, "We need to contextualize."

But we don't really do that, at least based on what we found in the literature. So, we don't take the national proximity between context where we transfer paradigms. We don't look about the workforce capacity. We don't look at the cultural proximity. We try to transfer, you know, those systems, prescribed approaches from one region to another and we neglect humans.

No. Mary and Nektarios are different individuals. They have different needs. The processes need to serve the needs, not Mary serving the processes. That's a big misunderstanding, I think.

- Yeah. I think a common one across lots of different sectors. Let me see. So, how are safety management systems, and I guess I'm using this in a more traditional sense, but just bear with me, how are safety management systems typically developed? So, traditionally, where does one start when developing a safety management system?

- Yep. So, the traditional approach is to read the standard, a book, or invite, you know, an external agent, a consultant, and check the list of what the systems should include in terms of processes, and then trying to see what you have, do a gap analysis, and plan ahead with introducing new elements or redesigning the elements you have.

It's not bad by default, but this misses one critical thing. Every organization in the developed world at least has already health and safety processes, activities, initiatives, and problems.

So, what they should do first, instead of doing a gap analysis of what they're missing from the standard, is to see whether each of those activities serves the purpose, a common purpose, which is the health and safety of workers, including everyone, of course, in the organization.

And second, try to connect those things so they will interact under the common purpose. I will give you a more tangible example. We have audits, okay. Do we have the audit because we really want to improve the health and safety or because we going to tick the box and look compliant? Do we do investigations because we really want to dive into the system, to the system review, I mean, to check what's happening, not locally, but broadly, or because we want to absolve ourselves from accountability and point the finger to the ones who are closer to this event?

So, we have different processes, but it's not always the case they have a common purpose. We must be honest with ourselves, first of all, before contemplating, designing, or introducing a system, whatever we have needs to be directed to this health and safety.

As one of my... We published a book in 2021 with safety insights from practitioners and professionals, a nice collection of 17, I would say, confessions about health and safety. And yeah, it's not an academic book.

So, one of the authors said, "When things become a bit confusing, when we have debates and discussions and we cannot reach a decision, there's only one question we should answer altogether. What would make the worker healthier and safe?" Not what Mary believes, not what Nektarios brings into the table because read the book of author A or B.

And the honesty, I'm going back to this aspect, is very important. And workers sense the real motives behind health and safety initiatives. When we go there and we assess a system, how the workers perceive it, and we ask the wrong question.

What I mean, if I designed my risk assessment process just to confirm my biases. So, I make those yellow and green and red, you know, areas to fit my expectations, so I am already predisposed, and I don't really have this process as a means to engage people and listen to others and see what the common ground is, the workers understand that.

When you go there to evaluate it, you ask them whether it's effective. Well, you better ask, "I made it for this purpose. Do you think it's working fine for me?" Because you made it for you. Yeah, you didn't make it for the workers, and they will be very honest. So, yes, just to answer, back to your question, see whatever you have, drive it to the common purpose, start connecting those things.

Do not add anything from this list of processes and other activities. See how it works, find a way to evaluate the effectiveness of what you do, and then only gradually take in which of those, let's say, processes and activities mentioned in a complete health and safety management system you need more.

Maybe you don't need more.

- That sounds like an excellent simplifying question, right? Just when, because things do get complex as people have discussions and debates about how to approach things. I think that's a really good tactic is to have that, you know, does this or does this not make the workers or the people, the organization, healthier and safer? So, I'd like to talk a little bit about evaluation.

You mentioned that. So, let's say that I'm a safety professional entering a new organization. So, I've inherited a culture, safety management processes, and I need to assess how well it's working, where it might need improvement. So, I got a whole string of questions here for you, and I can go back to them, but where should I start?

How do I define success or failure? And how do I even know if I'm asking the right questions?

- Yeah, that's a very nice question. Very hard to answer it. Why? Okay. First of all, any evaluation of any system needs to have structure, meaning that we need to follow an approach from high level down to, you know, detailed levels of systems. Now, there is a disclaimer here.

