Writing Effective Safety Procedures

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Bridget Leathley, a freelance health and safety adviser, writer, instructional designer, trainer and auditor. She's also a Chartered Fellow with the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health and an Associate Fellow with the British Psychological Society.

Bridget highlights the importance of well-written and clearly communicated safety procedures - and how they represent “quick wins” for HSE professionals.

Major safety initiatives are often unrealistic for EHS professionals due to budget restraints. However,  simply assessing and improving your safety procedures can significantly improve your organization’s safety performance.

Bridget offers many practical tips (with real-life examples) on how you can write better procedures, including: starting with the safety objectives, involving co-workers, using simple language, avoiding ambiguity, and including imagery.

She shares guidance on how often EHS professionals should revisit procedures and considers the role of multi-media in current and future safety management.

Bridget is passionate about getting organizations to adopt technology to keep people safe and healthy - but explains that the needs of the audience and the task should always drive how safety procedures are presented to co-workers.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," a 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. Safety procedures can seem very straightforward. Many involve a set of steps to be followed sequentially.

Most are the result of well-recognized standards of practice that have been developed over years of industry experience. So why do people make mistakes when they follow well-thought-out procedures? Why do they get confused? As it turns out, the best procedure in the world is useless if no one reads it or worse, if they do read it and can't understand the author's intentions.

Bridget Leathley is here today to discuss the hows and whys of writing effective safety procedures. Bridget is a freelance health and safety advisor, writer, instructional designer, trainer, and auditor. She's both a chartered fellow with the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health and an Associate Fellow with the British Psychological Society.

Her background in human factors is informed by an interest in human psychology and technology. Bridget is passionate about getting organizations to adopt technology to keep people safe and healthy and to combine new technologies, established techniques, and face-to-face approaches to minimize workplace risk. Some of her recent projects include on-site health and safety support, virtual classroom, on-the-job induction, screen-based, and virtual reality training.

She has a particular interest in streamlining paperwork to achieve better safety outcomes. Bridget joins us from Buckinghamshire in the United Kingdom. Welcome.

- [Bridget] Thank you very much for that introduction, Mary.

- When we look at the topic of written communication and safety management, it can sound a little abstract and I wonder if any of our listeners are expecting a grammar lesson or generalizations like, "Communication is important." But, when you and I first spoke, you mentioned why this particular topic is, in fact, incredibly practical and why listeners can expect to go away from this podcast with concrete steps that they can take today.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

- Yes. I go to a lot of talks and webinars like a lot of people who are listening today do. I listen to a lot of podcasts and there's a lot of really useful advice and information out there about how to make safety and health better within organizations. The problem is I deal with a lot of health and safety professionals who are sort of head of department level or head of health and safety advisor level and a lot of the information that's coming over might be about, say, great leadership and about authentic leadership and being a good leader.

And the health and safety practitioner might learn something from that about their own leadership style, but they're often not in a position of authority. They're not the person holding the budget strings. They're not able to influence things in that way. Neither are they the supervisors at the front line who also need to improve their leadership skills in some cases.

So there's a lot of advice that you get that they can't take account of. The other area I've spoken a lot about and you mentioned technology and my passion for that earlier on. And I've been involved with quite a few webinars and talks where I am really encouraging people to look into things like robots and virtual reality and artificial intelligence, databases for chemicals, and so on and so forth. And, again, you could come away from a talk like that going, "Well, that's great, but who's going to give me the budget? I'm never going to get my IT department to let me implement that."

So I thought when we were talking, it would be quite interesting just to come away with something that actually if you've got an hour tomorrow, maybe Friday afternoon you've got an hour to kill before it's time to knock off and it's all quiet at work, could you do something useful in that one hour that will actually make your organization potentially safer and healthier? So that's really why I thought it will be quite interesting just to focus in on some of the issues around safety procedures.

I think it's interesting as well because I think as health and safety professionals, we have an unfortunate reputation, sometimes by non-health and safety professionals of being the people who create the paperwork. We create the tick boxes, we create all of that extra bureaucracy, and we really have to get away from that. We want to be seen as the people who will actually help organizations to streamline the paperwork to get it down to what's actually needed, to get it in a format that people can actually make use of so that instead of it adding to the kind of the work of safety, it actually makes safety better and makes safety work.

So that's why I really wanted to focus in on that topic today.

- OSHA professionals are primarily tasked with developing safety procedures. So a lot of thought and study goes into creating effective procedures. But once the steps of a procedure are developed, why should safety managers focus on the mechanics of writing the procedure down? Like, realistically, do people even read them?

- I think there's a couple of things to unpack there. I mean, first, it's the sort of assumption that it's the health and safety professional who would be developing the procedures in the first place. And certainly, I would never advocate that a health and safety professional sits on their own in a room and writes a procedure because they're not the person who's going to be doing the job. They don't understand the job necessarily, they might have learned about it, they might even be someone who did use to do the job, but they're not really the best person to understand on their own how to write that procedure now for how to do the job.

So the first thing is always going to be you've got to involve other people in developing that procedure and and that should be obviously the people who are going to do the task but useful as well to involve the people who are going to maybe supervise the task, and in some cases, the people who are going to be the recipients of that task. So if it was patient handling in a care home, you might want to talk to the people in the care home about how they receive that handling.

If it was how to evacuate customers in a restaurant, you might want to talk to the customers about, "Well, how would you feel if halfway through your very expensive meal that you've just paid for, you're asked to evacuate the restaurant? What would you feel about that and how would you respond?" So you need to involve a larger group of people than just the health and safety professional. The other thing I think you were saying was, are they read anyway?

Do people read the procedures? Of course. For most situations, people don't read the procedure when they're about to do the job. Procedures are used in a lot of other ways as well. So procedures, and certainly should be used as a training tool. So if you've got your written documented procedure, you should then be using that for training. You should also have your procedures there when you're doing a risk assessment.

So it's important to get those procedures right, written in a way that makes sense, that's logical, that's error free because if you don't, then your training will be wrong and your risk assessments will be wrong, and you know, a whole load of other documents interconnect to it. But I think those are the sort of the triumvirate for me, this sort of triangle of documentation that you need to have in place.

And there's certainly sort of examples I've sort of come across where there wasn't a written procedure for something, the things that you might expect that you would have procedures for. And, therefore when they did the risk assessment, it was wrong. So one example was I was looking at risk assessment in one organization for changing a fuse, and I had three electricians sitting around the table because I was quite disappointed with this risk assessment.

There was very little detail in it. It was all very couched and, you know, "Be careful, turn off the electricity, don't stick your fingers in the plug." And when I asked them what this was for, one of them said, "Oh, I think it's for changing the fuse in the plug that goes into the outlet. And someone said, "No, no, no, no, we wouldn't have a risk assessment for that. No, this is for changing the fuse in the distribution board in the fuse board."

And someone else said, "No, it's definitely not for that. No, I think it's for the high voltage fuse." Because there was no link to any procedure. And actually, it turned out, they've never written a procedure for doing any of those tasks. So there wasn't even a procedure that said, "Only an electrician can do these tasks and this is how it should be checked. This is how it should be done."

