Welcome back to the Safety of Work podcast! Though Drew is out for this episode, this means we’re graced by the insightful Dr. Jop Havinga, a colleague of ours from the Safety Science Innovation Lab. Dr. Havinga is a great guest, as he probably spends more time in the field than the average safety science professional.
Together, Jop and I discuss a topic on which Drew and I previously touched: We revisit how stop-work decisions are made and why this is such an interesting topic of research.
Topics:
Quotes:
“I think I’ve probably been guilty myself of not fully defining what I’m talking about.”
“Only one case I found where a rule actually led to stopping work.”
“First of all, compared to current interventions we see around stop-work...they all paint this picture of real significant decisions...and well, I found that plenty of stop-work decisions are basically considered insignificant.”
Resources:
Deciding to Stop Work or Deciding How Work is Done?
David: You're listening to The Safety of Work podcast episode 75. Today we're asking the question, how are decisions to stop work made? Let's get started.
Hi, everybody. I'm David Provan and today I'm joined by Dr. Jop Havinga, who is also a colleague of Drew and myself at the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University. Welcome to The Safety of Work podcast. In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and we examine the evidence surrounding it. Before we go any further, Jop, welcome to the podcast. Can you share a little bit about yourself and some of your background?
Jop: Thank you, David. It's very good to be here. Well, sir, you probably know yourself, I'm a researcher at the Safety Science Innovation Lab. My background is originally in human [...] psychology. During my bachelor's, I was probably trained to be very experimental and quantitative. As I moved to the Safety Lab and did my Ph.D., it became more and more qualitative research and now graphic in style.
Since my Ph.D., I've done a little bit of consultancy largely in the same space of trying to help organizations reflect on what work is like for people within their organization. Recently, I've moved back to Griffith University and the Safety Lab to study this more academically and reflect on those questions.
David: Great, Jop. I think you spend a lot of time in the field. Even as an academic researcher, you probably spend more time in the field than many, many safety professionals inside organizations.
Today's also really exciting for the podcast because this is the first time that we're somewhat revisiting a question that we've asked before on the podcast. In episode 10, Drew and I talked about some research that we co-authored with Dr. David Weber and Shaun MacGregor. That episode was titled, what supports and hinders stopping work for safety. It's really exciting that The Safety of Work podcast has been around long enough to see some of the science moving forward and give us an opportunity to revisit one of these topics.
Jop, maybe if we start by introducing the paper we're going to talk about. Your paper was titled, Deciding to stop work or deciding how work is done. You are the lead author. Your co-authors were Kim Bancroft and Drew Rae, a co-host of The Safety of Work podcast. You published the paper in the Journal of Safety Science recently. Maybe if you want to start by talking about how that research question came about, or why that topic of interest popped onto your radar and you decided to research it?
Jop: I was doing this big project, three months of ethnography, where we were studying how safety management system processes actually influenced the front line and how we could trace any influence of that back. During this project, I was going out spending time with people throughout the organization, some time with people in the Safety Department, some time with managers and supervisors, and most of the time I was spending in the fields with operational teams.
One of the conversations that I overheard of two relatively new people in that organization was about how frequently you actually should stop work? They were like, oh yeah, I used to feel like I should do this work. But then I realized that if it's at night, you shouldn't actually be doing this noisy job or you shouldn't stress too much about a big job like that and just hand it over to the next guy. Originally, when I heard it, I was like, this is not actually why I came out here. I was taking some notes along the way and I was suddenly thinking this is actually quite interesting.
This is quite different from how we generally think about stuff work decisions as these big events. Well, they're saying, oh, this is actually what a good practitioner should do, stopping work when there's a better way of doing it. I started to reflect on what I had been observing so far. I was like, this seems to be very much in line with what I've been observing, but hadn't really taken notice of at that point that these people were constantly stopping work.