The more you dive into the system and to look at the individual subsystems and elements, the more you miss the system perspective. So, we need to find the balance of how many things we evaluate, how many areas, and connect those areas. So, not taking how my audits work, but taking, how does the deliverable from an audit benefit investigations, benefit the risk assessment.

How the risk assessment process feedbacks audits and investigations. If we want to evaluate, we need to be careful not to isolate aspects of the system and evaluate them separately. The second important thing, most of the times, we evaluate the quantity, the productivity of things.

How many reports we received, how many investigations we closed, how many recommendations from investigations we closed, and so on. And we are missing two critical aspects. One is the quality of what we do and the other is the timeliness.

So, I might implement, I might close off an action item in my risk registry, but maybe the quality of my action was not the best possible with the resources I have. Maybe I could have done better.

So, how do we measure that? We measure that actually by indicators like the acceptability by the workflow, the visibility, and, you know, sustainability of our controls. It's not how many controls you have in place alone. And the timeliness. Do I really implement this control in time in my pursuit to protect health [inaudible] or do I discuss for two years in trying to find, you know, the best solution available.

Perfection, you know, is the enemy of good. And timeliness is very important. So, those three areas must be assessed at the same time to give you a good overview of the system areas which must be once more connected.

And the other important part of evaluation is how you define success. So, if the success of an investigation, and this goes to the design, how you design investigations, is to produce a report, then measure the report.

If the success of an investigation, as you have designed it once more, is to welcome people, to invite people to tell their accounts and stories so that to help you understand the system and action, then you need to evaluate that.

If the investigation is about blaming, count how many people you blamed and you could be successful. You say, "Okay, we blamed 50 people. Yay." You need to have consistency between the real intentions behind each of the occupational health and safety processes and activities then design why you really have this activity and what you expect.

If the health and safety management system expectation from the senior management is to take the certification, then yeah, measure that. If the purpose is to improve health and safety by connecting under the same purpose and interacting with the appetite to share and learn, measure that. Some things, we design A and we measure B.

And there's, you know, some dishonest there.

- So, how do you suggest...again, with our hypothetical safety professional coming in. Let's say that they've come into a safety culture or an organizational culture where the workers are maybe a little bit suspicious.

Like, you had just mentioned, you know, if you're designing to welcome people to share their stories and to actually connect and be honest rather than, sort of, a culture of, "Well, I don't want to talk about mistakes because then, you know, there's punitive action." How do you connect with them and how do you even get them on board with participating in that kind of an evaluation, if the word evaluation is scary?

- In this scenario, it's not the workers we should approach. We should go to management.

- Ah.

- And when I was back in the air force, I realized, when I was responsible for about 100 people at some point, that people were not loyal to processes, were loyal to people. So, our systems have persons inside and we build trust or not, or we damage trust in the way we behave.

And accepting that or not people look up, I mean, metaphorically speaking, I mean, the leaders, the managers, they expect some directions and they see the example they set. So, indeed, if the leadership does not understand the value of opening up the culture, if they don't understand that blaming will not actually solve anything, we'll have the same problems every now and then because you don't change the system, how things interact, you change individual elements.

It's about ethics, I guess, at this level, and morale. On the other hand... So, we should start from there. Not that this suffices. It's just the starting point. Because if we don't have the commitment and the creation of a psychologically safe environment, that the supervisor welcomes the bad news, "Yeah, things can happen," then we cannot really get down to the worker level and try, you know, as a next step, to influence them and say, you know, "We have now an environment that affords you to share."

Because we don't have the environment. However, we should not, on the other hand, shift towards blaming managers. Because I have seen this notion like the workers are almost always right and the managers are almost always wrong. This is not a good approach. We don't want to shift the blame from workers to managers.