So the lack of a procedure had led to a lack of a risk assessment. And if your procedure is right, if you've got a good written procedure, then your risk assessments will make sense, your method statements that come from your risk assessments will make sense, and your training will make sense. So it's really important even if it's not a procedure that people read on a day-by-day basis every time they do the task, if they're going to be trained to that procedure, it's got to be right in the first place.

- So that's a case where the procedure is lacking entirely. Do you have any examples of different ways in which procedures can be ambiguous?

- Well, I think, I mean, the very use of the word fuse there, in that case, was ambiguous because there was no glossary. There was no definition of the terminology. The other thing I frequently see in procedures, certainly around safety is things like it will say, "You need to wear appropriate PPE," so personal protective equipment without actually saying what...

- What does appropriate mean? Exactly, what's appropriate in this situation? I mean, appropriate footwear was one I remember seeing in a catering risk assessment for the staff in the kitchen. And I went into the kitchen and they were wearing flip-flops because they thought it was appropriate. They wear flip-flops because it's hot in the kitchen. You want your toes there. And so not specifying what the things are.

I mean, I see it a little bit like a recipe. When you get a well-written recipe, it will start by telling you what are the ingredients I need to have because if I check those ingredients and there's something missing, there's no point in starting down that recipe, if the recipe launches straight into the doing part of it without saying what you need first.

So if you list the personal protective equipment that's needed for that task, if you list the tools that you're going to need. I remember another example I had on a cleaning risk assessment where it said, "Use color-coded cloths and buckets for cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen." It didn't say what the color coding was.

Now, if I think, "Oh, well, let's see. I've got to use green for the bathroom and I'm going to use red for the kitchen." And you think, "Oh, well, I'm going to use green for the kitchen and red for the bathroom." And then you and I are switching shifts, the cloth that you've just used to clean the toilet, I'm now going to use to clean the food preparation area. And that's sort of quite dangerous things that can happen.

And just genuinely that was a procedure that I saw, which told the cleaners to use color-coded cloths without expressing what color for what locations. So that ambiguity can be quite dangerous in that situation if you're not very clear about the terminology and you're not clear about, say, the order that things are done. And, in particular, the other thing I find quite often is who will do the job.

Somehow and I don't know whether the American education system is the same but in the UK, certainly, when I was at school, there was very much this push towards writing in the third person. The academic style of writing you're taught at university is very much this writing in the third person. So you would say, you know, the ladder will be checked, the barrier will be put up.

- Passive.

- Yes, exactly, that sort of stuff. Rather than saying, "Well, okay. The person wearing the safety harness will check that it's attached to an anchor," or "The site supervisor will check that the ladders have been cited properly," and making it very, very clear who needs to do what because otherwise, you know, everybody thinks it's everybody else's job to do these things. And if you don't get that right, if you're not clear about who has to do which parts of it, this all sounds like common sense.

And that's the problem with all of this, it is, and yet I'm always shocked. I mean if anybody goes and reads all of their procedures tomorrow and says, "Yep, we've broken none of those rules, all our procedures are excellent." Well, then, you know, send me your pack of documents because I'd love to see them. Because I think if you go through, you'll find that some of these rules will be broken somewhere along the way that someone will have put something in a different order from the way it's done, or they will have not specified something.

And, again, some of that is because, again, the person writing the procedure knows what needs... they know what the...everybody knows what the color coding is for cleaning.

- That's the curse of common sense, right? That's the curse of we all sort of have this bias where we think that whatever it is that we think is common sense is really an assumption that everyone knows this.

- Absolutely. And, you know, the definition I use of what people call common sense is common sense is everything that you learned so long ago, you've forgotten who taught you because when you... Going into the sort of psychology, you know, Piaget and stages of development, the only thing that a child, a baby's born being frightened of is noise and even that isn't enough to get people to wear hearing protection in noisy environments.

So there is nothing else that children learn to be frightened of spiders or snakes or whatever else their parents conditioned them to be frightened of. So there is nothing that's common sense. We've learned everything we know and the things that we take for granted about the color-coding or the appropriateness of particular PPE. I was talking to a non-health and safety person the other day about some work that was going on in the road, and I was saying, "Oh, I was a bit disappointed that these people weren't wearing any respiratory protection because there was a lot of dust flying around because they were drilling into a pavement so lots of silica dust coming up.

There was a lot of noise. They weren't wearing any hearing protection. And then my friend said, "Oh, I don't suppose they were wearing hard hats either." And I looked at him and I said, "Well, why would they wear hard hats?" And I knew it could go the other way.

- Because it's common sense, I guess. Yeah, but what do you think was gonna.. there was nothing to fall on them. And so the appropriateness of the PPE, the common sense of what PPE is, is that, you know, I've learned about respiratory hazards. I know about those and I know when it's not necessary to have PPE. So if somebody just thinks they need to wear this bundle of PPE for everything, well, that's not practical either, is it?

So being really specific and saying, "Well, no, I don't expect you to wear a hard hat for this job. But if you're working under the scaffolding over there, you do need a hardhat," and being quite specific about that. Not because we want to add layer upon layer of safety rules, but because actually, we want people to know when they don't have to do something, and we can take those layers of safety rules off them again. So, yes, that's quite important to get that in place.

- It sounds to me like a journalistic who, what, when, where, why might be a good approach. At least in your thinking process. Maybe you don't write all of that, I don't know.

- Yes, and actually, in an evaluative process, I think if you can evaluate the procedure once it's written using those, that's good. I think if you tried to use that as a structure for the process, I think that would be a more difficult one. I mean, the structure obviously, it's going to depend on the type of process it is because some processes are very procedural. They're very much like what we said about a recipe, you know, a recipe is do A, do B, do C, and you do them in that order.

Whereas if it's a process where, well, if this happens, you need to do that, and if this is happening, you need to do something else. But then, you need to go back and check whether the first thing is happening again, then that's not necessarily as automatic as to do it in that sort of step-by-step approach. But certainly, the Kipling's five great serving managers where we see them over here, which is the what, the where, the why, how, and when.

If you can ask those questions at the end and say, "Well, is it clear at any stage who needs to do what, how they will know whether that's been successful or not, whether they need to keep on doing it, whether they need to refer up the line, down the line to get more assistance?" Those questions are all answered within that. At the end of the day, the only way you're going to know whether your procedure is successful is to actually try it out with somebody whether that's an individual running through a procedural process, or whether if it's an emergency procedure, actually doing a dummy run-through of an emergency procedure and seeing if that works because that's how you find out.

And going back to this relationship between the training documents, the risk assessments, and the procedure. So I had a client recently and previously they'd been paying an external trainer to come in every year and to do fire safety awareness with all their fire wardens and it was a generic off-the-shelf course like, "Here's the fire triangle, this is how it works."

And they were talking about rebooking, again, and I said, "Well, certainly in the UK, there's no legal requirement to have an external trainer come in and teach your staff fire safety. You can do this yourself." "Can we? That's good." And I said, "Yeah." And I said, "What would be really good is that instead of doing this kind of generic PowerPoint in a classroom course," I said, "Why don't you use your procedure as the basis of your training and actually stand in the workplace with the procedure?

Start with a small group of the fire wardens and actually say to them, "Okay, what would you do now if there was an alarm? Do you remember what you're supposed to do?" And then they all stood there and went, "No, we've forgotten." "What does the procedure say?" "Okay, oh, the procedure says we do this." "Well, let's go to that location and then follow the next instruction." And they literally kind of walked around the building using this and sending people off where they were supposed to go.

