To copy best safety procedures from other companies is common practice and it's okay. But we suffer to implement it if:
- We don’t check own resources before implementing best procedure of other Company. Behind simple word “register hazard reports” on the procedure, the difficulty comes out. For instance: on your previous Company that has 500 employees who report 1000 hazard a year, registering hazard reports were not problem, but if you manage HSE Department of the Company that has over 10.000 employees that report over 20.000 hazards annually, you need more man-power, financial and equipment resources to register it.
- We ignore Culture difference between Companies. If current Company or peer colleagues blame employee who report the hazards, foreign cutting edge procedure of Hazard Management will fail in our Company. Every Company has unique Culture which is the character and personality of organization. It's what makes organization unique and is the sum of its values, traditions, beliefs, interactions, behaviors, and attitudes. Assess the Culture difference first and fix it if it’s necessary before introducing decent procedure.
- We don’t know why this best procedure is created and how it’s made and developed for last 20 years in other Company. Then we think our organization is small, so we cut unnecessary words or positions from outstanding safety procedure and unconsciously, we destroy hierarchy of rule and main concept to run overall system. For instance: Oh, it has 50 pages, we are not big as them, so we need only 20 pages of this procedure…
- We don’t check our maturity level. Coca Cola developed this procedure over 100 years, okay let’s use it for our new factory and shortcut their development process in safety. What happens if children play with matches?
In the end, best safety procedure is woodwork tool and it’s very useful when at skilled carpenter’s hand. You can buy good tool from Walmart, but ask yourself can I use it? - That means check your Safety Manager’s skill to manage system of this procedure. I know some people who use IPhone 6S for only speaking and show it publicly “Oh, I got the latest version”.
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Ganjiguur Bukhbat
TheSafetyPoster.com