Our discussion today centers around a Safety Science paper from 2008 titled, “Reflexive approach to the activity of preventionists and their training needs: Results of a French study” (Volume 46, Issue 8, October 2008, Pages 1271-1288 Safety Science by Alain Garrigoua and Guy Peissel-Cottenazb)
The paper results center on a survey sent to a multitude of French industries, and although the sampling is from only one country, 15 years ago, the findings are very illustrative of common issues among safety professionals within their organizations. David used this paper as a reference for his PhD thesis, and we are going to dig into each section to discuss.
The paper’s abstract introduction reads:
What are the training needs of company preventionists? An apparently straightforward question, but one that will very quickly run into a number of difficulties. The first involves the extreme variability of situations and functions concealed behind the term preventionist and which stretch way beyond the term’s polysemous nature. Moreover, analysis of the literature reveals that very few research papers have endeavoured to analyse the activities associated with prevention practices, especially those of preventionists. This is a fact, even though prevention-related issues and preventionist responsibilities are becoming increasingly important.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
“I think this study was quite a coordinated effort across the French industry that involved a lot of different professional associations.” - David
“It might be interesting for our readers/listeners to sort of think about which of these six groups do you fit into and how well do you reckon that is a description of what you do.” - Drew
“I thought it was worth highlighting just how much these different [job] categories are determined by the organization, not by the background or skill of the safety practitioner.” - Drew
“[I read a paper that stated:] There is a significant proportion of safety professionals that hate their bosses …and it was one of the top five professions that hate their bosses and managers.” - David
“You don’t have to go too far in the safety profession to find frustrated professionals.” - David
“There’s a lot to think on and reflect on…it’s one sample in one country 15 years ago, but these are useful reflections as we get to the practical takeaways.” - David
“The activity that I like safety professionals to do is to think about the really important parts of their role that add the most value to the safety of work, and then go and ask questions of their stakeholders of what they think are the most valuable parts of the role, …and work toward alignment.” - David
“Getting that role clarity makes you feel that you’re doing better in your job.” - Drew
Resources:
Link to the Safety Science Article
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
Drew: You are listening to the Safety of Work podcast, episode 92. How do different career paths affect the roles and training needs of safety practitioners? Let's get started.
Hey everybody. My name is Drew Rae. I'm here with David Provan, and we're from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to the Safety of Work podcast. In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to safety of work or the work of safety and we have a look at the evidence surrounding that question.
Today we're going to have a talk about one of the papers that David dug up when he was doing the literature review for his own PhD. This is a paper that talks generally about the roles, work, and background of safety professionals. David, before we jump into the details of the paper, is there anything by way of background you'd like to talk about?
David: Yeah, Drew, I found this paper really interesting and we'll talk about the details of where it was done and when it was done. It was a paper that covered some important questions that I had, which is about the background and the education of safety professionals about the activities they perform, and therefore what training and capabilities they need to have.
It also introduced this idea about the professional distress experienced by a reasonable proportion of safety professionals due to aspects of their role, support, and involvement within the organization. It kind of hits a real highlight of what I knew to be important questions for the safety profession.
Drew: I understand that the ideas of stress and frustration in the role are something that would have immediately attracted you. I guess this paper resonates with me a bit just because I've been thinking a lot recently about the usefulness of generalizations and labels. The way in which we try to find other groups of people where we share just enough similar experiences, that what works for us works for them, and how that's sometimes really useful for forming communities and bringing people together.
Also, sometimes it can lead to a sort of assumption that our experiences are universal and talking over the top of people who've got really quite different backgrounds and experiences even though superficially, we've got the same labels. I worry that that is something that we do a lot in safety that we prescribe these broad general solutions and say this is what everyone should do, thinking that everyone is like me, everyone has the same background, same education, same training, same problems that they're facing.
David: Yeah, Drew. Even about those things, just the labels like a tertiary qualified safety professional as opposed to a safety professional with no formal qualifications. These labels are really big and we say them as if there's a right and a wrong answer without a lot of critical thought and exploration of all the different alternatives, advantages and disadvantages of all of those different paradoxes, if you like.
Drew: Should we jump into the paper?
David: Yeah, let's talk about the paper.
Drew: I guess we've got an interesting label to start with, because the paper is called Reflexive approach to the activity of preventionists and their training needs: Results of a French study. Preventionist was not a term that I'd actually heard before. How about you?
David: Not until I started doing my literature review and found that organizations that had safety tied up a lot in allied health activities—occupational physicians, rehabilitation and so on—actually used the term ‘preventionists’ to describe what we would mostly call a safety professional involved in the risk reduction and prevention of the health and safety impacts of work as opposed to the diagnosis support and recovery from.
