The basics for a transient workforce:
More and more often we use on-tap workforces; to be the arms and legs for maintenance shutdowns activities, to handle short-term surges in headcount need, for longer-term non-core activities and for elements of civil and building construction projects as well as on marine vessels in support of off shore facilities.
One of the roles of the leaders of a transient workforce is about making sure we set up the workplace so that it is possible to not only to plan for and achieve successful work, but also to fail safely. Because fail we will. Failures will occur – especially with elements of a transient workforce who do not have the same level of experience and capability as many of the longer-term employees and contracting partners.
In a blog last year I talked about “Authentic Leadership in Safety” and in another I have revamped my milking stool blog (“The Milking Stool Revisited”). I believe that within these two concepts are the elements we need to consider with respect to transient workforces.
It is very hard – if not impossible – to ensure that our short-term people have the capabilities, capacities and competencies that make things go right when they are only on site for a handful of days, but the question is whether we can focus them on the essential few skills they need and then make sure our other supportive systems protect and guide them? I think we can.
Apart from the controls for fatal risks that simply must be in place each and every time a task is done, one of the capabilities we want to try to improve is that around people’s adaptive capacity. This will directly impact their resilience when faced with uncertainty and upsets in their plans as they strive to achieve safe work. The big question is how we achieve this given our short-term relationship with these workers. This is especially difficult when we realize that people are people. They vary. They can vary wildly. They vary in their judgment; They vary in their experience and they vary in their frames of reference.
I do believe that the bit we can focus on and influence is how we front-end-load our transient workforce for success. Namely through the induction processes. Inductions are notoriously rubbish across the majority of industries. It is high time they moved from ticking a box to actual learning. This is where an opportunity lies, and also the difficulties.
To my mind, inductions for transient, short-term workers needs to be quite different from your long-termers, who need to be up to speed with your culture, HR processes along with safety and lots of other stuff. The transient workers simply need some basics so they can produce safe work whilst on your site.
If we think about the milking stool, it has three legs and a seat. The legs are about Risk Intelligence, Authentic Field Leadership and Incident Investigations, held together by the Conversations we have (the seat). Authentic Field Leadership and Incident Investigations can be easily controlled and led by you and your team (See my blog “The Milking Stool Revisited”). It is more about what you can do during an induction and start of the job in Risk Intelligence that I believe will make the difference.
My feeling is that we need to shift the bulk of the induction process away from someone reading rubbish from PowerPoint slides, less telling people to be careful and to follow all the procedures and work rules et cetera and more helping the participants learn how to get better at looking at things, thinking about situations, applying a level of judgment and assessing the likelihood of things going right and the likelihood of things going wrong. That is where we will make the difference. It needs to be flexible enough to handle the wide variety of people present in the induction without being unwieldy.
People who understand a bit about Risk Intelligence and know how to apply a simple level of Resilience in their job planning and execution will be well on the way to creating safe work. They will be thinking about what could go wrong as well as how to make it go right. They will be looking out for the precursors to something going wrong and will already have a plan in place for when that happens. Of course, they will be guided and directed through their supervisor about which systems and processes they need to use and follow, but they will have some ability for how to handle the uncertainty when it does not all work as intended. This is exactly what we want in a transient worker. They will fail. They will make mistakes, and they need to be able to adapt. This is the skill they need in their inductions.
So what could that look like? It must be as practical as possible. Ideally no PowerPoint slides and minimal lecturing. It could be all about conversations and activities that revolve around some of the topics below:
- how we perceive things,
- how we think about what could go right and what could go wrong,
- practice at assessing the risks of things in the real world that go right and that go wrong:
o marriage, cancer, getting hit by a car, terrorist attack, or simply falling over,
- how we think about what to look for that might tell us something is about to go wrong,
- how we look at procedures, work instructions and tasks critically. Looking for elements of the job that could lead us to problems as well as success,
- being able to adapt (building adaptive capacity) when things go wrong,
- how to make good plans for when it does go wrong (and how to ask for help when it does),
- those few absolute essentials around Fatal Risk controls, all with
- small group work to practice all of the above
So, in summary, the goal is to aim to set up all your people, especially those who only work for you for a short period of time with the positive capabilities, capacities and competencies that make things go right. Focusing on the essentials that will allow them to produce safe work without bogging them down in meaningless and repetitive waffle and things they really do not need to know.