David: I find this fascinating that the organization that you're doing this embedded ethnography work. I was really interested in understanding how their safety management system impacted frontline work. The questions that we asked a lot on The Safety of Work podcast, which is how the safety of work influences the safety of the work. You're three months in the field to try to see how that safety management system had an impact or didn't have an impact, and had one of those aha moments that you have when you're doing ethnographic research.
It goes, hey, this is a really interesting thing that I've stumbled across or sometimes as a byproduct of what you were looking at. Maybe tell us a little bit about the broader literature on stopping work because it's something that I think all of our listeners would go, well, that's just a core part of our organization. We tell people to stop working for safety all the time. What does the literature say about stopping work for safety?
Jop: Well, it's probably pretty close to the general view that you're describing. I think everybody agrees that it's good to stop work when it's unsafe. Whether you have the most behavioral-based approaches to resilience engineering, to safety culture, everybody agrees that being able to stop work when it's unsafe, and having people able to just say, no, stop, is a good thing. Some people might put a little bit more emphasis on trying to achieve this through procedures, while others might put the emphasis a little bit more on empowering people to stop work.
David: And explore the issue further once you decided that was something you’re going to focus on.
Jop: With the way the research was set up, I basically had to go back to my old data because as I described, the focus of the project was actually a different one, which was, how safety management systems influence work, which a little bit overlaps but it is largely a different question.
I had just taken notes along the way of, hey, this is something interesting. If I run into something like this, of course, I'm going to take notes of it. Again, after the research project was already done and the reports were delivered, I went back to my notes and first went through all the fieldwork notes that I had and was like, okay, anything that's related to a job is not assigned, and completed or not completed. I captured that in a spreadsheet. Anything related to people not doing the job fully by themselves, getting help, requesting help, I marked it down. I marked down anything relating to procedures that might involve the need to stop work.
Then I went back through all the interviews that I judge could have been relevant, either with operators directly or people close to the operators. Searched through them to see if anything regarding this topic came up, whether it was specific cases they told me, or whether it was a general statement.
First, just collect everything together, then you try to look for patterns in this, and see what creates a coherent explanation. At the same time, I was going back through the literature, including your paper with Dr. David Weber and you see how this contrasts with what I find?
David: One of the other things that I really liked about your methodology is the idea that you started with work. You mentioned our research, and listeners might go back to episode 10 and listen to how we researched this topic. We wanted to research the authority to stop work and we wanted to understand stopping work for safety. We did a lot of focus groups where we talked to operators about stopping work in a team meeting, in a meeting focus group type environment.
I suppose what I was reflecting on in terms of thinking of the different methodologies and the approach that you took is we never actually observed to stop work decisions being made as it played out. As I think you quoted in your paper from Eric Holden, safety being created is a dynamic event within organizations. You are there on the ground as crews are making these stop work decisions and getting the opportunity to observe, but also then to immediately question and reflect with them. How was that experience of data gathering at the moment?
Jop: Well, that's probably what I like most about my work when I'm out in the field. You really have the chance to be surprised and have to rethink your own views because the view that I'm largely arguing against is stop work decisions are these big significant decisions where people feel a lot of pressure to make the decision to stop work. They probably exist somewhere as well, but tons of these decisions that you run into, but this turns out to be not to be true at all, which is a part of ethnographic work. You take people's interpretation of what happens very seriously, but at the same time, you try to take somewhat of an objective view of what's going on.
And then you say, well, if we say that a stop word decision is any time that people hand over a job, and that's actually suddenly quite common. You constantly have to play with this technical definition and the interpretation, plus what you see, and try to make them align with each other and make sense of it in a way that you can generalize anything from it.
David: I really like that description. I think we're going to talk about that when we talk about the practical takeaways about something easier when it's something that we think of as part of everyday work, as opposed to something hard when it's an abnormal type of event or situation.
What I also like in your paper is you actually made the effort of defining stopping work because it's a problem in research a lot and it's a problem in topics like safety culture where the authors don't necessarily take the time to define what they actually mean. I think your definition of stopping work is where an individual or a team makes a decision not to finish a job at that time and with the current crew configuration. Either deferring something to another point in time or getting resources from outside the work team that they don't currently have available to them on hand.