Drew: It sounds like a before or after label, the preventionist is just on the sort of left hand side of the bow tie.
David: And ties in a lot to the sort of the French ergonomics tradition as well around human factors and ergonomics. There might be a nice translation for it. This is just the way it translates into English—preventionists—but I did come across it quite a lot in some of the European literature.
Drew: The authors of this paper and as always, I apologize to the authors for my lack of skill in pronouncing names. We have Alain Garrigou, Professor at the University of Bordeaux, and we have Guy Peissel-Cottenaz. I can't actually get a lot of information on these authors because they seem to publish mainly in French so that's nothing to do with their lack of productivity. It's my lack of ability to read their body of work.
As far as I can tell from the translated titles, they seem to mainly publish about occupational exposure and of safety, what we might call Occupational Hygiene, your exposure to harmful pesticides, nanoparticles. This particular work is more general than that. It's not just talking about occupational hygiene. It was published in a good journal, Safety Science, published in 2008.
David: I think this study was quite a coordinated effort across the French industry. They involved lots of different professional associations and got access to not a huge number of participants in the survey, sort of 372 respondents. It was a survey—we'll talk about the method shortly—but lots of different industries, lots of different companies participating. It was quite a coordinated effort. I assume there was some funding coming from somewhere, which is why these particular authors took on this project.
Drew: I think in this case I might just read part of the abstract straight out because I think it summarizes the paper pretty well, and certainly the parts of paper that would be interesting (I think) to you, David.
It says, “What are the training needs of company preventionists? An apparently straightforward question, but one that will very quickly run into a number of difficulties. The first involves the extreme variability of situations and functions concealed behind the term preventionist and which stretch way beyond the term’s polysemous nature.
Moreover, analysis of the literature reveals that very few research papers have endeavored to analyze the activities associated with prevention practices, especially those of preventionists. This is a fact, even though prevention-related issues and preventionist responsibilities are becoming increasingly important.”
That could almost be the manifesto that started off your PhD, David. We've got this one term that we don't really know what the breadth of activity is that goes on beneath it. And apart from the term preventionist, you could just say exactly the same thing about safety professionals.
David: Absolutely right, Drew. It did get me interested in this paper, particularly, and as we get down into some of the details, there are quite a lot in this paper that I think gives a lot of opportunity for the safety profession to reflect on its direction. This actually did shape my thinking for the main ethnographic research component of my PhD, which was about how well do we really understand what safety professionals do in their role.
There was a lot happening at the time. There was a really big study that had been done supported by [...] 12 countries ([...] included) and others were involved. There were tens of thousands of safety professionals and that's what kind of landed that said safety professionals do training, risk assessments, write policies and procedures, investigate incidents, and do audits.
Over these five or six things, 70% or 80% of safety professionals all around the world get involved in these activities. Therefore, these are the training needs. There was a global capability framework published in 2015.
I felt along with these authors, that all of this was being done without a really good understanding of the role itself or an oversimplified and standardized view on what the role was.
Drew: Just because people say this is what they spend their time doing doesn't even mean that it is what they spend their time doing, let alone there's not a host of different things concealed under apparently similar labels.
David: Or you don't know what aspect of that work isn't understanding what a risk assessment is. Is it actually getting the organization to provide support for the risk management system? You don't actually know what their needs are and I think that's what these authors did really well about training needs. Unless we understand this intimately, we actually don't know how to train safety professionals or preventionist to be able to do their job well.
Drew: I might make a quick comment on the method of the paper. This was a questionnaire, a survey. It covered seven different topics. It covered the academic and professional background of the respondents, what sorts of activities they were engaged in, how they interacted and cooperated with other health and safety specialists, what their own viewpoints were about their activities, particularly with related to what their needs were, a bit about their own company and workplace and some demographics, what sorts of health, safety, and environment policies their company's had, and what their company's performance was in managing health, safety, and environment.
Surveys have good things and bad things about it. I think the authors actually summed it up pretty well. They say as a tool, the questionnaire is limited because it only allows access to what the person says about what they do or feel. We only work at what they tell us. It doesn't mean that that's actually a true reflection of what they actually do.
You can't really use a survey as a substitute for studying directly like through ergonomics, what someone does, and a survey shouldn’t stop you going deeper and trying to understand not just what they say about what they do but actually what they do, particularly at the very least going down to the level of interviews or focus groups. For this questionnaire, a survey is basically a good first start.
David: Again, I sort of feel like my research went on and did a little bit of what these authors were calling for with individual interviews and direct observations around not just what people did, but how they did it, and why they did it in their roles. Drew, it must have warmed your heart a little bit to see a paper that was so open, honest, and transparent about the method, the limitations, and what it meant.
