Quantifying my contribution. Measuring an intangible

 

During my 4 year tenure as safety superintendent for a load and haul open pit gold mining operation in the country of Mali, West Africa, I am proud of having twice reached the milestone of one million lost time injury free hours. En-route to that achievement the Lost Time Injury(LTIs in the mining industry included fatal events) Frequency rate went from a 4 to a zero. By creating a safety culture in which incidents were reported without fear of reprimand I was able to get a very accurate risk profile of operations. This came at the cost of having the highest incident frequency rate in the organization, minor incidents maintained their frequency during my tenure, I took every minor incident as an opportunity to learn and to encourage open and two way information flow between management and the workforce. By fostering trust, I'm of the belief that this approach reduced the frequency of major incidents. My philosophy was to make no distinction between the incident register and the risk register, they are both expressions of an operations experiential risk, the real world data that should have an associated number of countermeasures or controls. Unless it is it fallacious to do so, I wonder if that LTIFR rate of 4 per annum would have been been mainained if not for my efforts. So apart from the t-shirts I designed and had made to celebrate our million LTI free man hour milestones, it suits my ego to extrapolate that at the very minimum if I'm being charitable with myself(and believe me, I always am), it could be argued that in Mali my contribution prevented at least one fatality. If you're a manager reading this, the takeaway is don't ever blow up when you hear about a "silly" or minor incident, every incident gives rise to two opportunities, one to to learn, and one to promote a reporting culture, because if this is not authentically practiced by management, anything else promotes a punitive reporting culture. The litmus test for me is if there are any near miss events reported at the coal face. If its only the client, your safety or management team that report near misses then that may be a sign workers are scared to communicate at an accident almost happened.