What they identified as a result of that was several places in the procedure that it just didn't work that you couldn't see what you were supposed to see in the procedure, or you couldn't hear something. Or actually, somebody would finish their check of an area twice as quickly as somebody else, or actually, they can divide the areas up in a different way. And as a result of that, they changed the procedures to actually match what had happened in the exercise. The wardens felt much, much more confident that they were able to do their job because they'd actually walked it through and now really understood what it was they were supposed to do rather than having been given a procedure before and kind of read it and go, "Yeah, that's fine, I'll sign here."

They really understood what they needed to do and they've saved themselves some money because they're training internally rather than getting an external trainer in.

- And more effectively, it sounds like rather than having these, "Here's some abstract concepts about fire and fire safety, here's your daily job," you put them together.

- And particularly, you know, if I learned about the fire triangle last year and I learned about the fire triangle the year before, and I learned about the fire, I probably know the fire triangle by now. So let's focus on actually, what do I have to do in my job when the alarm goes? And what I've suggested is like, "Okay, next year, it would be really nice if you focused on fire prevention and maybe doing some..."

- Yes, yes. It's really ideal.

- Absolutely, yeah. Again, you can bring that back to, do we have a local housekeeping check procedure on who does that and who follows that through? And, what do we do if there's a door blocked, or they've got one of the neighbors on the site just change tenants? And when we walked around, we found one of the fire exits actually was blocked. So what do you do in that situation? If that happened in an emergency, how would you deal with that?

So again, by walking those procedures through. I mean, the other sort of situation I've come across with the huge advantages of walking things through is, obviously, if you want to simplify and streamline a process for an individual, then rather than having one process that covers the jobs of three sets of people, you can separate it out, and you can say... So the example I'm thinking of was a train operating company.

So they have, "Well, these are the procedures for the train drivers, these are the procedures that the staff on the train will follow, and these are the procedures that the people in the control room will follow." So you've got three sets of procedures but all for the same emergency, which is train stops in a tunnel. And when you looked at the individual sets of procedures, we'd written out a set of rules for them about the order that things were done, and the language that was used, and the simplicity of the language.

There were English speakers and French speakers. So probably start to pin down if you know anything about the geography of Europe, which tunnel this might have been. So we had to be quite careful about the language as well. But, actually, what we found and luckily, this was all...we resolved all of this before the tunnel even opened to operate. We did a desktop exercise before we were going to do a real live exercise with real people in the tub.

But before that, we did a desktop exercise. So we had instead of people being in three different locations where they couldn't see each other, we had three tables in a room. They all had their own procedures in front of it and we stepped through and we said, "Okay, so what happens at the point where the train stops?" And the train driver goes, "Oh, well, I do this."

And then the people on the train will say, "Oh, I do this." And the controllers would say, "Oh, and I do this." And we talked through this step by step as if it was an emergency happening. And, of course, then we discovered that, like, we got to a point a bit like in a script in a play where someone's like, "It's your line next." "No, no, it's not my line. I haven't got any lines." And the scripts didn't line up. And it was a great way of just going, "Oh, okay."

The other really good advantage of that was it meant that the drivers knew what was going on in the train better and the controllers knew what was going on in the truck and vice versa. Everybody knew what was going on in the control room so that stepping everything through is a really practical way of testing out whether the three procedures, in that case, lined up and made sense. I mean, another sort of simple way you can try and...because obviously, the danger of writing three sets of procedures, over time, they will get out of step because someone says, "Oh, we need to improve this."

And they improve one procedure without thinking about the consequences on the other procedure. Something like a flowchart where you can sort of see what the knock-on effects are. So if you change this procedure, you need to review the other two and make sure that you change that. And, again, if that's linked to a training document or a risk assessment, you need to go and have a look at those documents as well and make sure that, "Oh, actually, we've changed the procedure. Does that have an impact on the risk assessment?"

"Oh, actually, yeah, that's introduced a new hazard I hadn't thought about." Or, "Oh, actually, that's great. That's resolved this hazard that we've not been able to control properly." But that cross-checking needs to go on with that documentation.

- So we've mentioned a couple sort of faulty assumptions. One is the common sense, everyone knows this. Another one that you've just mentioned is assuming that this piece doesn't affect multiple other pieces, that there's no connection there. Can you think of any other faulty assumptions that are typically responsible for unclear procedures? And, one thing that comes to mind is, and you just mentioned languages, but differences in literacy, for example.

- Yeah, and I mean, I've actually kind of gotten my own little glossary that I've written. So I mean, I wouldn't ever use the word undertake in a procedure if the word do would use. You will never find the word to utilize on anything I write whether, with an S or a Z, I will always use the word use.

- Use, yeah.

- And, thereby, my simple rule of thumb is if I substitute utilize for use, does it still make sense? Yes, it does. Well, then that's the word I'll use. And the same way with any of that language, just don't try and make yourself look clever by using long words. And I don't know why we...I don't know, I mean, I blame my lovely English teacher because he told us it was clever to use long words.

I suspect it's lovely English teachers like that who encouraged us to use this broad and wonderful vocabulary, which is great in a certain context. But it's not great when you're trying to write a procedure that people can read quickly and not make mistakes on. So yeah, very simple language. I think you've probably got similar problems on both sides of the water that we have a lot of people in this country whose first language is not English.

And, actually, even between the U.S. and the UK, we have different uses of the word English. If we started talking over here about your safety pants, it would mean something quite different to us over here to the way you'd use it over there. Even those sort of differences have to be taken account of. But, you know, and it's one of the reasons why sometimes, certainly on a lot of building sites, you'll see a lot of pictorial simplifications of a procedure.

So, again, you still got your written process which tells you what the overall process is. But at specific points, you might have reminders, I mean, typically, you know. We've got the PPE signs which remind you of a specific thing, you need to wear a particular item or protective equipment. But I've seen, you know, more detailed pictures than that which will actually take you through a sort of process of how you attach a safety harness, for example, can be done pictorially.

I mean, any of those things should only be for a reminder. You should have been taught how to do it by actually doing it. But as a reminder, having some pictures can help get over that language problem.

- That actually leads right into my next question but you might have more to say about it, which is, what place does imagery have in safety procedures? Is it useful? And if so, where and when?

- Yes. And again, I think as long as there's a...there should always be background-written document using words, because as soon as you start putting something into pictures... You know, the point, the reason that we stopped kept painting caves and started writing things down and using 26 letters was because we can be more accurate and more specific when we use writing.

So you need to have your background procedure that you've checked, you've drilled, you've made sure that it's in the right order, that it's using the right language, you've got all of that. But if you then say, "Well, actually, for this part of it, it would be quite useful to have a pictorial representation that we can use partly as a training aid or partly as a reminder." I mean, one of the really nice ways of doing it, and again, it's one of those projects that has so many other benefits that go alongside it.

So in one organization I was working for, they were quite conscious that they didn't have any sort of procedures for using a scissor lift. So this was a goods lift that was in to get from a sort of mass level to a basement and there were lots of trap hazards there where you could get your fingers in the wrong place if you didn't use it in the right order, and so on.