We just try to connect everyone. And we need also to understand the external pressures organizations, you know, are subject to. Like, it's not easy for senior management to accept accountability because there's a regulator somewhere outside that when the regulator reads this thorough open investigation report, supposing that they have access to that, then we expose those persons too.

So, it's a fine balance. I know that there are colleagues, scholars, that say, "Let's disclose everything. Let's have an open heart and love and peace and hope." Yes, those are longstanding, you know, human virtues, but we must understand the context. We must keep this balance.

I don't say we should blame, but at some point, we cannot just let things happen because we have, you know, a culture that we accept everything. Somebody could get hurt at the end of this, you know, lose culture. Yeah. You don't want a strict, you know, punitive culture, but you don't also want a lose culture. So, the role of the professional there is to try to influence first leaders and managers, and then going a bit downwards, you know, deeper into the organization.

And I think the key points once more are not the workers, are supervisors, line managers, and senior managers.

- What are the elements of an OHS management system that need to be considered, do you think, if you're going to be successful or if you want the system to work successfully? And we'll assume here that the goal is better health and safety.

- There is a long list of elements. It's what you need, and you can need it all or not. Nevertheless, I will say you need elements from...at least a few elements from each one of the big groups.

You need institutional elements, the foundations, like commitment, resources, roles, responsibilities, things like that. Then you need operational elements, activities that add value to health and safety, like training, audits, investigations, inspections, and so on. Once more, connected under the same purpose.

And then you need some elements of verification and adaptation. You need to check whether things work well, not work according to what you designed, because maybe what you designed was not...maybe it's obsolete, you designed it five years ago. It's fine. It's opportunity to see the differences between what you expect, what you get, and what people need, to review your system and adapt to the new reality.

Now, I refrain from listing specific organizing elements there because it's up to the organization. And why I'm doing that, because you might have everything, but you don't need to document everything. You might have participation and consultation as just a natural process in your organization.

But that works fine. You don't need to standardize it to put it that's now a distinct process of our health and safety management system. You might have reporting. Maybe you don't have this rigid system with filling up forms and classification, but people might report to managers during the coffee break, or as long as they identify something.

You have a great reporting culture and system. You don't need to put everything on the paper and describe what Mary will do, what Nektarios will do. If then, else, else, else, else. So, algorithms there. So, you have the element, it's part of the system, and some things that needs a bit more standardization.

Maybe you want to document them, integrate how they will be performed. Some things, they just happen as part of this culture, you said, you know, before. So, yeah, you don't need to name them, to label them as, you know, standardized activities that we do.

- You don't need to standardize and structure human relationships?

- No. You cannot, even if you want to.

- Yeah.

- You can try, you can be successful, you know, in the short term maybe, but no, in long term, you cannot.

- So, what are some of the facilitators and barriers to safety management development that a safety professional can, sort of, look out for?

- You know, the barriers and enablers are actually the same things from two different perspectives in science. Yeah. Actually, when we're talking... First of all, let's start with the professional itself, himself or herself, you want to develop, you want to help develop a system.

Yes. So, what are you doing that? Is it because you are looking for a promotion? Is that because you're friend with Nektarios and he has a great idea and you're going to transfer the idea to organization? Or have you really done your sales, your studies, you know, you check things around and then having a nice plan ahead?

So, you can be the enabler in the latter case, or you can be actually a barrier in the former case, because the intentions are not, you know, about health and safety. Let's go to senior management. Do they want to look fancy? Do they want just to have a system for tendering purposes? You know, we tick the box to get the certification.

They will give the resources only to achieve those outcomes. So, they will commit. I read a nice study that says that, about cost-benefit analysis of implementing health and safety management systems, and they say in the first two, three years, really, the system was adding value to the business, but then actually was consuming capacity from the system because there was no commitment to maintain the system.

It was just, you know, "Ah, health and safety management system. What is that? Okay, let's do it. And ah, you can get certified against 45001. And this makes you look good to the industry." Yes. So, they started a system, designed implementation, but then the system just became, you know, an inactive, dead set of documents.

