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heq departments on some mining sites render corporate communication, leadership and culture functions, driven by an impetus to move beyond the 'compliance and behaviour' era.

In the last two decades, Sheq had migrated from 'loss control' to take in safety systems, hygiene, health, compliance, environment, quality, behaviour, wellness, leadership, and culture, accepting some roles once reserved to human resources specialists. Some Sheq departments have gained and lost accounting methods in a brush with enterprise risk and corporate governance. The multi-disciplinary practice is on course for greater things than quantifying effluent and carbon footprints.

Sheq now enables workers and organisations to actualise their inherent value systems, as the Swiss psychologist CG Jung described in alchemical terms in his mystic treatises on archetypes, maturity and individuation. Sailing into a haze of social, cultural and spiritual issues, Sheq is grappling with quantifying job satisfaction, peer pressure, culture artifacts, off the job culture, and corporate social investment.

SA globalised

There is no clarity as yet on which sciences, approaches or gurus would replace behaviour-based safety (BBS), exhausted in the last 15 years by employees, employers, academics and consultants alike. For once in the 60 odd year history of H&S, as most countries still label Sheq, South Africa is not lagging years behind the industrialised world. Mines and consultants have made up the gap by training, benchmarking,

customisation, and system maturity. There is no tried and tested application for SA to follow this time around, as there was when local employers adopted BBS a decade ago.

PAGE 8 APRIL 2010 MINER’S CHOICE

INDUSTRIAL CULTURE consultant Marie Beytell with a parade version of a corporate Sheq mascot. Some mines recognise social gold in culture artefacts.

Red tape hurdle

Among the Sheq certainties are huge systems and data workloads due to legislation, regulation, standardisation, codification, reporting and recording obligations. In SA there is a gradual slide towards enforcement penalties. Inspectorate training is pulling some novice operators up by the bootstraps, while entrenching many blue chip Sheq people in filing rooms.

Culture patronage rejected

Safety academic and consultant Dr Philip Frankel wrote last month in Miner's Choice that BBS had run out of steam. He finds cause for worker rejection in one of the BBS premises, that people should change their behaviour and adopt what senior management considers 'demonstrated safe behaviour', while SA employees want to shake off cultural patronage.

Culture paradoxes

Researcher James Reason titled one

of his articles 'Safety Paradoxes and Safety Culture' (International Journal for Injury Control and Safety Promotion, March 2000). Most managers tend to demonstrate 'control' and see culture as optional, on par with faith, religion, or fashion.

Biologists warn that people are by nature risk takers, but our bodies and minds developed in hunting, gathering, herding and agriculture, and we are not yet neurologically or culturally adapted to mechanised industry. Occupational culture therefore requires specialised research, education and management.

Delusion becomes culture

Organisations express their culture in a mindset and decision processes, said safety researcher and consultant Corrie Pitzer at the American Society of Safety Engineers, ASSE 2010 conference. “It is difficult to identify a corporate culture, especially in the aftermath of fatalities and loss”, Pitzer said. He claims to have identified the prevalent corporate culture as one of delusion, involving facades, posturing, pretence, window dressing, and selective reporting. Pitzer lists evidence for what he labels seven deadly corporate delusions; risk control, compliance, consistency, human error, predictability, trend to zero, and invulnerability.

'Risk control' delusion is bred by sets of rules to defend workers and enable management, yet many managers ascribe improved results to non-regulated elements; awareness, education, team spirit, maturity, values. Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32