Drew: Lots of research papers, when you pick them up, they've got token statements like this that just say this is why we did a survey, this is why surveys are good. These are the weaknesses of surveys. Then they totally ignore that when they get into their actual analysis and results and they make claims that their method can't support.
What I actually like about this paper is not so much just that statement, but the way they carry it through and they are careful to limit their claims to be most tentative when surveys are at their weakest and most strong when they know that actually this is something that a survey can tell us pretty clearly.
David: Like I mentioned before, the authors had 372 respondents from safety professionals—we'll use safety professionals and preventionists a bit interchangeably for our listeners—from within public and private companies. We're not talking about regulators, unions, representatives or something. These are formal roles dedicated either full-time or part-time with formal responsibilities inside public and private companies. Coming from manufacturing, utilities, agriculture, railway, nuclear, and other communications, a whole raft of different industries are categorized across a dozen or so different industry sectors. Not a huge number of people, but I think 372 people, diverse representation of industries, it's probably a sample that's worth looking at.
Drew: I think it's fair to say that it's reasonably heterogeneous in that they cover a lot of different things, but I don't think it's truly broad because there are hints from their data that there are clumps. They've obviously somehow collected a whole clump of people who work for just one or two railway companies that have responded to the survey.
You wouldn't want to claim that any of the statistics coming out of this are representative. It's not broad enough to claim that when they say 60%, that actually means 60% of the population. It does mean that when they say all of our respondents or most of our respondents said this, then you can accept that it's a fairly broadly true view.
David: Yeah, once sampling bias was distributed through professional associations and I guess then you're only going to get at the population that are affiliated with those professional associations and so on. The distribution method within the survey can sort of introduce quite a bit of sampling bias, and (again) may not be generalizable to the population.
Drew: Weirdly, you’d think if that was the case, that they wouldn't be picking up people who worked for really small companies or people without much education. In fact, they do seem to have got that. I think their choice of organizations was actually broad enough.
I suspected, for example in Australia, we just polled our HS members that would very heavily skew the more educated larger companies and consultancies. Whereas they don't seem to have that extreme skew that you'd get from this one professional organization.
David: Great. Drew, let's talk about some of the results. Let's get sort of stuck into these results. Do you want to get started?
Drew: Okay. The very first one is that most of the respondents, sort of up towards 90%, were not originally health and safety specialists. I think, David, you're one of the rare exceptions that you've been doing it pretty much your entire career.
David: No, I'm a minority that left high school, did a degree that included a safety major, and then got a graduate position as a Safety Officer for my first job. I know a couple of other people in my network who had similar career paths where there were some dedicated undergraduate degrees in around the mid-1990s. That's probably reflective of my experience. One in 10 people have probably done safety their whole career and nine out of ten people did something else before they ended up in safety.
Drew: They pull out some of the general paths that people have come from other backgrounds like production, or maintenance departments, or they've come from administration, or from quality, or environment. Then there's 59th, a whole heap just didn't come from any of those. They just spread from all over the place.
When they came into safety, the first weird thing they said was that the choice was free for only 46% of them. A lot of them almost got pushed into safety or at least that's the interpretation that the author's have put. Then moving into safety, very few of them got direct training immediately in occupational health and safety. They might have brought with them knowledge and experience, but they didn't get trained in the conversion to become [...] professionals.
David: I guess this was really interesting at the time. It was 2008. It's quite old now. The research was probably gathered 15 years ago. This idea that almost half of the people who are in health and safety professional roles wasn't their choice to become a health and safety professional. That's the way I interpreted it. There was either a position in the organization that they got pushed, or moved into, or asked if they could take it on.
There was not a deliberate choice for half of these people to become a health and safety professional. Only less than 20% of people had actually done training prior to taking on their health and safety job. Eighty percent of people start day one in a health and safety job without any training and then only another 20% actually convert that to a formal qualification. Within this sample, there was only 41% of the people who'd had formal training in health and safety for their role.
They may not be the representative numbers now or what, but I think that was a stock realization for me, which is how does a profession work like that where only half the people deliberately want to become part of that profession and maybe only 40% of people do any training for what their profession is.
Drew: The other thing that I think is really interesting, related to this is what sort of education background people had before they got into health and safety. This splits roughly into thirds, if I'm reading numbers correctly.
The first group have basically high school education. My understanding is that in France and Germany, in high school, you’re split into two parts either technical or headed towards University. These were people who, in high school, were on the technical path, finished high school, went into technical jobs.
They typically have no initial training in health and safety and very few of them were offered training beyond that, sort of 21 out of 94. They tend to be older people. Most of them aren't working at managerial level so they've sort of moved straight from a trade into a health and safety job with very little support to do that and are still executing the health and safety role fairly low down in the organization.
