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Members’ Week was a busy week for the GGF but it was perhaps even busier on the Health, Safety and Environment side.

James MacPherson, Health, Safety and Environment Manager had been forced to move the Health and Safety committee to Monday the 28^th of September to account for his paternity leave to ensure the meeting was held in quarter three so the GGF could organise another by year end. Why? Well, the GGF wants to, as soon as possible, increase the value that Members get from the GGF Health, Safety and Environment department and the Health and Safety Committee is a vital part of that.

At the Committee meeting, James proposed a review of the Glass Charter and the GGF Health, Safety and Environment guidance and advice literature, both of which will be decided on at the quarter 4 meeting giving the GGF clear next steps to work on in 2021.  You can have your say in the future of Health and Safety in the Glass and Glazing industry by getting involved in the Health and Safety Committee, if you would like to put forward suggestions, please contact James MacPherson, Health, Safety and Environment Manager on jmacpherson@ggf.org.uk.

On the 29th September (the day after the Committee meeting), GGF Members’ Week opened, a three day digital event that finished on 1st October, with a Health and Safety webinar in the morning and an Environment webinar in the afternoon to bring the curtain down on the whole event.

Both webinars were relaxed but informative forums, making them as close to a natural conversation as possible. The panel of Health, Safety and Environment professionals covering different sectors and specialisms, made for engaging discussions.

Here’s a review by James MacPherson of both webinars.

A New and Very Different Norm

Our Health and Safety panel discussion, lead with statements from each panellist, and after that things moved into a very free-flowing conversation where Members got involved in the chatbox and their comments were slotted them into the conversation with the panellists to create the desired “relaxed down the pub-style” that we wanted to create.

The conversation was varying and diverse but with one consistent key point that the panellist kept coming back to; our people are our solutions. A lot of the time in our business our staff are one of our biggest challenges. But it was clear from the panellist that included the Health and Safety Executive, and three extremely successful safety professionals; that if we do not engage with our workforce, if you do not enable them to feedback to our decision-makers, if they are not involved in the business then you are unlikely to be as successful as you could be, in both safety and business. Statements like;

“It’s vital and a legal requirement to engage and involve your staff in your health and safety obligations”

“We need to build relationships on trust in our workers otherwise we will never have a true image of working life and the risks”

Our World, Our Future

A great relaxed conversational panel that led to GGF Managing Director John Agnew, and GGF Director of External Affairs James Lee, joining the conversation. It’s clear from that alone that environment is high on the agenda for the GGF.

The conversation covered a lot of high-level detail with John Agnew throwing some questions in that challenged the whole panel. From the impacts of Brexit and with the challenges in 2021, what panellist would like to see from the government, the conflicting priorities in a heritage building and environmental buildings, members got a lot of value from the conversation.

Some really interesting points on the potential impact of COVID-19 on the way that we design and build our buildings. Jade Lewis, CEO of the Sustainable Energy Association raised the point that during the pandemic we have seen that a lot of our buildings that are not suitable for the potential modern-day demands of our lives and our welfare and that this could have huge impacts on the way we design our buildings.

With the panel questioned on what the risk of all of the drivers like Zero Carbon and modern methods of construction, plastic reduction progressing but in a silo and not aligning with each other creating gaps and challenges. The panel unanimously agreed that in the coming years so many things will be driving environmental improvement that it is vital that we apply some systems thinking and be aware of the residual impacts from our changes and improvements.

The panel provided closing statements summarising that Members and businesses have the power to lead the way, to have a voice and they should use it to drive improvements, be the change they want to see.

The GGF’s Health, Safety and Environment department are excited to increase the profile and work in this space and hope that Members help us on this journey. If members want to be involved or have ideas regarding environmental work in the GGF they should contact the HSE Manager on jmacpherson@ggf.org.uk

To watch the webinars please click on the links below:

A new and very different norm

Our World, Our Future

James MacPherson, GGF Health, Safety and Environment Manager provides an analysis of the Health and Safety Executive’s published fatality rates for 2019/20.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) published their fatal injury rates for 2019/20 and it shows we still have work to do. The GGF has always collected data from the membership, however, this is regularly had a low engagement and we thank the members who did send data in. Whilst the GGF data is from 2018 it still gives us some idea and conversation points.

The HSE fatality data

Initially, when we look at this chart we may jump to celebrate, and to some extent we should, UK workplace operations has resulted in less fatalities than the last few years, but still, we have lost 111 lives, 111 brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, mothers and fathers. So with that in mind, it is important to think critically when looking at data. To quote Mark Twain the famous American author.

 “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

If we look at the HSE data and critically ask ourselves where this reduction in fatalities has come from its easy to reason that it’s very likely been impacted by the lockdown from COVID-19.

If the reduction continues then we know it is from improvements however the statistics have been broadly flat for a few years so I would be inclined to be cautious before celebrating.

The HSE has stated that the early data did show a reduction consistent with the end of the year data “the number of worker deaths for the first ten months of the year was lower than comparable periods in recent years (99 in 2019/20 compared with 123 in 2018/19 and an annual average of 117 in the previous five years)”.