And I think if I would had just gone down and hovered there with a clipboard, staff would have been quite suspicious of me. But I just went and spoke to them and I said, "Hey, so what I'd really like to do is I'd like to take some photographs of you using it and you show me absolutely how it should be used safely because you know all about the safety of it." So first of all, they were quite flattered because I was making the assumption that they would know how to do it safely.

And whether they always did it that way is another matter but that they would know how to do it. Secondly, I'd asked them to be in photographs and they were, you know, one of them said like, "Oh, I'll do it."

- Let me check my hair.

- Absolutely. And I've got some terrific photographs of this guy and he was really posing for me because it was like I said, "Okay, pretend the trolley's really heavy." So he's kind of... "Now, just move the trolley as if it's easy." And so I got different sort of posts of him moving the trolley onto the scissor lift and a close-up of him pressing the buttons and showing how to close the gates and so on. So we wrote this really, between...

I mean, I did the writing but, you know, he was the subject for the picture. But I only wrote down what he was telling me about how he did it. And as we went along, I could then ask questions in a way that wasn't challenging, wasn't threatening because I could sort of... It was in a curious way because I could say, "Why do you do it like that? Have you ever thought about doing it like this?" And then he'd go, "Oh, yeah, we could do that, couldn't we? Yeah, let's do it like that."

And it wasn't a challenge, it wasn't a threat, because it was just like two people actually having a little bit of a giggle and creating this photographic procedure. They had some Portuguese porters working there as well and so this was then a really useful training area for him to use with the porters, as well as showing them what to do. You know, he could have this on the wall next to it so they can be reminded if they weren't sure about things.

So yeah, the pictorial approach, if you use your own photographs of people doing the job, it then becomes a living document for them. Because they might even laugh about, "Oh Fred's in the photograph," or... So, yes, pictures are great. And the smartphones make it so easy just to snap pictures of people doing things and put some close-ups in and cut and paste it all together and create something quite attractive for people to have a look at.

- I mean, we've also done... Manual handling training is another one of my sort of specialties. And with a particular group of people where they've done the manual handling refresher training a couple of times, and, you know, you wanted to kind of zizz it up a bit, make it a bit more interesting. So, again, we went through some of their more problematic processes, where they were sort of, you know, where I identified before that there were some problems in how they did it, and that there were correct processes but sometimes they didn't...

For example, there was a post room, mailroom, and it got quite cluttered sometimes. And if you didn't move the clutter, then it would make it quite difficult to lift safely because you'd have to twist to get round all of the clutter. And so to actually stop, stand back, take two minutes to clear the clutter, and then do the lift properly. So we focused on a few of these sort of issues and they made their own posters.

So I think some people did some drawing, some people found some clipart and they made their own posters, and then they stuck the posters on the wall in the specific places where these problems were occurring. Now, as I say, that's not a replacement for having a proper manual handling risk assessment and processes but as a pictorial summary of the process, it worked really well. And it, again, engaged people in that interesting discussion, because I've tried the approach of sort of saying to them, "Here's your process. Are you happy with this?"

And they'd go, "Oh, yeah. It's all right, I guess," without actually ever looking at it, and without thinking what was in the process. I don't know if I mentioned the X-ray and the bleach problem to you when we spoke before, did I?

- I think you did but refresh my memory.

- Okay. So, there was a process for... So it was an organization where they x-rayed all of the mail coming into the building because they sometimes had sort of the nature of their work was such that they had some people who didn't like what they were doing. It was medical research so they had challenges with their mail. So they had an x-ray machine.

And I was reviewing, and I'd asked them before I reviewed this procedure, I said, "Is this the procedure that you use?" And I showed them the title, and they said, "Yes, that's the one." And I looked and they actually had a tattoo version of this procedure sellotaped to the X-ray machine. And I said, "Is this the procedure that you have used, the supervisor, you've used to train these other people to do this job?"

"Yep, that's the procedure I've used to train them." Right. Went away and started reviewing it and when I got to the bit about if you think the parcel is contaminated, take it out of the X-ray machine, stick it in a box, and then wash your hands in bleach. I actually just put the procedure down and I went down two flights of stairs and said, "Stop. Where's the bleach?" And they go, "What bleach?"

And I said, "Well, your procedure." And he goes, "Oh, you must have been looking at an old copy of the procedure." And I said, "No, it's the one you said that you use." "Really?" And we looked on the fridge and they kind of looked at it as if, seriously, as if I'd gone in the middle of the night and then taken away their procedure and put... And they weren't doing that at all. So in that case, we kind of went back to first principles, right?

So rather than trying to fix the problem of "Oh, we'll replace the bleach with something less..." Because, you know, that's your classic hierarchy of controls. "So we've got bleach, we don't want bleach, we'll replace it with something less hazardous," which I said, "No, no. Okay, let's go back to basics. What are we trying to achieve here?"

- We're x-raying parcels because we want to keep people in the building safe. So if you've identified a parcel that you think might be a problem, what are you going to do next? What are you trying to stop from happening and what's going to happen next? So what you're trying to stop from happening is anybody else getting contaminated by whatever the parcel is. So, obviously, if it's an explosive device, you want it to be contained and people to get as far away as possible.

If it's chemical or biochemical, you want to not have anybody else touching it. What are you also going to do because you're not an expert in this topic? Well, you're probably going to get a second opinion. So when you get a second opinion, what are they going to do? Well, they're going to take it back out of this box that you've just put it in and put it back in the X-ray machine. What is the most airtight bomb-proof piece of equipment you have in this room? I think it's the X-ray machine, isn't it?

So how about if you have a suspect package, you leave it in the X-ray machine and then maybe wash your hands. It's a good idea, maybe have some wipes to wipe your hands but you then get away as far as possible. You call the security services and then they go and have a look at it. And, yeah, so we went right back. Rather than trying to tweak the process, we went back to, what are we trying to achieve with this process?

Let's start at the top. And so what is the purpose of this? And, actually, the procedure ended up being, I think, in the end, it was about five points instead of a page and a half. So we got it down to a really, really simple process because you didn't suddenly need all of this, "Oh what if it's this type of hazard, you do this, and if it's that type of hazard you do that, and if it's..." Because we had different ideas about different sorts of hazards. Because sometimes one old lady apparently on one occasion had donated her half-finished knitting to the organization because she thought they might be like a charity shop and they might sell it.

But you can imagine knitting needles and a ball of wool under an X-ray machine doesn't look like a ball of wool and knitting needles. So yeah, it can be quite harmless, but you need a second opinion to discover that. So yeah, if your procedure is that bad, you just need to go back to basics and go, "What were we trying to achieve here in the first place?"

- Maybe go through to find out if it's that bad because they all thought the procedure was fine, right? It's not like they were saying, "Oh, that's a bad procedure. We have to fix it." It was... And the thing was because actually, the procedure they were using was never written down. The procedure they were using was, they did actually take it out of the machine if they thought there was a problem and they did put it in the box but they didn't wash their hands in bleach. So they were half following the procedure but certainly, there was no bleach involved.

There was no bleach anywhere in sight, which was the kind of dermatitis harm to their skin that I was concerned about. But yeah, yeah. So they were half following but they hadn't... Again, this had been just handed on from hand to hand to hand over time. Nobody had actually been using the documentation to do the training and that was the problem. And if you don't use the procedure to do the training, you won't discover the problems with the procedure.