The second group has got a post high school, technical education, typically a two-year technical degree. These tend to be a bit younger. They're more likely to have got initial training in health and safety so they may have actually done their technical training, come out of high school, done technical training in health and safety, and they're moving into more supervisory, junior managerial–type roles.
They're the people most likely out of the whole group to actually have some sort of certificate in health and safety and most likely to have chosen safety as their career. You can think of these as the group of younger people who have decided actually to go directly into health and safety and have got accreditation accordingly.
Then your third group are your people who have a university education, but not in safety. They're engineers, they're BSC graduates, they've got a Masters, but actually very few of them have got training directly in health and safety. These people are typically either engineers or they're company managers. They're doing safety at quite a high level within the organization, but just like the people who had no university education, they have no safety training.
I thought those three groups were interesting and somewhat mirror the way we have things in Australia at the moment. There's a fairly young, fairly educated workforce who has chosen safety or done degrees particularly in safety. We've got a slightly older, more managerial, come out of other degrees, might or might not have gone back and got a qualification in safety. Then we've got people who moved from the tools into safety with limited support, maybe a short course or something like that.
David: They're not bad categories and it's a good way of us carrying through some of these different populations into the rest of the results. Drew, do you want to just talk about the initial training needs?
Drew: This one's not as clear cut because mostly what they're pointing out is, although there are some sort of commonalities, some common themes when you ask people what training they want, the main point here is that you can't really understand what the training needs are until you start splitting the people up into different groups and asking what training needs does this group have. We can see that just from the educational background.
The type of training that someone who was an engineer, who has voluntarily moved into safety management [...] training they need is going to be very different for someone who got pushed into a supervisory role coming straight off the tools. It's going to be very different from someone who got their original qualification in safety. They're all going to have different gaps in they're skills and knowledge that need to be filled even if superficially those things got the same labels.
We got some basic labels like they require training and ergonomics, understanding human behavior, compliance with regulation, the good old generic risk assessment, and negotiating with executives came up as one of the most commonly mentioned items.
David: I think there was a bit of a limitation in the design of this part of the survey. They asked (I think it was) 20 or 21 questions, and people would select multiple training needs. What do you see as your training needs in your role and select 1 or 21 of the following. Then they reported those things that 20% of people ticked.
They do say that it is a closed survey, people didn't get to come up with their own training needs, they could only kind of select from a predetermined list, so it really relied on the quality of that list. I think some better effort could have gone into that list of things.
The authors did conclude that there was a weight towards the non technical aspects of the role. Understanding human behavior, negotiating with the executives, and some of the ergonomic human factors, how people think, and how they make decisions and things like that. That was one conclusion that they drew from this that the training may not be so much technical as it is non technical, or the training needs.
Drew: What the authors did after that, which I think is quite interesting, is they divided all of their respondents up into eight groups of people who were as similar to each other as they could. David, I think we're probably only going to talk about six of those groups because the last two groups, the main thing that characterizes them is they didn't fill out much of the questionnaire. They're sort of like grab bag groups, whereas the first six are much clearer.
They describe the people as similar not just because of their background, but because of the organizations they work for. They found this match between what sorts of organizations employ what sorts of people and safety professionals. It might be interesting for readers to think about which of these six groups do you fit into and how well do you reckon that is a description of what you do.
David: Exactly, Drew, and just to go through, there's this prevention specialist role, so a specialist safety professional, there's a field safety professional, there's a management safety professional, there's what they call a proxy safety professional, two other roles around a coordinator or preventionist basic coordinator role, then this unstructured safety professional role.
Sometimes we talk a lot and [...] talks about safety professionals, safety practitioners, sometimes we talk about field roles and office based safety professional roles. This is just taking some of those normal dichotomous distinctions to a more broader set of categories. I think it's really something that will be interesting for people to think about, if they are a professional, where do they fit.
Drew: Shall we talk about each of those roles a little bit? The first one is the prevention specialist. These are people who work in organizations that tend to be larger organizations, that have got a structured health and safety policy, and resources behind that policy. I think the way we'd probably describe Australia is that they've got a pretty clear safety management system.
The preventionist working within that system, is someone who is qualified in OSH, they probably actually got a degree in safety, and they've got a reasonably high status because safety has a reasonably high status. The real challenge for safety in this sort of organization is negotiating safety alongside other organizational challenges and then working out how to specifically implement the safety management system in particular situations and contexts.
This group also didn't tend to talk about a lot of training needs, mostly because they consider themselves to be already qualified in safety. They weren't really asking for training. They were sort of saying that they needed more support in negotiating with senior management, but they didn't really see that as a please send me off to a course type training need.