The HSE  also commented on the caution we must take with the data “There is a degree of chance and randomness to the annual count resulting in an element of natural variation from one year’s count to the next.”

But we must not rest on our laurels.

Yet again working at height is the main cause of fatal injuries and construction also consistently the main contributor to the fatality rates, both of these areas are a huge part of what the Glass and Glazing industry does. Also, we see manufacturing contributing quite significantly and “struck with moving vehicles” the second biggest cause. All of these prominent in the Glass and Glazing industry.

But what about GGF data?

The GGF Data Set

It’s clear from the data that the Glass and Glazing industry has the most accidents in the following top three areas;

1. Cuts from handling glass
2. Manual handling
3. Slips trips and falls

Commercial glass, Home improvement, and domestic installers show as the highest contributors which would show a loose match with the HSE data of sectors.

When we compare the HSE Fatality data and GGF data it is easy to jump to a conclusion that we are better than most because our numbers are relatively low and not in the same areas. For example, working at height is one of the main contributors for workplace fatalities and the GGF data shows working at height is relatively low, with 13 reported incidents. So it is easy for us to assume everything is going well in the Glass and Glazing industry, but this data is only a reflection of just over 10% of the membership.  Remember

 “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

We can easily fall foul of our data, it can easily draw us into a false sense of security and it can easily turn us off when, yet again it’s James showing us charts of doom and gloom. I remember watching a keynote back in February when things were a bit normal, I was in the Cotswold’s at a conference. One of the speakers was talking about our reliance on the data and how, when we consider “drift theory” a good analogy to demonstrate the risks of RAG (red, amber, green) charts is “we do a lot of watermelon reporting”

Think about watermelon and our RAG charts, all green on the outside but blood red on the inside. E.g. the indicators are there telling us we are drifting into failure but we are overpowering those indicators with our good news reporting.  An old colleague of mine said that when he worked in the fire service they used to say, all green-unseen.

So, am I saying we should never celebrate our wins and always be doom and gloom, after all, that’s what Health and Safety is all about right? No, the thing is we don’t pay that much attention to things when they go right do we? Professor Todd Conklin often says, look at the times things go right there will be an error there too. Professor Eric Hollnagel says

“Can you learn about what a good marriage looks like while only looking at divorces?”

We need to start widening our eyes to learn lessons from our workplaces we need to start talking to the experts, who are the experts? They are your workers, the people facing the risks every day. Ask them

• What’s stopping you from working well?
• What’s not working?
• What do you do to stay safe?
• What do you think the risk is here?

And we need to ask those questions without judgment, we need to be curious without judgment. We also need to be aware of our biases. A Bias like our experience, the likelihood is low for a fatality at work because well, I have been working here for years, and nothing has happened.

To a certain point, you are most probably right. But when not if, but when it does fail, how bad will it fail? Do you have the capacity to fail safely? At least 111 people this year didn’t? We need to shift our focus to the significant risks and put our resources into building the capacity to fail-safe. We need to stop focusing on the likelihood because the likelihood of a slip is high but the severity of that risk is likely low (depending on location etc. etc.).

We need to focus on the fatal incidents and build our capacity. As I write this, my phone pings, a notification on LinkedIn, its late on Friday so I have a look, a lady called Laura commented on a post talking about our experience bias and how a trainer said to her “How many 1 in 100 chance things have happened these few years?” It’s so true. COVID-19, how many said, it’s not likely to come to the UK, I did, as I am sure most of us did. What would have happened if we played devil’s advocate with ourselves and said, if, just if it did come to the UK, what would happen do we think? Could we survive? Are we resilient enough? Do we have the capacity to fail, but fail safely?

I will finish off with something I have mentioned a few times over the last couple of years in training etc. It’s something I think about when I talk about capacity, and business continuity planning, and contingencies.

Spoiler alert if you haven’t watched World War Z I am about to talk about something that happens in the film. So, World War Z, a zombie film with Brad Pitt, what’s that got to do with Health and Safety? In the film, the zombie virus has started to spread around the world. We see conversations about how countries disregarded the indicators, because, well come on, zombies? Really? Similarly to how we might have discussed COVID. “Come on we have seen this before with SARs it never really impacts us in the UK.”

So the virus gets the playground it needs, as it prays on the naysayers and the optimists equally, and then ultimately the world. This is the dilemma of Health and Safety, well how far do we go? Control every risk there is? Jump to every new development, every new virus? Well, this is why I talk about the film, in the film, there is one country that is surviving the virus, one country that is winning against the virus.

So Brad Pitt flies over and finds out the country has a policy, “the 10^th man” If the room of ten people all have the same information and all come to the same conclusion it is the duty of the 10^th man to disagree. The 10^th man has to start thinking as if the other 9 were wrong and as a result, they are winning in the battle against the virus. What if we had a 10^th person in our board rooms, what if we had a comfortable conflict in our boardrooms? Next time you look at your data and all agree that everything is all good, or do a risk assessment for significant risk, maybe ask the 10^th person to assume everyone else is wrong and see what we learn?