Is that how you see this definition of stopping work, which then says, this must happen all the time? Find a supervisor or get extra resources, do something tomorrow instead of today. This must happen all the time in operational environments.
Jop: Well, in this case, I really needed to put forth a definition because I couldn't create a contrast with the general view that existed within academia or interventions around stop work versus what I was seeing. I think I've probably been guilty of not fully defining what I'm talking about, but in this case, it was really the tool that I needed to show this contrast.
David: I think it's a great reflection for practitioners and there's a really good section in this paper and we'll tell listeners how to get hold of it because it is currently not embargoed with the author links. We'll share some of those so that there might be a month or so left to be able to download this paper for free. I think there's a really good section that you describe in there about procedures and interpretation of procedures and requirements for individuals. It's a good reflection point for our listeners to go to.
If you're telling people in your organization to stop working for safety, do you actually tell them what you mean by that? What do you actually mean by stopping work? What do you actually want them to do? You might find that you've said stop work for safety and you might never have actually told or had a conversation about what that actually means and what it looks like.
You're spending these three months in the field, you're observing lots of work, you and the team decide that we're going to look at stopping work, you observe all these decisions being made, and then you go away and analyze all of that. Let's talk about what you found. Do you want to start by talking about the things that you found in your research in describing what they might mean for organizations?
Jop: One thing that I started looking at was the procedures around when the expectation was for work to be stopped to really start with the view of this is how we imagine those things happen. I found that very rarely, the procedure actually led to work being stopped, at least in a direct sense. I even saw that there was disagreement within frontline operators about how to interpret a certain procedure, whether an authorized spotter, for example, meant that somebody needed to have a certificate or just needed to be delegated on the spot.
This difference in interpretation between operators did not make any difference in terms of how they did the work. In that sense, it was not the rule that was dictating whether they were going to stop work there or not, or how they viewed the rule did not dictate whether they were going to stop work or not.
Only one case I found where a rule actually led to stopping work, which was work had to be done inside a real corridor, and there was a rule within the organization that you needed a spotter from the train organization to do work in the real corridor. For this case, the operator did not even look at the procedure. He just knew this from the top of his head. As soon as he saw the job wasn't at a location, he called up the schedule and dispatch team and said, look onto the job, you need to plan it with a real operator so you can have a spotter here.
David: When you say procedures in your paper, you talk through some of those stop work procedures and checklists like the process that the crew will go through maybe during a pre-start, where do you have this in place, do you have this in place, do you have this in place? Even when, I suppose these are all internal requirements? Yes, no. I know you mentioned in your paper that even when things may not be quite right, that didn't necessarily mean that work was stopped or changed.
It’s interesting that you mentioned that hard and fast compliance where the boundary was with another organization, some external rule, or some law, which obviously was a really hard stopping point for the crew.
I found it interesting in your paper where when people felt that if they weren't able to follow a procedure, stopping work and giving it to another crew was not actually going to solve any problems because the next crew will just have the exact same procedural problem that they've got, so they may as well just get the work done. Because doing it later isn't going to be any safer. It's still going to be just exactly the same work. Is my understanding of that right?
Jop: Yeah, that's completely correct. I didn't want to phrase it as such, yet do not spill the beans on the next point. But indeed, it was very much the view that if we stop work to comply with this procedure, it's going to be exactly the same for the next crew that's going to get assigned to this work. The procedures stay the same and the conditions tend to stay the same for the next crew. But that's probably a good segue then to the next part where if we look at the decisions where work was stopped, we see that it was very much a reflection on how work will be done.
In that sense, if you decide to stop work at that moment for the procedure, then the question becomes how will the work be done in the future? Which often will not change unless it can be handed over to a different team or a team with different tools with different information or at a different time when work might be easier, safer, or less cumbersome on other people to be done?
