Category: Safety
Launch of Hawke-EST
Factive is now a partner in a new extreme situation survival training business.
Myke Hawke and Ruth England, expert survivalists and co-stars of the popular TV series Man Woman Wild, have teamed up with resource industry culture expert and Factive’s Director Dr. Dean Laplonge, to create a new extreme situation survival training service for resource companies and their employees.
Violent attacks against resource extraction operations are unfortunately becoming an all-too familiar news story. Extreme weather events are also on the rise, causing more flooding, landslides, wild fires, and drought. These all constitute heightened threats to the safety of employees working in remote and dangerous locations.
Myke and Ruth will provide bespoke survival training, pre-departure and in-field, to ensure resource company employees can survive in extreme and unpredictable situations. Through the Hawke-EST blog, our team will discuss a range of safety and security issues which impact on the survivability of these employees in the changing global landscape.
Hawke-EST (Extreme Situation Training). Specialist survival training for the resource sector.
Reduction in injury a key result
This article was written by Anika Reynolds. It appeared in The Mining Chronicle.
A new workplace program designed to improve employee safety communications has been launched with the premise that empowering workers and customising safety solutions will deliver better results for companies. MySafe, by cultural research consultancy Factive, is a comprehensive communications program which examines safety communications across a company, rather than on a particular or individual aspect of safety.
To view the full article, click the link below.
A response to the “Getting Home Safely” report
The Getting Home Safely report was written in response to an inquiry into the safety practices of the construction industry in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). This inquiry was requested due to the high level of injuries in the construction industry in the ACT and in response to three fatalities that had occurred in this industry in the year prior.
This document offers our response to the Getting Home Safely report.
It is our recommendation that the report should urgently be complemented by an addendum report which explores the relationship between gender and the organisation of the construction industry in the ACT; and that this addendum report provide clear guidance to the industry on why it needs to investigate this relationship and how construction companies can go about it.
To request a copy of Factive’s response to the report, please contact us via our website.
Is it safe to…be a “man”?
This article was written by Kathryn Edwards, Editor of the Australasian Mine Safety Journal. Publication date is unknown.
You can read this commentary piece by clicking on the link below.
The crisis of psychology in resources safety
This article was first published on 22 August 2012 in the online magazine HighGrade. You can download a copy of the article by clicking on the link at the bottom of the text.
Relying on psychology to help improve the safety of people working in high risk environments is now commonplace. But does anybody really know why? When leaders of resource companies agree to pay millions of dollars for a program which claims that psychologists can change safety behaviours, do they really know what they are doing?
Psychology is a recent discipline of thought. While there is evidence of ideas similar to those we would today describe as “psychology” within ancient cultures, contemporary psychology emerged only in the late nineteenth century. Freud and Jung are perhaps the most well-known psychologists who gave wider fame to psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century. And from the middle of the last century on, we see the popularity of a focus on human behaviour as the preferred way for psychology to go, particularly in Anglo cultures.
The history of psychology goes unnoticed in the application of psychological theories to workplace safety today. Psychology is just one of the many disciplines of thought which emerged in the post-Enlightenment era to provide us with a means of understanding and interpreting what we as humans do. Yet psychology is now believed by many to offer the “truth” of how we relate to safety at work.
Resource companies have jumped on the bandwagon of seeking to improve workplace safety by tapping into the solutions to “bad” human behaviour that psychology claims to offer. They employ people with an undergraduate degree in psychology to roll-out behavioural observation programs which promise visibility of how safely employees really go about their work. They promote models and slogans which psychologists claim can get employees to focus on the real link between their attitudes and behaviours. “Safety culture” is the new buzz word, with every resource company seeking to establish a safety culture better than what their competitors has. Every resource company wants a “psych” who they can promote as the guru of human behaviour. And consultancies which employ psychologists are cashing in.
It’s fair to say that this phenomenon is not so far removed from what has happened in the wider culture over the past few decades. The popularity of psychology is reflected in the high levels of interest people have in celebrities like Oprah Winfrey whose simplistic responses to complex human issues make us believe we can all be “saved”.