David: The field preventionist (I think) is comprising a weaker structuring of the safety policy within the organization. Therefore, maybe a lesser status of the safety professional role, and safety being seen or managed more so at an operational level much closer to where the risk is. Health and safety is not a criteria for general management, but it is absolutely a need for frontline management and operations management.
They're more likely to have a background in the company's activity sector. If they're in construction and they're project safety professionals for the construction industry, they're more likely to come out of operational frontline roles within the construction industry.
They tend to gradually acquire knowledge by doing continuous training courses. They might do a certificate in training and assessment. They might do a certificate in risk management. They might do an auditor's course. They might do an incident investigation. They tend to do continuous training courses on the way through. Is there anything else you want to say about the field preventionists roles?
Drew: I just want to highlight that they claim—I don't know how universally true this is—that these people tend to be more separated from their peers. It seems like they're claiming that people who are in this position have less power and influence within the organization. They tend to get diverted towards doing activities like risk assessments that don't have a direct impact on operations. Even though they're more likely to have come directly from operations, they're now in the safety role and have less influence than they had when they were operational personnel. They've almost been sidelined by the transfer.
David: It's a good thing to highlight and I think listeners can reflect on their experience of field practitioner roles in operations. Do you want to talk about class three, the preventionist-manager?
Drew: These are headquarters-based roles. Just grab a couple of quotes, which I think indicate. They talk about “his executive engineer status and his organization chart positioning (attached to the GM) confer authority and legitimacy.” If you ignore the gendered language there, they are talking about someone who is very much in a senior management position, having come out not directly on the tools but from some sort of previous engineering- or management-type role. You may be a typical engineer project manager, go up to senior safety manager, or go up to a more senior management then go sideways into safety.
They talk about someone who is able to look across the whole organization, understand the different dimensions of safety, the physical, mental, organizational, social. They don't say a lot about the educational background or educational needs here. Just that the person is in a very pressured position because of all of the compromises that they're trying to balance around them.
David: Yeah, Drew. Let's go into the preventionist proxy. I'm not sure I fully understood what they were talking about here other than that the management see the need. The organization sees the need to do safety, but they haven't really developed any formal policies, but now allocated a resource to safety management within the context of not really having a formal management system or process as such.
Drew: The way I interpreted this, and I also don't quite understand where that term proxy comes from, what they were trying to signal with that term, but it seems like this is an organization that if you did some sort of maturity assessment, you'd see it as chaotic. These are safety people who are trying to exert order over the organization.
Maybe they've actually been asked to implement a safety management system for the first time in the organization or something like that because they talk about, for example, directing often towards administrative rather than towards technical risks. These are people who might have even come out of a trade union type role, where they're putting up these safety structures in contrast or in opposition to the organization's operational activities.
David, I wonder if maybe our difficulty in understanding this is that Australia's become so de-unionized that we have less of a sense of what it's like in an organization that has this very active union representation.
David: And I think some of the comments in here about the company undermining the role. I think I could just see a safety professional inside an organization that says, we want you to manage safety, that's why we've hired you as a safety professional. There are no formal structures or processes in place to anchor anything off.
All they're doing is starting to provide advice and suggestions about what to do, and everything's being hit with no awareness, or understanding, or systems and processes to anchor things off. They're feeling like they're making no ground at all. They look outside their organization for support in professional associations and things like that. In some of the quotes, it sounds like that was the experience that these people were having.
Drew: I thought that constantly looking outside the organization for support was interesting as compared to a couple of the other classes where clearly the first class are getting their support from the authority and safety management system, the engineers and managers are getting their support from their own authority high up in the organization, and the field people are getting their support through continuous professional development and just being sent constantly on courses to learn about safety.
David: And then those people that we just spoke about, the proxy preventionists are getting limited support at all. It's probably not a bad way to think about it, Drew. We talked about that a bit during my research about where people draw their legitimacy and power from. That's a nice connection. Why don't we talk about the basic coordinators?
Drew: This one is interesting. This is someone who is in an organization that has some sort of safety establishment. But it's not an establishment that's geared towards directly intervening in work in making work safer. It's geared towards providing coordination type activities, for example, giving other people safety training.
This is someone who's spending their time largely as a trainer, running inductions, running training, helping other people to know and understand about safety, and possibly getting involved in some activities that can be fairly discreetly isolated, like accident investigations. They might take on those separate activities, but they don't have a really clearly defined policy that lets them get involved in the frontline work and in any authority to change how work happens. If they're upskilling themselves, they're upskilling themselves in their skills as a trainer.