David: I like that hand forward point. I love the title of your paper. I don't know if that's your title or Drew's. He usually spends a bit of time and comes up with really good titles. This idea of are we deciding to stop work or are we just deciding how we can do work better, whether that's easier or safer.
I don't think stopping work for safety crews, from reading your findings, distinguishes between stopping work for, there are not enough hours in the shift. If it's a six-hour job, I've got three hours left, then I'm stopping because I can't finish it. Or actually, this is going to take me half the time tomorrow if I get a different piece of equipment here than I've got today, so I might as well do something else today and do this job tomorrow when I've got the right thing.
This sort of dynamic collaborative planning just is going on all the time in the completion of work. The stopping work for safety is muddled up inside all of that dynamic planning activity by my interpretation of some of your findings.
Jop: Yeah, and I completely agree. What I also find interesting about it is that all these questions, almost all of them, they only partly relate to safety. If it's easier done with a different tool, then it is probably safer to do it tomorrow with a different tool. If you want to do it or if it's currently next to a busy road and you think the road is going to be empty in the midday or at night, then you can hand over for that. If it's easier done by a bigger team, then you hand over for that, which is not immediately or not only a safety concern, but it does lead to safer work conditions.
Probably a couple of them were less safety-related like trying to avoid cutting off water during dinner time, which mostly is about providing a good service to the community. I have to say I was really surprised with how high that 40 operators are concerned. That they were constantly reflecting on how much they were interfering with the lives of the people around their work area.
David: I think we see that definitely in a lot of utility organizations, whether it's water utilities (as in this case) or whether it's electrical utilities. I think those organizations exist with a very deep sense of care and purpose about providing those essential services to communities. And they take that provision or the continuity of the provision of that service very seriously. In fact, we see that sometimes compromising their own personal health and safety. I think in your paper, it was reflected in stories about how under fault conditions, work would continue. When maybe under planned conditions, it may not actually continue in the same way.
Jop: I'm not 100% sure if we covered that in this paper, but it's definitely something I've seen working with other utility companies. I'm completely confident in making that claim.
David: There was a story—which I interpreted to be that and I may be wrong—about how when a planned activity, they would carefully dig up the grass and put it aside so they could work it out. But under fault conditions, they would really move and work in a different way, which I interpreted as being a bit more maybe hurried, maybe pushing forward, maybe making some more work-related compromises that they might otherwise have just deferred that job to a different point in time.
Jop: Like I said, I can't immediately remember the story, but it's definitely the case. I'm completely confident in supporting that claim.
David: That's okay. Other findings that you want to talk about. This idea that stopping work happens as a part of everyday work and much more regularly than we probably think that it does. These stop work decisions are not so much about stopping, but they're about how best work is going to be done now or in the future.
The other thing you mentioned earlier about procedures spark considerations, but they don't actually dictate actions. People interpret these procedures in very different ways and they impact individual actions in different ways than we might otherwise think. These are the broad areas of findings. Do you want to say any more about any of those?
Jop: That's definitely the big finding. First of all, compared to the current interventions we see around stop work decisions, which is authority to stop work, policies asserted in this training. They all paint this picture of a really significant decision that people need support on. I saw that at least plenty of stop work decisions are considered basically insignificant and people make them without a second thought about it.
The second part is what you alluded to is needed. It's not about stopping work. It's not about how the decision is made, then we have safety or we don't have safety. It's about, okay, this is a condition of work, how are we going to deal with this? How are we going to continue doing this?
Finally, the procedure [...]. Procedures do seem to have an influence, and they can definitely lead to consideration. But it doesn't stop people from reflecting on the previous point that it is firstly a reflection on how work is done or is best done.