- So that leads me to two questions, actually. One is about how often should organizations or safety managers revisit procedures? And then the other one is about decision-making and flowcharts. Because we've talked about procedures that are fairly linear, a lot of them are, but a lot of them depend on context.

So what about decision trees or flowcharts? What do you think their place is in a written procedure?

- I think the difficulty with a flowchart... I love flowcharts because half of my first degree was Computer Science so I'm quite happy to look at a quite complicated flowchart and follow my way through it. But I know for some people, it's like a blindness. It's like seeing a formula and they really don't get it. So for some people, if the flow chart has got more than a couple of branches on it, it's probably not going to work for them.

I mean, we talked about technology earlier on. I mean, actually, one of the better way of doing that sort of branching thing is if you can actually build that into a little app on your phone or your tablet device where you can answer a series of questions, and then the tree is hidden behind you. So you might still need to create that flowchart as a management document but what the user sees is, you know, is the light red or green or something else?

And they can go, "Oh, okay, the light's red." You know, what's the reading, enter the number for the reading and you can enter. And you can then go through it and all of the logic can be behind and all they need to do is make one decision at a time depending on what the feedback is that they're getting from the equipment. So I think that's going to be, for a lot of people, a more successful approach. I mean, I have built things like that with Excel.

It's a very time-consuming way of doing it for an organization that says they can't afford to buy a proper app, that they can afford to pay me a ludicrous amount of money to muck about with Excel. So yeah, this day and age, I think, you know, we're actually looking for some sort of an app that helps you to make those decisions. Because, yes, anything more complicated. Yeah, I mean, again, if you're talking about something like an evacuation procedure, it could be, you know, if I hear a continuous bell then I'm going to evacuate.

If I hear an intermittent bell, I'm going to wait until I hear a continuous bell. People can cope with that on a flowchart because there's basically three branches. But, yeah, anything more complicated than that a lot of people will get a bit of a blindness over it and just not follow it through. But, again, flowcharts are really useful way of checking the logic of your documentation. And sometimes, I will, quite often when I was writing a training procedure for an organization the other day, so they were looking at, what's our health and safety training procedure?

And I started trying to kind of flowchart that and I realized that there were parts of the process in terms of booking things, and it kind of worked for one type of training, but it's like, well, actually, where does it go from this box here? It seems to go nowhere for this type of training. And it's like, "Oh, yeah. We hadn't realized there was a gap in the system." So the flow chart can be useful as a management exercise to see where the gaps are. But, it probably won't end up in the final procedure for users, because it's just too complicated for them, in some cases to follow.

It depends on your users. If I was talking about...I mean, back in the day, I used to do some work for the nuclear industry. And if I was talking about a flowchart for engineers working in a nuclear control room, I would have no problem with their ability to understand and to follow something far more complicated than I would be able too. I mean, the other question you asked there I think was, how often?

And I think that is a little bit like the piece of string question, isn't it? That it depends on the criticality of the procedure. So obviously, the higher the impact of it going wrong, the more of a problem it is. It depends on the turnover of your staff. It depends on what other changes have happened in the organization. I mean, traditionally, over here, most organizations will do a fire drill once or twice a year, depending on the type of organization.

A lot of schools, because they have three terms, will do a fire drill once a term that sort of fits in quite well. And effectively every time you do a fire drill, you should be not just going, "Oh, that took 20 seconds longer than last time." You should actually be saying, "Okay, does that tell us anything new about our procedure? We built that extension, does the fire drill still make sense? Does the process for evacuation and for sweeping still make sense now we've got that new building?"

There might be other procedures that you look at them after five years, and they're still the same and nothing's changed. I think just coming back to what we were talking about right at the beginning is what I would urge everybody to do. If you're a health and safety professional and you have some influence and control over procedures, I would make sure that since you've been in that role, you have at some stage looked at every procedure that's within your remit, and that you've gone through and prioritized crumbs.

This one's bad and it could be really bad if people don't understand it, or this one's bad but it's not used very often. I'll put that on my moderate priority, or actually, these ones are quite good. And, you know how to assess risk, you know how to prioritize which procedures need to be reviewed in more detail and updated.

But I would urge you just to make sure that you have your head around all of the procedures that you've got control over and you know what process they've been through, and that they follow those basic rules. Like you said earlier on, if I look at this procedure, do I know who is supposed to do this job? With what equipment are they supposed to do it? At what time are they supposed to do it? When are they supposed to do it? And who else has been involved?

And I think it's the disappointing thing I find about when organizations document a process is I think that it is one organization, one of my clients that does do this, but most of them don't. They actually include a little box at the end and it lists anybody who was consulted about that procedure. So it will say, you know, "The following people were consulted," and their role so you know that it involved people at maybe different levels in the organization and from different functions across the organization.

So when you're looking at that procedure, you can go, "Oh, okay, that's reassuring," or, "Oh, hang on, they didn't ask that group." And, again, that gives you some indication as to, well, maybe it does need a review and maybe it's not a big deal. Maybe it's just, I'll get that group to have a look at it, make sure they're happy too. But you've got a better feeling then as to whether the process is working.

- You've already talked a little bit about apps in terms of decision trees. Are there specific kinds of procedures that lend themselves to particular media, do you think, and I would include like, videos, audio instructions, documents? Yeah, I think videos are usually more of a, I mean, yes, a training aid for a process.

I mean, it's an interesting one with software, and again, it's a bit of a generational difference on this one, isn't it? If I'm trying to do something in Excel that I haven't done for a long time and I've forgotten how to do it, I just want to find a website that goes right through these steps. I want a list of things to do.

I know my 20-something-year-olds will go and find a YouTube video, which then shows them all the things and what to press. And I just get very irritated because it's like, "Just take me to the bit I want to know." And so, to some extent, it's to do with the way we were educated. So there was a sort of generational difference there but I think it's probably also a personality difference, familiarity difference.

So some of those differences about which media are actually more down to the individual than they are necessarily down to the task. But I think certainly you can easily see that there are some tasks that are going to be easier to have learned in the first place if you've seen somebody doing it. And if there isn't an opportunity to see somebody doing it, watching a video of somebody doing it is quite useful.

So I mean, we talked about changing a fuse in a plug, that's one that maybe actually watching a video of somebody doing it so you can actually see how they... Because when you read the instructions on the plug, and it sort of says, "Strip the cable," you think, "Well, every time I strip the cable, it cuts through the whole thing rather than just cutting the installation. How do I do that?" So actually, to see somebody doing that maybe makes that easier.

I don't imagine you're actually going to have that there at the point that you're changing a fuse in the plug. It's more of, you might have it as a reminder if you haven't done it for a while, so that sort of thing. I mean, the audio is an interesting one. So there's been a lot of work done with the heads-up display so the sort of selling point for the heads-up displays, and they only again tend to be used in quite sort of high-budget industries, so to the wind turbines and engineering and power stations and so on, some examples of usage.

So it's great. So I'm going to do this particular procedure on this particular piece of equipment and I've got my heads-up display, and it can sort of list the instructions. And maybe it's got a voice control and I can say, "Next instruction," or it might even be able to recognize parts of the machinery, or it might be looking at QR codes on the machinery and it can tell you what to do as you go along.