It's important, the management there. And we must be honest with the management because if the safety professional does not really understand concept of system and thinks that the more we have, the better, meaning, the more resources they need and consume from the capacity of a given pool of resources.

I mean, management cannot allocate resources forever or infinite. So, they have limited budget and things. And you try to achieve the perfection and the ideal system as you envisioned it. And you don't see what you can do with what you have and slowly getting more into the system. If you introduce complexity because it's time you add an element, you become the barrier of the system.

If you change a technique or a tool that has been there for quite time because the only reason is you're friends with Mary and you like the publication she made or the product she offers, you disturb the system, you add complexity to the system, and what is the real intention behind?

So, it's a limit the system management safety professionals, supervisors, workers, are at the same time barriers and or enablers. There is a long list in this chapter which is freely actually accessible to everyone. And if you look at the big picture, not the items on the list of barriers and facilitators, actually there's a common label, humans.

- I was going to say it sounds like there's no prescriptive rules, but the element from what I'm hearing that is most important is introspection and really understanding motivation and goals. And that can be on a personal level for the safety manager, and it can be on an organizational level.

- Yes. I think this nicely articulates and summarizes, you know, this concept. Sometimes, we are very fast. I don't say there's bad intention by safety professionals. Like, you know, they try to improve the system.

Most of the colleagues out there do a great job. But I think what we need now for the next level is a bit more science in practice and a bit more practice in science. It's nice to be open to everyone when talking about safety, to read the books, to listen to podcast, as this great one, and webinars, and so on, but we need to have a critical mindset.

The safety professional is not in the organization to copy-paste things or copy, modify a bit, and transfer things. Everyone has opinions and arguments about approach A or approach B. Personally, I don't hold the absolute truth.

I'm just talking out of my research, my professional experience, and the knowledge I have. Don't listen to me as, you know, the only authoritative source. I don't want to be labeled as such. I'm just another person out there. So, the safety professional needs to be very careful not to be just attracted by loud voices and big messages and fancy colors and banners and, you know, the soul.

I don't say there is no value in those things, but we must understand what value we can find and, you know, see if this is needed for our organization, not if it's nice to have. Everything is nice to have.

- Yeah. Well, you know, being open to hearing these messages, but also applying critical thinking which, as you're speaking, I think really means applying context and understanding, because that's what critical thinking is. But I wanted to talk a little bit... So, I noticed that the Queensland University of Technology bills itself as "the university for the real world."

And I'm bringing this up because you just talked about bringing practice into science and science into practice. So, that hints at the tension that sometimes occurs between theory and practice. In your section on OHS management systems, and this is in "The OHS Body of Knowledge" for the Australian Institute of Health & Safety, you address this tension.

And you say, I'm going to quote you here, "Because the research literature does not necessarily reflect the contemporary experience of OHS professionals working with and within organizations, a forum was held to discuss OHS management systems." So, I'm wondering if you can describe the forum, how it was organized, how did it work?

And then, eventually, of course, what did you learn?

- Yeah. So, the forum actually was a great idea of my co-author in this chapter, Mrs. Pam Pryor, who is the editor of this book. After I have drafted the draft chapter based on literature in my experience and knowledge, then we say, okay, that's the perspective of literature, Nektarios, and Pam.

Is this the truth? Well, not of course. So, how can we, you know, identify to flesh out some of those things in the chapter and see how they work in practice? So, I had the courtesy to commit, you know, professionals here in Australia from different organizations, regions, sectors, backgrounds, engineers, managers, psychologists, okay, and come together and discuss this concept, you know, of occupation health and safety management system and what the traps are, what the challenges, the benefits, you know, the expectations, and so on.

So, the most interesting thing that came out from this session was that whether the chapter discusses about evaluation and about tactics and what effectiveness would look like based on literature and management, commitment and leadership, and good investigations, you know, what we discussed in the beginning of this podcast, they came actually with a great list of strengths and weaknesses, which I think would be very worth considering when we want to check whether the system as a system works, not individual processes.