David: I wouldn't mind putting you on the spot and getting your reflections from outside your research. You're very familiar with crew resource management literature. You've written a paper about how crew resource management took off outside the cockpit. When I thought about coming into this area about authority to stop work, I thought about how, say, a pilot makes a decision that I'm not going to take off today because of the weather. That's a big decision. I've got 300 people on my plane that want to go somewhere. I've now decided that I'm not going to take off with this plane. I'm going to shut down this nuclear power station because I see something on the control panel, so I'm going to shut it down.
I think some of the literature has these examples of stopping work that is quite big, that feel like quite big decisions. How do you reconcile some of the things that you maybe found with your research? Do you think some of these things transition across into those other areas? What are your thoughts?
Jop: Very good points you raised there. Well, considering those stories, I think we should acknowledge that there's probably a lot of difficult stop work decisions as well. I'm definitely not making the claim that every stop work decision is easy. I'm trying to open people's eyes that there's this whole area of stop work decisions we're basically not even considering. What I at least expect is that by probably organizing work differently, we can make sure a lot of the difficult decisions can be avoided and keep them in the easy space if you can keep them in a space of framing how work can be done rather than how work can be stopped.
David: I love that. I love your description there. I'm reflecting as I was listening to you. We lift and shift a lot in safety. We take something out of one domain, and we think it holds true in a different domain and then that's how management approaches. We might think about this aviation example of authority to stop work and how difficult these decisions are. A lot of effort goes into the assertiveness training of the copilot, and a lot of effort goes into companies giving the authority of pilots to not take off.
In those environments, we think procedures do dictate actions. If something's not right on a pre-flight checklist, a minimum equipment list, or a certain weather threshold, then the procedure probably does dictate a lot of actions about stopping that activity. We go great, we understand this now. Now we're going to go into a day-in-day-out utility organization and think that the world works the same way.
I think what you've opened my eyes to is that if we take that expectation of work as imagined and overlay that into the business, we can drop something into our business that really doesn't do anything to help the situation that our people actually face. Actually, you might make it harder for them to do what they need to do and a lot of misplaced effort, which we'll talk about when we get to practical takeaways.
Is that how you see it? Because of some of your findings, just in my discussion then, I'm thinking in different domains, the findings might be quite different.
Jop: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I do expect that in almost any domain, there will be this section of currently unacknowledged stop work decisions. What they exactly look like will be very, very different. How big that space is will also be very different. Part of what I think really contributed to the situation here is that the way work was planned and delegated was distributed across three different groups, which was the schedule and dispatch.
There was a part of the supervisors of the operators that supplied some help and then the operators themselves. All of them were acknowledged and had their part to play. I think that probably will make it easier compared to a setup where there's a supervisor who directly hands over the job. In that case, you have a more one on one tension, rather than something that diffuses across multiple people
David: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about practical takeaways. Because if listeners are like me when I was reading your paper, and even when I was just hearing myself talk and listening to you in this episode, most of it makes intuitive sense once you've revealed it. A good ethnography and a good article on ethnographic research paints a picture of the world where you can go, okay, I can see that to be the case.
I think these descriptions are about, okay, well, yes, it is about replanning work. If I can hand it on to someone else, then yes, I've got a procedure. If I can't do anything about it, then I might as well just get the work done. All these things that we've spoken about just make sense to me. What does it mean for organizations? What should organizations do now? If our listeners are sort of listening longer, that makes sense. That sounds like my organization. What should they be thinking and doing?
Jop: I think the main strategy that my paper alludes to is making it easier for work to continue, to phrase, or view an operation to stop work as work to continue. Because in that case, it will be a decision that's less significant and easier to make.
If there are specific hazards where you're afraid that people will continue working under, can you develop dedicated tools or dedicated teams, for example, to take over when that hazard appears? As in thinking of asbestos, if there's a dedicated team within an organization to deal with asbestos jobs, then I think a lot of people will be willing to stop if they can just hand it over to that team. They'll go, no, this is actually what the organization expects me to do. It's clear that I shouldn't be pushing on here.