But that's out of reach. I mean, it's great and I think in 10 years' time, it might be quite commonplace. At the moment, that's really out of the budget of most people. And, actually, there's also an element for a lot of us. I don't know whether those of us over a certain age, whether we would ever adapt to that thing of having the text. I'd have the wrong glasses on and I'd have to be changing glasses to be able to read it.

Whereas I love listening to the radio. I love listening to podcasts. So for me, if I had an audio device, and I think, you know, I could probably rig something up on my phone even now where it would respond to a voice and you could say, "Next, next." So if it's a process where you've got headphones and you've got your hands free, it would have to be a quiet environment because obviously, if it was very noisy, the phone wouldn't hear you.

But if you could then say, and you could step through the instructions. So that, again, would be something that it would need to be procedural. It would need to be a linear process, not with lots of decisions to make. It would need to be something where it was quiet, where you needed your hands free but, again, you would also have to be somebody who actually likes listening to instructions by audio. Again, I mean, I've noticed this difference with my husband that he finds it very difficult when we're listening to something on the radio to take in the information.

So you talked earlier on about the difficulty with language and understanding. As soon as we get into all these other media like in the heads-up display, the audio, we're dividing people up into even more fine grain of information. I mean, the virtual reality. I've tried out quite a lot of virtual reality through health and safety training type of applications and I love it.

And I kind of built my tolerance up now that I can spend three hours in a VR headset and not feel ill. But, again, I've seen colleagues who have felt ill after three minutes in a VR headset. It's not for everybody. So we're going to have to be very careful with any of the new technology not to leave people behind. We've got to keep in mind, you know, when we started building buildings with steps, we started leaving out people in wheelchairs.

We need to make sure we don't do the same thing with these processes that we start leaving people behind who are not yet ready for that technology. But I certainly think there's lots of applications for that and I think, especially the new generation coming through, they like learning. Okay, my younger son learned to play guitar by watching YouTube. I bought him a guitar book, I might as well resell it because it's in pristine condition, never got used.

He doesn't learn through books, he learns by videos. So yeah, it's a difference in the way they've learned.

- How can you tell if you've succeeded in creating a well-communicated, I won't say written communicated procedure? How would you test for effectiveness? And you mentioned drills. If a procedure is written or communicated well, is there still a reason to practice it?

- Oh, absolutely. Yes, because, I mean, again, I think we have to think separately here about emergency procedures and routine procedures and we need to think about those as two separate things. Because if it's an emergency procedure, you absolutely have to practice it. Because I think we all know when we're in that sort of emergency frame of mind, we have to resort to instinct, we have to take shortcuts.

We don't have time in an emergency to sit there and go, "Well, on the one hand, I could ask everybody in the building to evacuate. On the other hand, that's going to cause quite a lot of disruption. So maybe I should…" You just haven't got time to think about that. You have to just know, "Right, this is what I'm going to do. This is the thing." So it has to be an instinct, and you're only going to get that instinct if you practice those emergency procedures in some way.

Just simply going back to the thing about the apps, first aid training. So there was an interesting study I read about a few years ago where people did CPR training, so a heart massage. I'm not sure whether you do call it CPR?

- CPR, yup.

- You do call it… Yeah, okay. I wasn't sure if there's different terminology. Yeah, so CPR training. So they trained a whole bunch of people to do CPR and then one cohort were given an information card about CPR as a reminder, and that was it. Six months, that's all they had was this card to remind them. The other cohort had a little app on their phone, and like once a week, it would come up and go, and maybe it would ask them a question or show them a little video of doing CPR.

And it was just some little reminder and refresher about CPR. And after six months, they got both groups back again and the feedback was interesting. There were two very, very different, statistically significant differences between the two groups. So one was, and that might be fairly obvious, which was that the group that had had all this refresher training were better at doing the CPR after six months.

So they'd remembered the ratios. They'd remember the timing, and so on because all of that had been rehearsed on the app for them. But the other thing, which is even more significant, when it comes to something like CPR is their confidence that actually when asked about, "Well, if somebody collapsed in front of you, how confident would you feel in doing CPR?" They were the ones who would be saving our lives if we collapsed in front of them.

The ones who hadn't done it for six months were, "Oh, no, I'm not really sure. No, I feel like I need…" and they didn't have that practice. So practicing something doesn't have to mean that you do a full-scale rehearsal. So going back to the fire wardens, what I try and encourage organizations to do is, you know, I get that for most organizations, clearing the entire building of all of the staff, the C suite, the customers, whatever else you've got, doing that more than once a year is just not practicable for organizations to do that.

But if you've got 20 or 30 fire wardens, you could be doing an exercise once a month, where they walk through as if there was an alarm, and they just walked through their patches, and they do a little bit of a look around and see whether the doors that are supposed to be open are still open, that the route's still clear, that people haven't moved offices. You could do those sort of rehearsals more often.

So lots of those emergency procedures, you can practice in a tabletop exercise, in a simulation, in lots of other different ways. So that's why it's important to practice emergency procedures. With routine procedures, you're doing them. If you're doing something every day, you don't really need to practice it in between. But that's then where the supervision is really important. Because what will happen over time is people will start to take shortcuts.

Now, maybe those shortcuts are good shortcuts. Maybe the person who's doing the job has found a better way of doing the job in which case, if you supervise and you observe them doing it, you ask the curious, "Why you're doing it this way? My procedure says you should be doing this, but you're doing it this way." And if you have the right culture, and they say, "Actually, I'm doing it this way because as well as making it quicker, it makes it safer."

And you can work that through and you could go, "Oh, actually, yeah, they're right. That is safe. Oh, it is safer to leave the package in the X-ray machine than take it out and wash hands in bleach." Then you can rewrite the procedure to match what they're doing. Actually, if what they're doing is more dangerous, you can go, "Well, that's not the way we do it around here. Shall we just go through the procedure again? Let's have a little bit of a coaching session around the procedure. Was there something you didn't understand about the procedure?"

And then they kind of go, "Oh, well, I thought that word there meant I had to do it like this." "Oh, okay. Well, I need to change the procedure to make the language clearer," or "Well, Joe said do it like this." "Oh, okay. Well, I need to go and have a word with Joe.". And so it's the opposite. With the routine procedures, it's not about practicing it, it's about somebody coming and observing, are people still following the procedure and doing it the way it's written?

And if they're not, don't assume they're doing it wrong. Be curious about why they're doing it differently because maybe the written procedure is wrong and maybe they've found a better way of doing it. But if they haven't,they just need to know that they've got your support for doing it right because maybe doing it right takes longer. And if the only feedback they ever get is, "You're taking too long about this job," we know what they're going to do.

They're going to go with doing the job the way that gets them the best feedback. And the feedback they get is, "Oh, well done for doing it quickly," not, "Oh, I know you did it quickly, but you cut that corner. Can you take a bit longer?" Whoever told an employee to take longer over a job.

- One thing that strikes me about both of the responses there, whether the shortcut is safe or unsafe is that the manager approaches with a bit of humility and curiosity, as opposed to, "I'm looking for you to be doing something wrong."