David: Yes, Drew. These safety professionals intervening or getting involved in what they put in scare quotes as basic issues like accident analysis and like you said, safety training courses. This was really big and popular maybe two decades ago, at least in Australia, where every single job ad for a safety professional will come out with a mandatory certificate for training and workplace assessment because it was such a core role of the safety professional to do training. Just competency-based training for workers. Not to provide any advice, or programs, or something around safety, but to train workers in their safety competencies.
Drew: The final category, they've just called unstructured. It should be clear, this is not like an unstructured category. This is a fairly unified category. The stuff that was any other they did separately, but the role itself is very unstructured. The big indicator here is just how little skill and qualifications these safety people have compared to really the size of the job that they're expected to do.
You could almost think of these as people who should be in an organization that is big enough and complex enough to have a safety management system, only it doesn't. They're trying to do all the parts of the job that would normally be heavily supported by a system, documents, and procedures, but they're just being thrown in to do that job without any of that support.
David: You've done a good job of describing it. Some interesting, I suppose, insights from the data is that 40% of these people are in organizations less than 200 people. They just have a safety person because they have to have a safety person and has no real training and no idea about what the role is going to do.
Also enterprises, like 30% of these people were in the largest of all companies that are at an enterprise kind of level, which meant that in very small or very large organizations, you seem to just drop. When you've only got one role and you're a very small organization, you seem to not necessarily know what to do with it. When you're a really large organization, you might have hundreds or thousands of safety professionals. There seems to be a portion of those people who are there because they're there, and they don't have any training, and they don't really know what to do. It's interesting to see it at both ends of that organizational spectrum.
Drew: It's quite interesting that these people are often in the org chart, actually very close to the General Manager. In the case of the preventionist manager being close to the GM is just a sign of how much power and influence they have in the organization. In the unstructured, we didn't know where else to put them so they're just sitting dangling off the general manager on the org chat. But that's not really an indication that they've got a lot of activity and support.
David: We've got six classes. There are eight in the paper, but we've decided to talk about six of them, of different types of roles based on organizations and approach to training and safety management. Let's talk about some discussion points. Do you want to start by talking about the relationship between these different roles in industry?
Drew: Okay. Even if I get specifically into that realm, I thought it'd be worth highlighting just how much these different categories are determined by the organization, not by the background or skill of the safety practitioner. Even though we might have people with certain levels of training tend to be in certain classes, it just indicates just how much of the capability that a safety practitioner has depends on the capability that the organization is offering them and the support the organization is offering them.
That then lets us come into this question of, okay, there are then particular industries that give better or worse support. They say that, in general, there's a little bit of a trend or class. You can take a guess what organizations and when we'll be in based on the industry, but it's not a guarantee.
If you know that somebody would say chemical engineering, then there's a good chance that the safety professionals are going to fall into that second group, but not necessarily. You can't make assumptions, there are different types in the same industry. Even in industries, you might think on mostly unstructured, you'll still find isolated examples of each of the other types.
David: I guess it goes to say that the identity of the safety profession is maybe not strong enough to standardize across companies and industries so much yet, whereas other professions—may be legal, accounting, and other professions—maybe have a stronger kind of consistency of professional identity and role archetypes, more so than as a profession. They say the profession is still so heavily shaped by the organization in the industry. That'd be a hypothesis, Drew.
Drew: Yeah, it also possibly partially speaks to this idea of organizations trying to take their next step or they're reforming safety by saying, okay, we want to bring in this person and safety manager and they're going to fix up the safety for use. But then, what the person can actually do is so heavily dependent on what organizational structures already exist and what sort of people are already there in the safety group that they're working with.
David: Drew, I want to circle back around if we're ready to move on a little bit just into one other part of the… There's a statement in the abstract which really did jump out at me when I first picked up this paper. It says, “A significant proportion of preventionists are in a position of great difficulty even professional distress.” That was the statement, even bolder than a few of those words. Great difficulty, professional distress are bold in abstract. I haven't seen an abstract with bolded words before, but maybe that's why it jumped out at me a little bit.
I coupled it with another paper that I read in professional safety, which is the American Society of Safety Professionals Journal, which was about the significant proportion of safety professionals that hate their bosses. It was one of the top five or top couple of professions for people who hate their bosses and managers or something.
Those two data points got me thinking about this idea of professional discretion, frustration, and you don't have to go too far in a safe profession to find frustrated professionals. Drew, I wouldn't mind just talking about that, but would mind getting your genuine thoughts first around just that hypothesis or claim.
