Prerequisites to Good Project Safety Management

 

Project Safety is not easy to achieve. Lot of business think tanks presume that they can achieve project safety by deputing good and experienced safety managers or leads on the project. Some of them believe the allocation of a handsome budget for safety is enough.

[1] Yet there are many who consider safety as an overhead cost, and it may be avoided by depending upon line managers for safety. Few of them think safety may be outsourced[2] to avoid hassle of management. But all these mindsets can never be of any good for any project in the world. There are certain established prerequisites to good project safety management. Until and unless organizations don’t adapt them, they will continue to face safety issues, concerns, and crises.

Management Commitment is the first and foremost prerequisite to achieve safety[3]. Its not about how management thinks, its about the way they respect their safety teams and safety managers. On a safety observation if line management start criticizing safety as e mailers, show anchors, whistle blowers, intruders, outsiders, or impeders it is true indicator of an organization with worst management commitment in safety. Policing is the worst form of safety management though at some stage it may be recommended as an interim arrangement, but it should always be avoided. If an organization has management commitment towards safety, they will surely take safety professionally and seriously right from the conception of the project. Management commitment also entails that during the entire life cycle of the project, the line management anchors and leads all safety meetings with safety assisting them as advisors, coaches, and facilitators. While exhibiting this trait good project managers encourage not only their workers and teams but also their safety supervisors for every single point of achievement through regular acknowledgments and rewards.  Management Commitment in safety should not be limited to arrangement of extinguishers, filling in of risk assessments, first five minutes of project meetings, safety shoes or a helmet but it should be explicitly visible in every segment of a project from pre project feasibility reports to environment impact assessments, safety engineering in basic design, procurement preferences, scheduling and timelines as well.

Allocation of Right Resources[4] at Right Time. It has almost become a taboo that projects are often conceived in isolation from Safety experts by those who think Financing is the only important aspect while planning new projects. When budgets are allocated for projects, a tentative amount is fixed without any consultation or calculations by safety professionals or experts. Pre-project Environment Impact Assessment Reports are assigned to outsider consultants who work independently largely through tentative, indicative, and comparative tools of assessments. Even during ESIAs safety teams and departments are rarely involved. The outside consultants often generate reports without exactly understanding organizational dynamics. The Synchronization lacks. The third stage is the planning and design stage when it is very important that the basic layout, designs, and schedules are created with safety aspects on the top. Even at this stage most of the organization only use mechanical, electrical, civil, instrumentation or chemical engineers to approve all drawings, P&IDs, plans, schematics, flowcharts, designs, logic diagrams etc. Surely, they believe that these engineers would take care of safety engineering and that’s not a bad approach. But still, we often forget what country we belong to and what is the basic safety sense of our society. Not all engineers are safety conscious. The fourth stage in a project is execution and then finally commissioning. Safety managers and teams are usually engaged at the time of mobilization in the fourth stage. They are asked to follow plans and contracts on which they may have tens of reservations. Imagine you being a safety manager and you have been asked to implement safety culture on a project whose contract contains penalties only against fatalities, fires or loss time injury cases and there is no allowance for penalization against basic safety violations. You would surely be in a fix. If organizations engage safety resources right from the planning and contracting stage, things can be different.