What is particularly appealing for resource leaders is how psychology claims to be able to change the attitudes and behaviours of everyone and anyone. Differences in context, experiences or mood do not need to be considered. A single safety culture and a single way of thinking about safety are always the promised goals. They believe that the more they speak the psychological mantras and the more they talk about “our safety culture”, the more likely it is that people will actually start to believe and follow. For the leaders of resource companies, who over the past century have steadily become the arm of the state in disciplining the worker, it’s has to be more appealing to believe they can discipline a workforce that thinks and acts the same.
The real and sustainable impacts of psychology on safety are, however, questionable. To date, there has been no independent research into the effectiveness of psychological practices on improving workplace safety. All the available research comes from the very same consultancies which sell the programs or from psychologists who are indoctrinated by their own methods.
The impacts on how people have come to view their workplace cultures are, however, astounding. Where Freud once spoke about a gap between the conscious and the unconscious, we now see in the application of psychology to safety a gap between the real and the imagined in the workplace cultures of resource companies. The models of safety culture and the language that are being used to promote safer workplace practices are the imagined. But the realities of what people actually say and actually do rarely match.
Employees readily repeat the mantras of the programs. They talk about their safety culture in ways that are eerily reminiscent of the predictions of George Orwell in 1984. Rarely are employees able to articulate what they mean by what they say. Meaning and interpretation become irrelevant, so long as the slogans are known.
The promise of the success of psychology also does not allow for the possibility that workers can consciously act one way when under observation and another way when not. It does not allow for differences in the way people interpret the same words and phrases. It doesn’t appreciate that “culture”—even a safety one—has never been and can never be singular.
In this rush to benefit from the promises of psychology, we have not stopped to think about why psychology has managed to get such a stronghold over safety in the resources industry. Psychologists trust in their programs without question. Safety personnel apply their knowledge of psychology in an uncritical manner. Psychology has become a powerful discourse in contemporary culture.
And in the resource industry, this has now translated into an enormous amount of power and authority—which translates into dollars—for those who can claim to have “knowledge” of psychology.
The crisis of psychology in resources safety
Are you tough enough?
This article was first published on 12 June 2012 in The Australasian Mine Safety Journal.
The mining companies most likely to see an impact on their safety culture are those that will avoid seeking quick-fix solutions. Senior leadership need to understand that you cannot put a group of men in a room for a “two-hour workshop” and expect they will emerge behaving differently.
You can view the full article HERE. You can also download the article by clicking on the link below.
Worth the debate: Getting serious about the connection between gender and safety
This article was first published in CIM Magazine in October 2011.
Discussions on gender in the mining industry are generally limited to the under-representation of women in the workforce and the “glass ceiling” they encounter. There seems to be an assumption that safety has nothing to do with gender: we are not taking gender seriously. However, I believe we do so at our own peril. Many different research methods have been used to investigate the relationship between gender and risk, and the conclusions are always the same: men take more risks than women.
You can read the full article by clicking on the link below.
Gendered behaviours and safety: The story so far
This article originally appeared in September 2011 in MineSafe, a publication issued by the Department of Mines and Petroleum (Western Australia).
A year ago, Dr Dean Laplonge, lead gender studies researcher at Factive cultural research consultancy, wrote an article for MineSafe introducing the idea of a link between gendered behaviours and safety. He argued the importance of taking this link into consideration as a means of driving better safety on mine sites. What has happened since then? How far has this debate moved along? Here, Dean updates his thoughts on gendered behaviours and safety in the mining industry.
You can view the full article online HERE. You can also click on the link below to download it.
Addressing mining safety and health
This article was published in July 2011 in MineSafe.
In 2010, Dr Dean Laplonge ran workshops for Resources Safety’s roadshow series, exploring toughness in the workplace. His report on the workshop and recommendations is available from the publications section of the website. With his assistance, the focus group is developing a series of information sheets on gendered behaviours and their effect on workplace culture.
To read the full article click the link below.
You can also contact us via Factive’s webpage to receive a copy of the information sheets on gendered behaviors and their effect on workplace culture which Factive prepared for the Department of Mines and Petroleum (Western Australia).
A tough issue to deal with
This article was written by Angie Tomlinson. It appeared in the online magazine HighGrade on 9 June 2011. You can download a copy of the article by clicking on the link at the bottom of the text.
ON the surface mine sites appear harmonious and safe, but dig a little deeper and in some cases you expose homophobia, aggression and a culture of “real men” putting the safety of themselves and their colleagues at risk.