Drew: I think the term professional distress is really interesting and gets at the heart of the dissatisfaction. They say this isn't just generally people who hate their jobs. This is that people are in distress in their jobs because they feel isolated. That isolation can come in a few different forms. It can come in not feeling that they are recognized. But I think much more interesting, it's not that they don't feel recognized as individuals, they don't feel that safety is recognized as a profession.
They feel like they're part of a group of people who are not recognized, which might be okay if there was some other place they could belong, if they could still at least belong to that group of people outside the organization. I'm hated in my organization, but then I can come along to the meeting of safety professionals and we can all complain together, except so many of them don't feel part of a network outside the organization.
Their profession is looked down upon, but they don't feel like they belong to their profession either. That's where the extreme distress comes in. Where do you belong if you don't feel that you're valued either inside your organization or part of a network of support outside of it?
David: I might just run through a couple of the statistics because of all the surveys; we've got some numbers. Maybe listeners could reflect on how they might think about some of these questions. The headline level, they've concluded that about 16% of responses, basically of preventionist is their practice is extremely poor. They appear totally deprived in terms of training and resources. They don't receive any professional recognition within their organization and that idea of extremely poor professional practice. That's approaching one in six kinds of people responding to the survey.
Drew: Maybe that this is a self report. This is people saying that I, myself, am not able to do my own job well. You could expect that the actual proportion of people who might even feel like that but don't feel like saying it, or might be in that position but don't necessarily recognize it. It's always going to be higher, not smaller.
David: Yeah. I'm just trying to think about the big numbers, but 25% of responders indicated that they don't cooperate well with other health and safety stakeholders. This might be between different roles within the same organization or other roles. You said, even one in four people in the health and safety community say there's not good cooperation between our professions within our organization. There were a lot of people who didn't feel like they belong to any kind of working community, so half of the people.
Drew, this point you made about 45% of people said they experienced this feeling of isolation within the organization, you mentioned isolation as a key part of professional distress earlier, did that surprise you, that one and two kind of number?
Drew: Not at all. I've always used this one, the Christmas party test. In an organization, you know you belong to a group if you get invited to the Christmas party for that group. Particularly, your field safety professional is the person most likely to get forgotten to be invited to any Christmas parties.
They don't get invited to safety because they're out in the field forgotten by the head office. They don't get invited to the local group because they're not seen as part of the local group. They're seen as part of the safety organization.
David: I got to get invited to the Christmas parties because I had to give the emergency response briefing at the start.
Drew: Yeah, so you were the most valued, charming person at that Christmas party. They all just applauded and clapped when that part was over, and they could get to the drinking.
David: Exactly right. Interestingly, 83% of participants. Think of that number, indicate that they compromise with respect to what they think needs to happen for safety, because of they say company logic, which is great to see the use of that word, but only 13% said that they didn't have to compromise their safety opinions and recommendations for the company.
I guess lots of people would probably say that we have to compromise. I guess the question is just how much we have to compromise. It says here that nearly 40% of people said that these compromises shouldn't be justified.
Drew: Looking at that first figure, I'm thinking, well, yeah okay. You want safety people who say that they compromise. You want people to be flexible, adjusting, recognizing their other values, but then that 40% see those compromises rarely or never justified. That's suddenly, whoa, okay. They don't talk in here about just being flexible. They’re talking about my values I've been compromised and I don't like it.
David: There's a lot to think about in there and reflect on. Again, it's one sample in one country 15 years ago. These reflections are useful reflections as we get to the practical takeaways or exercises shortly. Let me just talk about management.
Drew: I was really hoping you're going to touch on some of these very small numbers here about times when practitioners felt at their ease.
David: Okay, yeah. I actually did put this directly and literally. Only 2.5% of respondents. If we've got 372 people we're talking about, 7 or 8 people out of 372 said that they felt at ease in their professional practice negotiating with management about safety. Two-and-a-half percent of people felt comfortable talking about safety to management or negotiating safety with management. That's a big parent-child power imbalance inside organizations. I guess that's driving some of that unease. Your thoughts, Drew?
Drew: I'm wondering a little bit about what exactly people interpret at ease to be. But then I'm thinking, your job is spend time talking to management, spend time talking to other people in the organization, spend time talking with people out in the field. If only 2.5% of them feel at ease talking to management, 0.7% feel at ease negotiating with HR, and 10% feel at ease negotiating with field operators. These people never feel comfortable in their jobs. When do I feel comfortable when I'm sitting in the office while I'm talking to anyone? Most of the time, I'm stressed.
David: Yeah. It said that 44%. Again, a number as we approach half of these people are not invited to their relevant management committee.
Drew: This is good news because we know they're only at ease when they're sitting alone in their office and 44% are getting invited to go out and talk to management.