Clarity in Contracts. It is so strange that even if the organizations have an excellent pool of engineers and management experts, they still try to engage outside resources for managing new projects. For a new venture, process, machine, or equipment installation it may be a good idea however some organizations engage contractors or sub-contractors to avoid safety responsibility[5] and reduce legal hitches. They enter into contractual agreements with 3rd party contractors. The contracts are mostly drafted through legal experts and lawyers[6] who may not have any idea of what the real-world safety is. They craft generic safety clauses into contracts. The contractors make lot of hew and cry over every single clause and proclaim that the cost is going to be increased. The penalties are kept limited to ultimate safety lapses such as fatalities, loss time injury cases or major fire incidents. Even if there are heavy penalties against these three safety concurrences it may not help much in building safety culture on projects. The real safety can only be achieved by authorizing financial penalties against fundamental safety violations. The project management team of the client/owner should have empowerment to levy fiscal penalty to contractor on very basic safety violations i.e., use of crane without 3rd party licenses, non-availability of certified electrical or scaffolding safety inspector, unsafe power tool, work without legitimate permit or acceptable safety arrangementunreported safety eventunsafe driving etc. Delegation of right resources for safety oversight should also be adequately addressed in contracts but it is often touched cursorily. The legal language of contracts is rarely comprehended by those working on the project and organizations never align someone as exclusive overseer of contract compliance. It is given as an additional responsibility to someone in Planning or Project Management Team. For a right start and before every project it is important that detailed interpretation, awareness, and interactive training session on understanding the contract is kept. It should include every supervisor, manager or lead from contractor, sub-contractor, contracted consultants, and client/owner. A good contract is the only way you can get to good execution. Contracts should never be drafted by a few engineers or a few lawyers. They should be duly and surely reviewed by administration experts, security advisors, safety consultants and procurement professionals. The contracts must be translated into local languages for the ease of common man. The contracts should be known down the ladder to every supervisor so he can contribute more proficiently on the part assigned to him. Even if the project is planned by an organist ion through its own team or works department, they must also issue detailed execution plan involving every functional stake holder and get it approved accordingly before start of the project. Unfortunately, most contracts are drafted with a focus on achieving fiscal gains only. Safety is also about savings, but lot of financial teams consider it as an overhead. While working out a project execution plan or a contract, one should always pronounce with clarity interim rewards on achievements of various safety milestones to keep safety teams and project teams in high spirit throughout the life cycle of the project. Job descriptions where required must be mentioned more explicitly with a focus on safety for each cadre. The best time to fix safety responsibility is during contracting and not during execution.

Pragmatic Timelines. Rome was not built in a day[7], nor you can try doing it. The investors and owners of the organizations expect money being allocated for projects to be recovered as early as possible. They want to achieve break even within few months or years and almost stand over the head of their project planners and project management teams to ensure the same. Tight timelines are declared as a routine matter. Scheduling and target dates are fixed without accommodating time for standard safety arrangements or even recommended quality inspections. We often forget that poorly installed equipment, pump, machine, or motor would always have more reliability issues ultimately carrying risk of operational failure or a safety incident. Curing requires time. Cable termination is a sophisticated activity. An activity that can be completed in half an hour may require many days for safety arrangements and checks. Organizational leaders at time quote example of other projects that might have been completed in lesser durations. While making such comparisons they expect their own teams to further reduce project timelines. This can be more damaging then challenging. Every organization, place, team, or era is different from the other. Indeed, even if a new project is an exact replica of some other project still you cannot fix the same timelines and schedules. Projects are dynamic in nature. To catch up on tight plans, organizations often ask their project execution teams to work 24/7 and 365. On the other hand, contractors avoid hiring more people and the result is over taxing workers and even managerial staff leading to socio-psychological and physiological disorders. We often ignore that a tired worker is a safety risk. Rest and leaves are equally important for the project teams as they are for any other employee of an organization. Day outs, team building exercises, promotions, training sessions and town hall meetings cannot be dumped during projects. During last couple of decades, the corporate and industrial world has gone more competitive. Organizations have almost started pushing their project managers to reduce construction and commissioning timelines.       This has become biggest impediment to good safety culture on projects. The best way to reduce project timelines is to ensure that contractors you engage have perfect solutions to every safety need during the project and they have adequate and appropriate safety resources readily available right in the field or immediately in the back yard. Pragmatic project timelines mean adequate opportunities for safety and quality checks at every stage of the project and for every activity of the project.