Research by Factive lead gender studies researcher Dean Laplonge delves into what it is about men working on mine sites that makes them takes risks. It’s a complex issue, and one not for the faint-hearted.
Research into the area throws up some nasties counter to the goals and image the mining industry has been striving for over the past 10 years. At the crux of the issue is the link between the way men are expected to behave and risk-taking. Whether it’s a biological, genetic or psychological issue the conclusion, according to Laplonge, is always the same: men take more risks than women.
“Safety is all about taking care and protecting and slowing down and thinking. All of these things stand in opposition to the real toughness of real men.”
“When we are born into this world and declared to be a ‘boy’, there are then a range of behaviours we are expected to display to show that we are a ‘real boy’ and later a ‘real man’. If you look at the kind of man that is attracted to the mining industry, being a ‘real man’ is about not being soft or weak or effeminate or gay, or anything else that is too much like a ‘girl’. So, to maintain this sense of real manhood, they must engage in behaviours that are not ‘girly’.”
“They must be tough, do tough things, kick things, bang things, think they can stop a moving vehicle or unblock a piece of machinery by giving it a hard bang. They don’t need to rest or discuss what needs to be done. They just do it. Because if I just do it and I survive, well then I’m a real man. So, taking risks is very much a part of the way these men play out their gender.” That kind of cultural engineering is not the sort conducive to a safe workplace. “Safety is all about taking care and protecting and slowing down and thinking. All of these things stand in opposition to the real toughness of real men,” Laplonge said.
Factive has done work with a number of mining industry companies, including BHP Billiton Iron Ore, Worsley Alumina and Nickel West. It was commissioned to put together a report for the Western Australian Department of Mines and Petroleum which threw up some interesting, but disturbing results. The report did show, however, a real desire for change within the industry.
“People are fed up with men acting tough at all levels in the industry. We have been able to identify with some of our clients that, despite what they might say on the surface, a lot of men are concerned about the increase in the number of women entering the workforce. They believe it will affect production and change the way they have to work,” Laplonge said.
“We have been able to expose extremely harsh cultures of homophobia and aggression in underground mining workplaces. We have heard stories of individuals who know they have injured themselves simply because they were trying to be tough. We have heard from people who wish the workplace environment wasn’t having such an effect on their behaviours at home.”
“The real challenge now is for companies that have shown an interest in this topic to really commit to doing something about it. These are not easy issues. They are extremely sensitive and complex. But if they are genuinely committed to better safety, doing the same old same old is not going to work.”
Factive works with mining companies in a number of ways to address the relationship between gender and safety, including awareness raising by getting senior management to understand the relationship between gender and safety; working with small crews to engage them in a debate; and working with HR to look at wider gender issues. “The more work we do in this field, the more complex it starts to get. We are seeing issues of sexual harassment, workplace bullying, sexual tensions, territorial disputes etc.,” Laplonge said.
Factive’s methodologies are about engaging a workforce as they go about their daily tasks. “We don’t pull them out of that space and say, right, now we are going to do a day’s training on gender. We share their work with them and chat to them about why they do and say certain things, and see if there is anything that’s going on in the group which might be supporting an existing notion of good masculinity, but which could actually be putting them at risk. We identify these things and work through them there and then.”
“It’s also important to have an overview of the organisation, to conduct a gendered behaviours audit at an organisational level, so the organisation can develop better ways of dealing with this issue before safety incidents arise.”
A gendered behaviours audit involves working alongside key personnel, often from HR, to review documents, recruitment practices and organisational communications to see how they might actually be promoting “toughness” in the workplace which is actually working against safety goals. A mentor program involves a researcher working and living with a crew for a short period of time, usually a single shift, to engage the men in discussions about the way they work and interact. The mentor does not go in with a particular model of masculinity they want to promote. This kind of work is very much about seeing what’s happening, giving feedback and then getting the men to give their responses to the feedback. Usually a few issues will emerge which the men recognise as import ant but they have never been given the tools or language to address these issues before. They start to see how quite normal behaviours in the group might actually be putting them at risk.
After working with the Australian industry, Laplonge is currently working with the Canadian mining industry on his research, as well as establishing an international network between a Canadian university and the University of New South Wales where he is an associate senior lecturer. Laplonge will be returning to Australia next month to present at the NSW Minerals Council OH&S conference.