This workplace safety article was co-written by Ryan Roark, the former director of operations, AkzoNobel Surface Chemistry, and was previously published in the July 2014 issue of Safety+Health magazine.
In a perfect world, safety would be easy. Leaders would look at safety incident reporting and identify and remove the exposures and hazards that cause them. They would improve behavioral reliability and safety by making sure everyone followed the rules. But real life is not so simple. The live workplace is always changing—making it critical that employees be able to detect and respond to real-time changes in risk.
Exposure response is a theme that shows up time and again in the story of process safety management catastrophes and other serious events. Still, this capability is seldom developed as a discipline in its own right. It’s not hard to understand why: building fluency in exposure change is an iterative process. It takes field experience and time. Sustaining it also depends on a safety culture that supports exposure response. That’s why some organizations are turning to their leaders—especially those at the front line—to start building that competency using conversations.
Talking about exposures in any context is a good thing. But a conversation designed to build fluency takes a little more structure. One simple framework focuses discussions around what are called the “Four Rs” of exposure response:
Conversations will look different depending on your objectives and culture. At AkzoNobel Surface Chemistry, these conversations are part of a formal initiative in which supervisors are coached how to have discussions around defined scenarios. The goal was not to have a safety initiative, but a “line-leadership initiative related to safety.” Whatever your approach, the job of workplace safety leadership—and process safety leadership—is to help employees develop fluency in the language of exposures. Doing so, you enable them to be more proactive and effective at protecting themselves, others, and the organization itself.
To learn more about exposure recognition and response, download the free white paper The DEKRA OSR Assessment: A Comprehensive Process to Identify and Control Exposure to Injury.