Labor laws and labor management. Most of the large-scale projects that are labor intensive are managed through contractors, sub-contractors, or the manpower suppliers. International labor organization reports indicate that most of the underdeveloped world and even some of the developing countries care less about labor laws specially on large scale projects. Low labor rate, with poor administration of the labor and then the maltreatment leads to uneasy, uncomfortable, and stressed-out workers. It leads to greater safety risks. A happy worker works with more energy, wisdom, and care. Lack of qualitative scrutiny, health checks and socio-psychological assessments create opportunity for reference workers, unskilled workers, aged workers, unhealthy workers, risk takers, incompetent staff entering p [reject sites. The result is devastating not only for over all project but even for the safety during work. It is believed that if you wish to see the morale of the project teams visit their labor camps and labor accommodation. Everyone on a project is important and should be respected for his contributions. If you offer engineers and foreign experts much privileged treatment and you maltreat your ground teams and workers, you are leading to fatal project management. There may be a class or status difference but basic and fundamental needs of workers and staff working on a project should never be ignored. It only results in de-motivation and half-cocked effort.

Responsibility of compliance. Contractors ignore, become silent or start complaining about arrangement challenges right from the start of the project when they are asked to comply with safety guidelines or requirements. They stop work for hours and sometimes days to give message to clients or owners engineers that the pushing by safety would cause delays. The project managers start asking their safety overseers to find alternates to standard safety practices and be complacent as well. This complacency provides contractors an opportunity to reduce safety investments and efforts. When contracts are too scanty on safety contractors get enough room to out play on safety. Their compliances go low. And the owners or the clients start scolding their own safety teams and managers presuming that they are not doing enough. The responsibility of ensuring safety keeps on switching between owners/clients, owners’ engineers/consultants, contractors and or their sub-contractors. It seems like a throw ball game where everyone is throwing ball into the court of others. This adds to greater safety risks. The blame game never ends. The sufferers in this are mostly the safety teams and not those who kept the contracts sketchy or those who are responsible for the safety i.e., the line management. Many organizations even today consider safety officers as responsible for all weaknesses, gaps, or losses with regards to safety. It is so unfortunate that the whole world has established that safety is basically the line management responsibility but still lot of project managers call in safety officers for safety lapses. The line managers who believe that they can only achieve safety if the safety officer is supervising the activity on a project. They often don’t realize that on any medium or large-scale project there are hundreds of project activities going on simultaneously and it is humanly impossible for one two or even few safety officers to be present on each activity. Hence it must be understood with clarity by all that safety is basically line management responsibility.

Work Method Statements, Risk Assessments & Work Permits. Its hard to believe that large number of contractors avoid incorporating work permit system on projects. They strongly pronounce that there are thousands of activities and job orders on a large-scale project so they cannot invest time in preparing for the permit or issuing the job order. They often employ pick and chose technique to use permits for only the critical activities. Even those are mostly paper works. A good permit cannot be issued without a good work method statement followed by a chronological risk assessment or pre work hazard analysis or job safety analysis. Work method statements are kept very brief which makes risk assessments an eye wash. Ultimately permits are issued without adequate safety arrangements even for critical activities. Work permit is a backbone of safety culture whether it is a project or a running plan. As a matter of fact, no work even on a project should go without written job order, work method statement, risk assessment and a work permit. However, the system should be developed with such flexibility that minor an activity easier the process of issuing the permit must exist. Permit may be in any verifiable form, shape, or size but no activity on a project should go unobserved, unsupervised, or unapproved to avoid safety lapses and accidents.

·        Safety Access & Control. If an organization offers security and safety control of a project to a contractor or sub-contractor on a project it has lost half the battle of implementing good and safe project controls. Contractors surely don’t want interference in their work, but it doesn’t mean that you allow them control of gates on a project site. A good client would never do that. It helps in avoiding thefts and it also helps in containing more then half of the safety issues outside a project site. At the time of security and safety induction good project management teams identify unsafe workers, vehicles, machines, gadgets, and resources and keep them away from project site. As and when these controls are given to contractors may it be an EPC contract it causes more loss to an organization then good. Specially on a large-scale project where in and out movement of workers and vehicles is at much faster pace and on large scale the weak safety and security controls cause more damage to overall safety and security culture on a project.                                                 

In nutshell there can be tens of more prerequisites to good project safety management, but the crux remains around above aspects.

Article Written by: Capt. Zahid Faqir

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