- And I think, as an external safety consultant, I think it's always the advantage that I've had. I can genuinely go into a situation and go, "Hey, I really don't know much about repairing boilers or servicing them," or, you know, "How does this equipment work? Can you just run through that again?" And then I could go, "Oh, so is this process wrong because that seems to be what you do?" And you can have that really open, curious conversation.

And actually, what I find in a lot of those situations was sometimes the blue overall guys would turn around and go, "Yeah, I know, we're supposed to do that. Yeah. All right, sorry." And because there was no feeling that I was going to shock them or critique them, they didn't mind admitting to me that they did things differently. So you can actually get that.

And I know that's probably more difficult if you're a line of control within an organization. It may be more difficult to form that relationship with people. But yeah, I think as you said, humility and curiosity, and making sure that people understand that you're there because you want to help them to do things safely, to not get themselves hurt, to not hurt anyone else. I think that's important to go into it with that.

- Are there any industries that you think in general, and I realize every workplace is different, are doing it right when it comes to communicating safety procedures?

- Yeah, I mean, some of this I think comes from the way that we regulate in the UK. So we have the Health and Safety Executive, who are the sort of government body who regulate all health and safety, except for the fact that they don't regulate fire safety, because fire safety is slightly more complicated. If you go to the Health and Safety Executive website, there's some amazing like documentation, guidance, codes of practice, and so on.

So if someone is starting from scratch and says, "Actually, I need to know what the procedure is for setting up woodworking tools," then you can go into the HSE website and you can find all that sort of thing on there. I think even it's a similar thing, I think in Canada and in the U.S. as well, where you can find such standard ways of doing things. The problem we have is with something like fire safety is a lot of the information that you need to do that for fire safety, you have to buy it through the British Standards.

So, you know, it's like an ISO standard or ANSI standard. So that means that actually, people get quite confused about fire safety. Fire safety is also tied up with things like the Building Regulations. And, so hence, you have problems like we've had in this country where actually procedures for, I mean, anything to do with construction is always complicated because you've got so many different players and each player will have their own processes, and everybody else will think that everybody else is responsible for checking, you know, where are the building materials the right building materials?

Well, oh, well, they must be because they specified them. And they're like, "Well, we specified them, but we thought you checked them before you bought them." Or, "Well, we bought them but we thought you checked them before you installed them." And so the whole construction and fire is at the moment over here, I think, a little bit of a mess. Actually, I think one of the areas that's better because it is well regulated is probably the care sector.

And as well as the health and safety executive, the problem they've had over the last few years is that the budgets have been cut. So their ability to go into businesses and inspect has been cut down. So they're not inspecting what we call low-risk businesses, like shops and restaurants, well, and retail and office-type buildings. Those aren't getting inspected almost at all and even the high-risk ones, they're not inspected as often.

Because there's been a lot of issues with care homes, we've got a special regulator, the Care Quality Commission. Again, they give lots of guidance on their website. And so I think care sector actually are quite good at making sure that individual patients are risk-assessed rather than this sort of over-application of generic risk assessments that we have in other industries.

And because they're measured on that, then those will all have to be right and they will have to be based on processes for doing those assessments and for considering the needs of individual people. So I think that's good. I mean, other than that, as you said, I think it's very patchy. I think the problem you have when you're a very small organization, you try and get away without having any procedures at all because everybody knows what they're doing and we can all talk to each other.

And we all know because we all know what we're doing. Very large organizations have masses of procedures and then you end up with this bureaucracy. And so finding that middle ground where you have enough procedures but not too many is quite a difficult place to find. And I think the other thing is I'm probably not the right person to ask because, by the very nature of what I do, organizations tend to call me in when they know they have a problem with their procedures.

- That's true. That's true. Who doesn't call you? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

- Nobody rings me up to say, "Hey, we've got this really great set of procedures. They're really well written and you'd love them. Do you want to come around and have a look at...?" No, nobody wants me to do that.

- We just thought you should know.

- Yeah, if you're out there, let me know. It's fine, I'll come and have a look.

- So I'm going to move on to some questions that I ask all of my guests. This one, I'm going to call the University of Bridget. So if you were to develop sort of a core skills, a human skills, in other words, non-technical training for new safety managers that are just wanting to become safety managers, what would be maybe the most important ones that you think they should develop?

- Well, that's a very difficult question, isn't it? And it might sound like it's more of a technical skills and a non-technical skill, but I want people to understand what a risk assessment is. So I think that's sort of first and foremost, where I sort of start with it is a risk assessment is not a table with numbers and risk matrices and things. You know, risk assessment is what we do every time we cross the road.

There's that side I'd want people to understand. I think the other thing is because my background was in Human Factors so the first job I had when I left University was working for British Telecom. And a lot of the people that I worked with in BT had come out of what had previously been Post Office Telecoms, which had previously been the Post Office, so the Royal Mail, people standing in a sorting office sorting letters.

I know this is going to sound like it's a bit random, but I'll come round to the question again. So sorting letters in sorting office. And, obviously, people would sometimes make mistakes with putting letters in the wrong sacks and then letters ended up in the wrong place or they got delayed. And when they looked at this problem, they never sort of looked at it and said, "Oh, we have a problem with our sorting culture. We need a behavioral sorting program."

And yet for safety, we go, "Oh, we have a safety culture problem. We need a behavioral safety program." That's always struck me as a little bit strange as a way of tackling the problem. Well, actually what you need to do is you need to go look at what's the environment within which they're sorting? Are the mail sacks organized logically? So again, if people are doing the wrong thing in the workplace, we need to be going, "Well, why are they doing the wrong thing?"

And maybe it's because the written procedures need to be improved, or the things we've talked about today so maybe you need to do that. But maybe, the procedure that you're trying to write down is wrong in the first place, like with the bleach and the taking it out of the box where we need to go back. So you need to look at those organizational and environmental issues that people are working within, whether that's the physical environment, or whether that's the relationships with other people, with their manager.

I mean, I did some research a few years ago on manual handling. And it was really interesting that although I deliver manual handling training, that's one of my sort of specialist areas of training. And yet all the research shows that manual handling training does not reduce the incidence of musculoskeletal disorders in people who have been trained, which is quite an indictment on you as a trainer. Actually, what people need to do is to learn how to do manual handling risk assessments because you actually need to risk assess the handling jobs in the first place.

I was doing some training with a bunch of guys who, if they took a day off because their back was hurting, they only got statutory sick pay, they didn't get full pay. So why would they take time off if their back was hurting? So of course, back pain leads to back pain. There was a lifting job that needed two people.

But if two people did it, they had to turn the machine off. When the machine was off, the clock stopped and that time got added on to their rota at the end of the day. So they kept one person running the machine so that their eight hours was clocking up. So only one person did the manual handling task. I could have trained them forever, but unless you actually change the way they were paid. So yes, I think that whole design systems thinking would probably be the topic that I'd want to come back to is, you know, stop targeting people's behavior and blaming the worker for what they're doing or not doing.

Let's look at the environment they're in and even when it's something where you go, "Well, we told them what to do, and they're still doing the wrong thing." Just look at what your other rewards structures are in your organization, whether that formal or informal rewards. There was an example that a colleague gave me. We have various supermarkets do deliveries.

