Example

Safety Leadership Challenge - High level action planning

Our safety vision: To create a culture that supports open reporting of unsafe conditions, acts, high potentials (near misses), and incidents.

Our primary safety goal: Increase the number of high potential incidents (near misses) reported by 20 per cent within the next three months.

Desired end state / Current state / Required actions / Evaluation
What is the desired future you would like to see? / What is the current situation? / What needs to happen for the current state to change into the desired end state? / How will we know if we have reached the desired end state?
Workers routinely and proactively discuss safety incidents with the goal of learning from them during toolbox talks. / Workers only raise safety incidents when asked and if they are too serious to be ignored. /
  1. Senior manager to attend toolbox talk and present the safety vision.
  2. Add standing agenda item to toolbox talks.
  3. Frontline leaders to receive training in providing verbal recognition to staff who report incidents.
/ [#]of safety incidents raised during toolbox talks.
Workers engage in using the formal incident reporting system used on site. / Use of the formal reporting system varies markedly and is particularly low among subcontractors. /
  1. Provide refresher training to all workers onsite.
  2. Conduct focus groups with workers to understand usage issues/challenges.
  3. Identify and implement additional actions to improve reporting.
  4. Frontline leaders to receive training in providing verbal recognition to staff who report incidents.
/ [#]workers trained in reporting system.
[#] incidents formally reported through system.

Force field analysis

To successfully implement change, it may help to think about the pressures or forces that support and resist change. The template table below helps to identify and analyse these forces by following these steps:

  1. In a group,brainstorm the types of forces both for and against each desired change and include people from diverse areas of your business and from all levels.
  2. In the group decide on and assign ratings for each force on a scale of one(weak) to five (strong). Tally the scores for all forces that support and resist change.
  3. Develop a plan to address each force, strengthening the forces that support change and weakening or removing the forces that resist change.

Example Force Field Analysis

Forces for / Desired change / Forces against
3/5 / Clients require detailed safety performance metrics, including safety incidents. / Workers routinely discuss safety incidents with the goal of learning from them during Toolbox Talks. / 3/5 / Historically, people have been disciplined after reporting incidents in some areas of the business.
4/5 / Senior management visibly supports more open reporting practices. / 4/5 / Supervisors vary in their openness to discussing safety incidents and some may adopt a punitive approach.
2/5 / A contractor onsite has already implemented a similar process within their Toolbox Talks. / 3/5 / Some workers, primarily contractors, are not aware of incident reporting criteria.
3/5 / There is a current recognition system in place that rewards workers who report safety issues. / 3/5 / Most Toolbox Talks are rushed as there is too much information to cover in each session.
12 / TOTAL FOR / 13 / TOTAL AGAINST

NB: The ‘force field analysis’ is based on the work of Kurt Lewin (1943).

PN12174