David: The management committees are I guess site leadership teams or general business leadership teams and things like that. Again, different countries at different points in time. But there are some numbers in here that you get out of surveys that if you ask the questions well enough, yeah, there's a lot of subjectivity in here, but what does it mean to feel at ease is a different thing for different people.
There's some interpretation here, but the good thing that I like about surveys and what this paper particularly allowed me to do was to form some kind of questions and hypotheses, and go and explore them through my own research, particularly in relation to some of these specific issues that seem extreme.
Drew: Is that a good time to move into the takeaways and as we touch on how you looked at some of those issues yourself?
David: Sure, let's do that. I got a couple of points. Do you want me to start or do you want to start, Drew?
Drew: I think you write these, so you go and explain them.
David: There are a couple of words in each. You should be able to work them out. I think the first one is just a recognition that safety professionals come from diverse backgrounds, have diverse training and education profiles, and diverse experience profiles.
Drew, in one of the papers that we did during my PhD on the professional identity of safety professionals, we found that career path and experience was a dominant factor in shaping the professional identity of safety professionals and was also one of the most common causes for distinctions, categorizations, and ingroup/outgroup fragments within safety organization.
The university training, the non-university training for people who've worked in frontline roles, and people who haven't worked in frontline roles. Just be aware that the profession is very, very diverse, that diversity is a source of strength, and it needs to be supported, and it also needs to be integrated well together. Drew, any thoughts around that?
Drew: I think we could make almost a separate takeaway there for those of us who have a vested interest in training and education, particularly when we're trying to standardize and say these are the things that the safety practitioners should know, these are the things that a safety practitioner should be able to do.
I think it is important to recognize that it's not just a case of taking people with different backgrounds and then giving them what they're missing so they all end up the same again, because the actual roles that need to be filled by safety professionals are all quite different. We need different sets of capability. Whenever we try to define a standardized set, we're always going to fall short just because it's going to describe this generic person that fits nowhere.
David: It's a good point, Drew. That takeaway there has been a really complex job. I say this to people that I’ve talked with and trained all the time around that I think it's arguably or at least in my opinion, the most complex job in the organization. We need to understand what's happening in the frontline, what's happening in the boardroom, what's happening in HR, in IT, in project management, and in engineering. It's one of the only roles that's not located on-site that actually needs to know how things are done on-site.
It's a really complex job that requires a really complex set of technical and non-technical skills. Those things are different, like you said, in different roles and different industries. It is very hard to say what the ideal capabilities and training needs of a safety professional are, but I think we're a long way off in many things that we do for the safety profession.
Drew: The fourth takeaway, and I think this is one directly for safety managers, is that the role clarity for safety practitioners in all of these different roles is very low, leading to really high uncertainty, job dissatisfaction, and lack of support. I think that means that we're not going to fix the situations that give rise to this very quickly at all. That's something that's a job for the profession. That's a project lasting decades.
In the meantime, the people in these roles are going to need extra support just because of the problems that they're facing. We just need to take that as a priority for people across the profession. It's the creation of networks outside of organizations and the creation of management opportunities within organizations that directly address that need to belong and have support as individuals.
Maybe something we can take up as another topic for the podcast is highlighting some of the work that some really good groups are doing in this area with the setting up of these different networks and what sorts of supports are working well, not working so well.
David: It is something that can be done, even having those open conversations with the organization. The activity that I like safety professionals to do is to think about what they think of the really important parts of their role that add the most value to the safety of work, and then go and ask questions of their stakeholders of what they think are the most valuable parts of the role, and then start to work towards alignment on that.
What I typically find is that many safety teams and safety professionals have never even had the discussion with their stakeholders and others in the organization about what the most important activities are and what good looks like. Investing some time and effort, and you can do that relatively quickly in role clarity, role alignment, will help safety professionals if the situation is like this paper describes the situation is.
Drew: I think I've heard you say before that that just directly improves job satisfaction as well, but getting that role clarity directly makes you feel that you're doing better in your job.
David: Yeah, and confidence is really important. Feedback is really important. Drew, I wonder if I can throw you the question then because I didn't really answer this one succinctly, to put you on the spot if that's okay. The question that we asked this week is, how do different career paths affect the roles and training needs of safety practitioners?
Drew: I don't think the paper directly answers that question. I think it almost turns into a yes, no question that we can just state with confidence that different career paths absolutely do affect the roles and training needs of safety professionals, but probably not so much as different organizations and the structures within them affect the roles and training needs of safety practitioners.
David: I think that's a great conclusion. Therefore, that means that there's a lot you can do in your own organization without the need for the whole profession to move and change.
Drew, that's it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought-provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. Join us in the discussion on LinkedIn or send any comments, questions, or ideas for future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.