So, they say if the system makes safety visible in the workplace, it's successful. If it facilitates alignment with other business objectives, not having OHS as a separate add-on thing, it's a success. If it assists people to determine priorities and to allocate the resources, it's a success.

If can mediate the effects of power and politics, you know what it says? Yes, it's a success. And on the other hand, if the processes, the focus to maintain your documentation and processes and registries and everything, and not health and safety, then it's a failure.

If it's bureaucracy that dominate your system, and this, of course, will waste your time far from influencing the organization, helping everyone around. If it's inflexible, it's a problem, it's a weakness.

If it's not owned by everyone and it's the safety and health department's baby, then you have failed. So, it was really amazing, not surprising, but, you know, reminding myself of those system-level indicators of failure or success.

No one, nobody from the panel, from the forum, discussed specifically about the elements, the organizing elements of the system. They had such great understanding of the system's perspective and this balance between standardizing, yeah, we need a systematic way and a great way to do things, and the system's thinking to acknowledge the variability, that we cannot predict everything.

That the systems actually are not deterministic and we must adapt.

- That sounds really, really interesting. So, I think I've already asked you what you think the most important element of a successful safety management system is. I'm going to flip that and ask you, what is the number one fastest way to fail in developing or trying to improve a safety management system?

- The fastest path?

- Not that anyone's going to try that, but sometimes I think asking that question helps illustrate the opposite.

- Yeah. Is to document a system alone based on your understanding alone.

- So, like... Yeah. So.

- Actually, you don't have a system. Yes, that's why it fails.

- Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

- That's all.

- So, I have a few questions that I ask every guest, and I'd like to ask you, so if you were to develop your... And now, I know that you have developed safety training programs, but if you were to develop your own safety management training curriculum that was focused only on core skills, soft skills, human relationship skills, where would you start?

Like, what do you think are the most important of this type of skill to develop in tomorrow's safety professionals?

- I think that I maybe biased also because, you know, I have studied human factors. We need to start understanding ourselves and how we as systems consisting of the physical element, our bodies, our cognitive element, our minds, and our emotional elements, how those come together, they can affect each other.

So, we need first some education and training about decision making, about information processing, about cognitive heuristics, about fatigue, about the limits of human performance, and about emotional intelligence.

And when I think we understand that, then we can move to the phase of interactions, how those are saved, not in an isolated environment, how I see Mary, but how the way Mary sees me shapes the reality, my reality. And then seeing how systems work, how networks work, how compromises must be in place.

That the world does not revolve around us. This, yeah... So, no, it's fine. So, gradually understanding how we actually interact with the physical environment now, not a climate change, I mean, implications in 10, 20 years.

Now. It's happening now. What others expect, what we can do for them. And then I think we have a great basis to have effective collaborations, protective relationships. We are very much the center of everything, each of us, Mary.

And always, I think we need to educate ourselves in answering honestly the question, for whom do you do what you do? For whose benefit?

- So, really understanding, again, understanding motivation. It comes back to the same. Okay. I'm going to switch tacts a little bit here. If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your career in safety research and you could only give one piece of advice to young Nektarios, what would it be?

- Mary, I was very unfortunate and fortunate in the past. So, the fortunate thing is that after, I mean, I think 10 or 12 years as an engineer, aeronautical engineer, had the opportunity to study for my master's in safety assessment and human factors.

And this really changed my whole perspective. So, that was the fortunate part. The unfortunate part is that as an engineering student, I've never had an opportunity from any of my units in the university to speak about humans, to learn about how people think, how people react, how people adapt, how people behave.

So, when I graduated as an aeronautical engineer, everything was a matter of deduction. You take the system, you break it down, you see what goes wrong, you replace or you repair that, you build it up, and you have a great system. Which it's indeed excellent for technical systems, but doesn't work for human social-technical systems.

