Harriman Oyofo: Production in the right Environment
Managing safely is synonymous to safe and efficient production. Yet not many businesses make that connection until it’s too late. All too often they suffer a death blow before sitting down to examine what went wrong.
Experience shows that Managers who pay little attention to safety only end up paying a big time price attending to all kinds of post-incident business loss activities. Issues like absenteeism, lost workdays, spiraling medical bills, sagging public image, poor workforce morale, increase insurance premiums, dwindling production and a shrinking bottom line.
It follows that poor safety performance directly translates to poor returns on investment and you don’t have to look too far to see it or why. It’s clearly signposted all over the workplace place; in the employees’ body language, asset use and misuse, mounting unresolved environmental issues, etc. Like they say, you can run but you can’t hide because safety issues are like a pack of dominoes, one falls and they all fall. Therefore put your best foot forward first time and always, manage safety in the business as if your life depends on it for it may well be. If you do not have a full operational safety plot of all the elements at the onset then you may just find that you’re hitching up the wrong wagon before long. Your people, asset and the environment must be congruent for anything worthwhile to result from the venture. Otherwise you may have to start all over again to your chagrin, and at some irreversible costs.
There are people who tend to view managing safety in the business as an add-on luxury because it costs money. Money, they feel is better spent elsewhere, namely; production. But they forget it is all integrated and that money begets money.
Everything is interrelated in the workplace; tools, personnel and the work environment itself. The tripod cannot stand without one of its three legs and so it is with the three elements of workplace safety: tools, personnel and the work space. And it doesn’t matter how clever you may be because there is no way around it. Safe Tools + Safe Personnel + Safe Environment = Safe Production. QED.
Some may think that safe production is a matter of ‘I know my job’, but that’s not enough. For one thing, if you didn’t know your job you’ll be out of employment anyway so that’s not the issue because the very fact that you know your job does not mean that the next fellow down-the-line knows his or hers. That’s the sum total of it because if all the elements are not in consonance the end result will be less than optimal since we’ll end up with influences at variance or in opposition instead of working together to achieve smooth, safe production.
One of the best ways to manifest competence is in safe work delivery because competent people know that without safe processes, tools and techniques, there can hardly be any production worth talking about. Competency means people are able to read the game, break it down in its various component parts to identify and isolate those steps that might throw spanners in the works if inadequately managed or resolved prior.
It’s simply illogical to expect to reap bountiful profits from a business where the active instruments of production are in themselves haphazardly strewn together. Safety in business must be a conscious and deliberate effort for it to pay.
Harriman Oyofo is CEO, Mann Associates Ltd., Nigeria.
