Boundaries and Workplace Safety
"Every [human] problem involves bad boundaries. It might not be the proximal cause, but it's always in there somewhere."
I was talking with J tonight about an article he's writing about professional ethics in his field. His premise, essentially, is that it is not sufficient to give practitioners a list of proscriptive and prescriptive rules to follow -- but rather, that people need to have the tools to discern what is right in fluid and complicated situations. Not having much experience in the sort of work where complicated ethical issues were commonplace, I translated the issue to something that I am familiar with -- the question of workplace safety. It was at this point that a concept occurred to me -- that "many poor workplace safety environments are an example of bad boundaries."
One of the common situations that I've heard of and experienced directly is the case where an activity is taking place that requires certain safety precautions to be taken -- the use of the "two-man rule", for instance, or requiring a certain procedure or documentation to be followed. A company that is following the advice of its lawyers will train its employees to use these safety precautions on pain of disciplinary action. They might well even follow through on actual enforcement of the rule -- at least sporadically. However, the next step of both employer and employee is usually to sabotage the precaution -- often entirely inadvertently.
Here's how the pitfall develops: Outside the heat of battle, we agree that certain work should never be done alone, that work in certain areas of the site requires the use of a radio, and that appropriate personal protective equipment should always be worn. However, in practice we encounter scenarios where, effectively, we desperately want people to disregard said guidelines. Say a project comes along where there aren't enough hours allocated to send two people on the field survey. Say that twenty engineers are working on seven high-priority tests and there are only six radios. Say that the proper safety equipment costs half the budget and won't be delivered until after the deadline. What do you, as the manager, do?
What happens often enough -- even with the best of intentions -- is that you apply indirect pressure to your employees to work unsafely. You tell them that the necessary adjustments to the budget and/or schedule are impossible. You tell them to "think outside the box" or make bright motivational speeches about "the impossible not actually taking any longer". Or your employees feel indirect pressure to work unsafely. Who wants to hold up their entire team, after all, for want of a horseshoe nail that probably won't prove relevant anyway?
By and large, they don't. And here's where the bad boundaries come in. It's all too easy for an employee, in the face of intentional or unintentional pressure, to allow penetration of their boundaries in the matter of safety (and in other matters, but this is the topic du jour). There are both legitimate and illegitimate concerns that failing to permit intrusion will result in substantial negative consequences for yourself and/or others who depend on you.
At this point, I'd love to have an easy moral to the story -- but truthfully, there isn't one. It's easy to violate others' boundaries. It's easy to allow your own to be violated. It's hard... to create a true safety culture in a company that is more than just posters, where people feel that doing things the right way is a genuine priority in their work.
I was talking with J tonight about an article he's writing about professional ethics in his field. His premise, essentially, is that it is not sufficient to give practitioners a list of proscriptive and prescriptive rules to follow -- but rather, that people need to have the tools to discern what is right in fluid and complicated situations. Not having much experience in the sort of work where complicated ethical issues were commonplace, I translated the issue to something that I am familiar with -- the question of workplace safety. It was at this point that a concept occurred to me -- that "many poor workplace safety environments are an example of bad boundaries."
One of the common situations that I've heard of and experienced directly is the case where an activity is taking place that requires certain safety precautions to be taken -- the use of the "two-man rule", for instance, or requiring a certain procedure or documentation to be followed. A company that is following the advice of its lawyers will train its employees to use these safety precautions on pain of disciplinary action. They might well even follow through on actual enforcement of the rule -- at least sporadically. However, the next step of both employer and employee is usually to sabotage the precaution -- often entirely inadvertently.
Here's how the pitfall develops: Outside the heat of battle, we agree that certain work should never be done alone, that work in certain areas of the site requires the use of a radio, and that appropriate personal protective equipment should always be worn. However, in practice we encounter scenarios where, effectively, we desperately want people to disregard said guidelines. Say a project comes along where there aren't enough hours allocated to send two people on the field survey. Say that twenty engineers are working on seven high-priority tests and there are only six radios. Say that the proper safety equipment costs half the budget and won't be delivered until after the deadline. What do you, as the manager, do?
What happens often enough -- even with the best of intentions -- is that you apply indirect pressure to your employees to work unsafely. You tell them that the necessary adjustments to the budget and/or schedule are impossible. You tell them to "think outside the box" or make bright motivational speeches about "the impossible not actually taking any longer". Or your employees feel indirect pressure to work unsafely. Who wants to hold up their entire team, after all, for want of a horseshoe nail that probably won't prove relevant anyway?
By and large, they don't. And here's where the bad boundaries come in. It's all too easy for an employee, in the face of intentional or unintentional pressure, to allow penetration of their boundaries in the matter of safety (and in other matters, but this is the topic du jour). There are both legitimate and illegitimate concerns that failing to permit intrusion will result in substantial negative consequences for yourself and/or others who depend on you.
At this point, I'd love to have an easy moral to the story -- but truthfully, there isn't one. It's easy to violate others' boundaries. It's easy to allow your own to be violated. It's hard... to create a true safety culture in a company that is more than just posters, where people feel that doing things the right way is a genuine priority in their work.