Benoît Journé

Beyond Safety Training

This book investigates why, despite more and more resources devoted to safety training, expectations are not entirely met, particularly in the industrial sectors that have already achieved a high safety level. It not only reflects the most precious viewpoints of experts from different disciplines, different countries, with experiences in various industrial fields at the cutting edge of theories and practices in terms of safety, professionalization and their relationships. It also consolidates the positioning of the Foundation for an Industrial Safety Culture, highlighting what is currently considered at stake in terms of safety training, taking into account the system of constraints the different stakeholders are submitted to. It reports some success stories as well as elements which could explain the observed plateau in terms of outcome. It identifies some levers for evolution for at-risk industry and outlines a possible research agenda to go further with experimental solutions.

A Pluralist Approach to Safety Culture

Managing safety culture appears to be a very difficult task, including in the context of high-risk industries. A clear opposition exits between academics about this issue. On the one hand some deny the possibility for an organization to “manage” any kind of culture. Doing so would just be a manipulation of groups’ and individuals’ behaviors that has nothing to do with culture but refers to coercive power and domination. On the other hand, some build up theoretical frameworks and good practices to support the development and the maintenance of a strong and homogenous organizational culture such as safety culture. Our contribution to this debate is to open a way between these two opposite approaches. The aim is to introduce a pluralist approach of safety culture that makes its management possible, meaningful and valuable for both managers and practitioners. It is based on the clear distinction between two sets of safety cultures: Safety-Culture-as-Tools (SCT) and Professional-Safety-Cultures (PSCs).

Organizing Risk Communication for Effective Preparedness: Using Plans as a Catalyst for Risk Communication

Crisis response preparedness is a problematic issue for local governments. It is a responsibility with high stakes, but at the same time it is very distant from the daily management of the community. In France, local governments engage to a limited extent with preparedness by designing crisis response plans, which very often lack operationality. This paper examines the contribution of risk communication to effective crisis response preparedness. Indeed, technical and organizational issues are at the core of preparedness concerns, but we argue that political and cognitive dimensions are equally important, although often overlooked. The use of risk communication thus plays a critical role in the construction of reliable organizational response capabilities in order to face the unexpected, across all these dimensions. To understand this process, we examined the activity of a French risk manager whose objective is to support a group of municipalities in the organization of their respective organizational crisis responses. We found that to help the municipalities go beyond the limits of strictly organizational responses and engage in resilience, this manager uses the formal and technical character of the plan to generate rich cross-sectional communication that produces the conditions for resilience.

How to Deal with the Contradictions of Safety Professional Development

Companies around the word currently ask their employees to behave and work as “professionals”. To be a “pro” has become a managerial leitmotiv that promotes an ideal image of employees based on the highest levels of performance, rationality, responsibility and reliability, especially in the domain of risk industries and safety management. This is typically the vision that managers promote when they decide that “failure is not an option”. Hence, the development of employee professionalism appears to be a very legitimate and neutral objective that should be at the core of the functions of the Human Resource Management. In every big company, many resources of all kinds have been invested to design and implement increasingly sophisticated training programs for professional development and to engage managers and HR’s departments. Unfortunately, these efforts have not produced the expected pay-offs in terms of safety performances and this disappointing performance raises several questions and problems. This chapter addresses them and suggests that some of the basic assumptions and images companies currently use to manage professionalism and professionalization are misleading because they over-simplify their nature. In other words, the notions of performance, rationality, responsibility and reliability that are associated with professionalism are in fact totally oriented towards compliance with formal procedures and rules. In some ways, the “professional” is seen as the perfect employee that never makes errors, never fails and never complains. In fact, this vision is purely behavioral (i.e. exclusively based on personal behaviors) and neglects the social and the political roots of professional skills and competencies. This chapter (1) identifies some of the main tensions and contradictions that are tightly linked to the notion of professionalism and (2) suggests how to actively manage these contradictions and explores new ways to develop professionalism in risk industries.