So, this is what I missed many years in my sphere of knowledge and practice. So, I apologize to all my colleagues back between, you know, the first half of my career in the defense sector, because I didn't see them as sources of value and information and inspiration. And for them, from the engineering perspective, were the sources of problems due to unreliable, you know, performance.

So, this is something I would change. I cannot change it now, but I think we can change. We need to put these human factors, health and safety, you know, relationships, whatever we think important in early education in all studies.

- It's interesting that when I ask that question, guests, yeah, they come back to that sort of thing. It's never like, "Oh, I wish I would've read this manual more thoroughly." No one thinks that way. At the same time, I think everyone also wishes that they had the experience and understanding now back then, but that's just, I think that's the human condition that we learn as we go, right?

Although it sounds like it would've been helpful to have more opportunities to learn about these things at the start.

- Yeah. We focus, I think, in our education, very much on technical things, on how one prescribe and standardize the environment and not appreciating, you know, the beauty of variability, that we are so diverse and different and this, it's the beauty of the world actually.

Yeah. Sometimes, things do not go according to the plan. We harm each other unintentionally. That if it's unintentional, not, of course, any, you know, intentional damage. And if you see even we're talking about health and safety management systems, we are about to finish a project with a student here checking whether the business education in Australia talks anything about health and safety.

What do you think? Very little.

- That's... Yeah. Well, you know, I don't think it does anywhere. So, it's great that you're leading the way in asking that question because I don't know how many institutions have asked that question even.

- Yeah. And then you understand that health and safety, when, you know, masters and bachelor students graduate with their business degrees becomes as an add-on because it was not part of business, just, you know, a unit they don't say that they have to do a whole course, you know, a module, it was not part of business reality. And then you have the safety professional coming like an alien, saying, "What do you mean health and safety?"

- Yeah. Yeah.

- Okay.

- So, a little more cross-pollination between the perspectives earlier on.

- Yeah. Yeah. It's a great way to see that, yeah.

- So, for the last question, let's get practical. This is where I ask our guests what are your best, most practical, either tips or resources for safety managers who are looking to improve work relationships. So, this could be a book, a website, a concept, it's pretty open.

- I'm prepared to answer this question.

- That's okay.

- Yeah. I rarely even direct my students to read the specific theory of a book. Yeah. I don't think there is one single that. So, open your ears and eyes, interact, appreciate the interactions. I interact very much on LinkedIn.

It's amazing what I have learned from LinkedIn. It doesn't mean that they accept everything, but they understand how other people, you know, react. So, if you want for your organization, listen to everyone, don't be the carrier of bad news and problems. Be the carrier of opportunities. Do not act like the police or the problem solver and do not undertake roles that do not, you know, commensurate with your job, with your, I mean, title.

It's not a health and safety professional who will solve the problems. It's everyone together. Sorry, I didn't, you know, exactly answer your question, but...

- Nope. No, you did actually. You absolutely did. Because it's a concept, right? It's...

- Yeah.

- That is a practical tip is to essentially open your ears, interact, listen, and don't accept all information from a single source. So, where can our listeners find you on the web?

- Well, they can find my profile on QUT, of course, if you see QUT and my name on LinkedIn. I don't use Facebook, sorry. And on Instagram, I only add friends. So, please, even if you find me there. LinkedIn. ResearchGate, also where I post most of my work. LinkedIn and QUT would be enough to understand what I have been doing.

And I'm very open to everyone to debate, to send me feedback on this podcast, to share between us. Once more, Mary, I didn't come here and I never speak to everyone with the illusion, I am the right one to listen to.

I'm just another voice. And thanks very much for inviting me to share my voice, my thoughts with you and the audience.

- Yeah. It's a very valuable voice. So, thank you for joining us, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in. And we'll see you next time.

- See you next time. ♪ [music] ♪ - "Safety Labs" is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade. Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe. ♪

[music] ♪