David: I like that. Rather than just a generic stop work if you consider it to be unsafe for a number of those foreseeable types of situations where collectively with the frontline crews, you can make a determination about work maybe not being the best way to be approached in the standard way because of particular hazards. Like you mentioned, having ways for them to just seamlessly hand that off, to pass it forward.
I like the way that you also mentioned, having options that crews can arrange themselves. I like that because what we found when we researched is if they had to explain it to a supervisor, ring a call center, or talk to someone else and go through a process to make that happen, that was just another barrier to just pushing on.
Jop: I actually think that alludes to an unanswered question in the research right now. If we look into safety culture, the current view is that you need to have an open culture where people can share things. In that sense, you would expect that people communicate the reasons why they stopped work. What you alluded to and what I also somewhat found is that not having to explain yourself actually helps a lot. While that's not directly counter to an open culture, it's not immediately the same thing either.
David: No, exactly right. It sounds like a great idea to have this open culture where everyone can say anything, but I'm not sure that exists or ever will exist inside organizations. It doesn't exist in families where people will just explain themselves and make themselves vulnerable all the time. I think we need to have strategies that match the reality of organizational life today, as opposed to our desire for some organizational life, which doesn't exist.
Jop: I think beyond the impossibility of the culture, I think you also should recognize that it's often quite hard to phrase exactly why you're doing something. Going out with a lot of people in the field, I generally view my own job as trying to translate what people in the field do and why they do what they do. I see them as the most important source, but I do expect that they can't perfectly phrase it themselves. It needs my effort to interpret why they do what they do.
In that sense, the idea that we can always just explain why we do what we do I think doesn't hold up in reality.
David: No, that's a really good point. One of the other practical takeaways that I took out of reading this is this idea that you've mentioned about making stopping work or this idea of stopping work feels normal. It's not a special card around someone's neck. It's not a once in every year type event. It's something that is integrated and part of everyday work. We incorporated training.
Like you said in your reflection earlier about people saying that it's the sign of a good operator, a good practitioner, someone who knows when they need to stop something, pass something forward, and request additional resources. Making that stopping work be not something as you failed for not being able to do your job, but making stopping work be something that we train people in and we show as a sign of a good operator. There are lots of ways organizations could approach that, but that feels like a good thing to do.
Jop: Yeah. I completely agree. The general strategy of keeping the decision to stop work feels easy, and keeping it framed around this is how to do work or how work should continue. In that sense, making it part of the operator's training completely fits in with that strategy.
David: I think if you're in an organization and like you have said, from a literature point of view, it doesn't matter what safety approach you believe in. I think most, if not all approaches, think it's a good thing for people to stop work if they're faced with an unsafe situation. The traditional strategies for that have been around having procedures, prescribing when work can and can't proceed. Also having training—assertiveness training, authority to stop work permission from the CEO for any job in the company, and those types of things.
These procedures and training about these big stop work events, and I think the alternative that your research is painting is that well, that might not be true in all domains, it might not be true in your organization. If it's not true in your organization, then stopping work might be integrated and part of every day-in-day-out work.
Rather than those other strategies, you might want to work out how you can make stopping work feel more normal, how you can include it in training, how you can create alternate work strategies that crews can work with, integrate, and arrange themselves. That might be a better use of your safety management effort than some of the other approaches. Does that summary feel close to the mark of your paper, Jop?
Jop: I would probably slightly tweak it in that I say, I expect that both are always true for every organization. There are always going to be a couple of examples of very difficult stop work decisions. I expect in any organization plenty of easy stop work decisions. It is definitely true that within different organizations, different industries, one might be more relevant than the other one.
David: Great. Thanks, Jop. Today, we ask the question, how are decisions to stop work made? Jop, you're the expert now in this. What's your answer?
Jop: To link it back to the title of the paper, I would say there are decisions on how work is done as we've discussed, at least most of the time.
David: Great. Thanks, Jop. That's it for this week. We hope you find this episode thought-provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. Send any comments, questions, ideas for future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.