So a big van comes out and they deliver your shopping to you to save you having to go to the superstore to buy your shopping. And this company's motto was something along the lines of, you know, "Nothing we do is worth getting hurt for." Because, you know, whether I get my three types of hummus in my shopping tomorrow or not, it's neither here nor there. I've probably got baked beans in the cupboard, so I'm not going to starve. And then one winter, one of the drivers had been out and couldn't get the vehicle up to this house.

So he got out of the vehicle and loaded up as many bags as he could on his shoulders and he trudged up this path for 20 minutes and delivered the shopping and then he trudged back down the path for 20 minutes. And then he took another load of shopping, trudged back down the path, trudged back down again. Big feature in the staff magazine about what a hero he was for getting the shopping to this customer and the health and safety manager was absolutely furious because it's like, "I've been saying that nothing we do is worth getting hurt for."

So that person has risked a manual handling injury, they've risked slips and falls on the ice, low working, in the dark. They could have just been there and nobody would have found them for several hours. They could have died of hypothermia. So all sorts of things could have happened. They put themselves at risk so that this woman in a posh house in the countryside could have her three types of hummus for her lunch the next day.

And so, again, there's an informal network there of feedback to people, which is saying, "I know we say be safe but look at what happens if you take a risk. You know, we're going to reward you for it." So we have to from that side, the University of Bridget is going to be, understand the system, understand the big picture, let's look at what all of those big picture issues are and how they influence people.

I mean, there's a psychology course in there basically, as well as a technology course and risk assessment, because at the end of it, risk assessment will be at the heart of that. But yeah, more nuanced risk assessments, perhaps with no numbers.

- Well, that sounds like an excellent course. I'm interested in Design Systems. The next one is if you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your career and you could give young Bridget only one piece of advice, what would that be?

- It's an interesting one because sometimes I think it would have been quite useful to have got into health and safety earlier. But actually, if I had gone into health and safety earlier, I wouldn't have been able to carry across all of the things that I learned from human factors, and that I learned from the high-hazard work that I did.

So I think both of those have carried across to health and safety. So that's fine. I think, possibly the only thing I might have done differently, I think...actually, no, two things. So when I was 14, I had this notion that I could only do intellectual subjects at school. So I did Geography O-Level and I wish I'd done needlework instead. But we weren't encouraged to do the practical subjects.

So I kind of wish I'd done needlework instead of Geography because Geography has made no difference to my career. And that's the first very simple piece. But that's nothing to do with my career, that's just to do with life. I guess the other thing is, sort of, the way my career went;. So I said worked for Telecoms for about six or seven years, then I moved into high-hazard health and safety. So this was aviation, nuclear, offshore, transport, railways, and so on.

Then I took a little bit of a sort of not quite a career break, because I was still doing other things. So I was teaching yoga, I was writing about health and safety, I was developing a few other lines of thinking. And during that time, I realized that what would be quite useful was a teaching qualification. So I did a couple of years teaching IT at a local college sort of '16 to '18 year college to get that teaching qualification.

So I guess the one thing I might have done differently is that I could have done a concurrent Certificate of Education when I was doing my first degree, and then I would have left university with a teaching qualification at that stage. But I actually think that's the only thing I would have done differently, would have been to get a teaching qualification earlier. Because everything I've done I feel has led to where I am now and it's contributed to that and has formed my different way of looking at things that I find certainly to other British health and safety professionals.

- Excellent.

- So that's not a short...that was a long answer to a short question, wasn't it?

- That's fine. A lot of people who have trouble with that one and a lot of people say, "It doesn't matter what I would have said, I wouldn't have listened to myself anyway."

- I think off the record, and this probably doesn't go in the recording is I think the only advice I'd probably given to myself was a couple of boyfriends I'd have missed out.

- Yes, yeah. He's no good. Move on - Yeah, one or two that I would have left out completely.

- Okay. So let's get practical and this is where I like to ask about resources. So are there books or websites or anything that listeners could use to maybe delve a little deeper that you would recommend?

- No, no, no. I'm only going to suggest one because I think a lot of the books I've got over there are about designing training. So I've got a lot more textbooks on designing and training, which is not really quite relevant for the procedure stuff. Because I think, actually, a lot of my stuff on procedures was based on probably on one paper that I think my professor wrote at university, which I could probably dig it out. But it's sort of embedded in my head from 30 odd years ago that I don't refer to on a daily basis, because all of those rules have just become part of how I practice.

But one book that I would suggest in terms of what we were talking about earlier on, which is about task analysis. So, you know, you're asking the question about, "Well, what happens when you realize that actually the underlying procedure is not working, it's not right? And my kind of classic "A Guide To Task Analysis." Really recommend that because it's got lots of different practical ways of doing task analysis. Yeah, it's quite meaty, but you don't need to read all of it.

You can just kind of get browse through and work out which type of task analysis is probably appropriate for you. But if you don't understand the task, you won't write a good procedure. And if you don't understand the task, you won't have a good risk assessment. If you don't understand the task, you can't train it. So the task analysis for me is that underlying bedrock of all of the other safety documentation you have understanding the task.

And for a very simple task, you could do that on the back of an envelope. And you can say, "This task involves one, two, three, four," and then like, "Do we all agree that's what the task is?" "Yes, right." But at least you've got it. For something more complicated, sort of hierarchical approach of breaking it down and sort of increasingly more detailed. So, yeah, Barry Kirwan's book on Task Analysis would be my recommendation for further reading.

- Awesome. Where can our listeners find you on the web?

- So I'm on LinkedIn. I think my name is fairly unique, as long as you spell Leathley correctly, I think there's only one of me on LinkedIn. If you do ask for connect, please do put a note with it because I genuinely just automatically refuse any connection requests that don't have a note with it. Because if I connect with somebody on LinkedIn, I want to know I'm going to have a conversation with you. So demonstrate to me we're going to have an interesting conversation by sending me a note saying what you're interested in, and then I'm quite happy to connect.

I've also got my own website. It's not very well developed. I don't really sell much through that but there's quite a few of my articles on there. So if you're interested in this area of different ways of using technology in health and safety, there's articles on there about AR, VR, Internet of Things. There's also some articles. There's a whole series of articles kind of looking at very fundamental concepts in health and safety, like, what is a hazard because sometimes the way we use hazard varies.

So going really down into detail about what these terms are. They're a little bit UK biased, obviously, in terms of the references to legislation in there. There's also some articles about what we can learn. There's links to other articles about what we can learn from other professions. So I did a whole series of articles on learning from sort of obvious professions, like learning from different branches of psychology or learning from quality managers and so on.

Also, the most interesting article, the one I enjoyed the most in that was, "What Safety Professionals Can Learn From Magicians." So that's linked on my website as well. So the website is thesaferchoice.co.uk. So that's my company name, The Safer Choice.

- Awesome, thank you.

- It'll be in the notes below. Isn't that what they say on video?

- Yes, that's what they say on the YouTube. And they also say, "Ring that bell and smash that button or Subscribe button," or whatever. Anyway. So thank you for joining me, Bridget, - Thank you, Mary.

- Thanks to our listeners for tuning in.

- Thank you.

- I'd also like to thank the Safety Labs team whose clear procedures keep this project moving along and bringing great content to safety professionals around the world. ♪ [music] ♪ - Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade.

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