Originally published by the Australian Institute of Health & Safety
Mitchell Services recently won the Australian WHS Team of the Year in the Australian Workplace Health & Safety Awards for implementing a sustainable strategy for improving workplace safety
Mitchell Services is an Australian-based drilling services company with over 800 employees working across Australia, serving multiple clients in the surface and underground mining and exploration industries. The business faces significant challenges in managing the various systems as well as contractual requirements that must be met, all while managing high-risk activities, according to Josh Bryant, GM of people, risk and sustainability at Mitchell Services.
“The Mitchell Services’ WHS team consists of only seven personnel for the entire business, and operates on a limited budget, resulting in limited opportunity to actively engage external resources to assist. The team has relied on their initiative, determination, relationship building and drive to achieve business improvements,” Bryant explained.
The workplace culture of mining companies and their contractors is often viewed as one of compliance (as highlighted by recent reviews like the Brady Report on fatalities in the Queensland Mining Industry in 2020), and when unforeseen events occur, Bryant said the client-contractor relationship can quickly devolve into a ‘parent-child’ dynamic, with clients often quick to blame contractors for their perceived lack of adequate systems or personnel not following procedures. “This has created ‘tension’ for the WHS team and conflicts with the embedded philosophies of Human and Organisation Performance (H.O.P.) which Mitchell Services leadership aims to embed within its line management,” he said.
Establishing a business need
Mitchell Services identified a need to create a critical risk management system to account for drilling site-specific fatal risks, designed to verify critical controls and provide feedback to the organisation on opportunities for improving these controls.
The WHS team also recognised there was a need to create an improved ability to share learnings across the business, focusing on improving the ‘safety of work’, and ensuring a measured response by leadership to ‘bad news’. “The team identified that a positive relationship between the WHS team and the supervisors is vital for any initiative to work and be sustainable,” he said.
Bryant explained that Mitchell Services’ small WHS team operates across 25 geographically diverse operational sites throughout Australia. “Each of these has its own ‘microculture’ (way of work), largely driven by the supervisors and their relationship with the operational drilling team. It has been found that between sites there can be a lack of standardisation of equipment and different ways of planning, adapting to, and completing work,” he said.
“Mitchell Services’ WHS team took deliberate action to embed the philosophies of Human and Organisation Performance (H.O.P.) to create an environment of trust, implement a fit-for-purpose critical risk management system to manage fatal risks and not rely on client systems, and create an opportunity for improved organisational learning from the frontline worker on the rig, up to members of the board.”
System implementation and H.O.P. training
To implement our program, Bryant said the WHS team needed to:
Develop and deliver in-house training in H.O.P. and provide coaching to leaders in the business.
Create a critical risk management program specific to Mitchell Services' critical risks and involve all levels of the organisation in its design and implementation.
Collaborate with its HSE software provider to build an entirely new system to manage critical control verification
Embed workplace insights that involve the use of the ‘4Ds’ and be able to have this feedback from the frontline to the board, with a feedback loop to operations.
The Mitchell Services WHS team was initially exposed to the concepts of ‘Safety Differently’ by Sidney Dekker, and Bryant said the team further explored the literature and took the key principle of “our people are a solution to harness and not a problem to control’ and incorporated it into all business-wide communication.”
Consultation with frontline workers found that the business had a focus on statistics, individual actions and blame, and typical actions such as a ‘stop for safety’ or retraining. “Working with the Mitchell Services leadership team, a review was conducted of all key processes where there were ‘employee touch-points’ and the team started to deliberately change the tone of communication to be about learning and employees being able to share their ideas on the safety of work. This was not a transformative approach – this was done by changing 100 small things, consistently, and with deliberate intent,” said Bryant.
Unable to use an external resource, the WHS team developed in-house Human and Organisational Performance (H.O.P.) training for all leadership positions in the business and incorporated it into the internal Mitchell Services ‘Lead with Purpose’ leadership program, which exposed over 50 leaders in the business to H.O.P. philosophies. This has a massive impact on the business, Bryant said, as leaders began to consider conditions and context first before reacting to negative events, which led to a shift in the business’s culture.
The implementation of H.O.P. training with the supervisors also drove a greater understanding of the impact of critical controls and their management of high-risk tasks. Supervisors co-designed critical control verification (CCV) inspections within current routines, resulting in improvements in the standardisation of controls and conditions on drill sites. CCV inspections allowed all operational critical controls/critical steps to be verified at the same time, promoting a whole drill site-level approach to safety management. Because frontline workers and supervisors had input in the program design, it was more easily adopted throughout the business.
Bryant said these inspections resulted in increased communication between supervisors, work teams, and the senior leadership team, leading to operational and quality improvements across the business. “Through the critical control management program, there were improvements in the standardisation of controls and conditions on the drill sites,” he said.
4D workplace insights and technology applications
The team conducted further studies into human factors, focusing on the interface between operational workers and controls. The team facilitated ‘Learning Teams’ to understand everyday operational work and gain insights that led to operational and quality improvements across the business. Through a whitepaper by Learning Teams Inc., Mitchell Services took the idea of the 4Ds (understanding what’s Difficult, Dangerous, Different and Dumb) – to perform a proactive inquiry. “This enabled the team to change from typical ‘behavioural based’ field conversations with employees to a shift to ‘4D workplace insights’,” said Bryant.
“These 4D workplace insights have led to operational and quality improvements across the business, and are reviewed in detail at a senior leadership team and board level,” he said.
“This change has demonstrated value and led to senior management’s increased desire to understand where frontline workers need to adapt. But more importantly, conversations are now a lot less transactional, are now more focused on learning,” said Bryant. Bryant added that the WHS team also reached out to industry leaders in technology and online content creators/digital influencers to see how they bring ‘their world’ to their audiences. “This has resulted in Mitchell Services adopting low-cost 360 cameras and VR headsets to immerse leaders and those unfamiliar with operational areas so that they can better understand adaptation and differences in processes and conditions,” said Bryant.
Measuring impact and outcomes
Through the Mitchell Service WHS team’s integration of critical risk management, H.O.P., and 4D workplace insights, Bryant said there is now a focus within the business on the robustness of controls for critical risk. “Leaders are curious about ‘normal work’, with genuine care and interest from the frontline to the senior leadership team and members of the board,” he said.
“Through a combination of critical risk management and 4Ds workplace insights, Leaders have a better understanding of where our employees have to adapt, and where leaders can give better access to resources, improve standards and training, and also improve conditions.” Examples include improvements in tooling, changes to work areas and platforms, additional guarding around high-risk areas, the introduction of laser barriers, and the introduction of LED lighting underground.
Mitchell Services has also experienced improved standardisation of controls, an understanding of defeating factors of controls, and increased awareness of tasks involving energy that could result in a fatality. “The WHS team ensured that frontline workers were involved in every segment of the program, including assessment of hazards and controls, design of verification tools, and communication back to the workforce. “This has led to an increase in the reported number of high potential events/potential SIF events within Mitchell Services – a result of an improved understanding of controls and the positive response of management to news of failures and critical control deficiencies,” said Bryant.
The efforts of the Mitchell Services WHS team have also led to a change in focus by the leadership team and board. Bryant said has resulted in changes in communication from TRIFR and injury statistics, to critical control deficiencies and performance, actions to improve controls, activities to understand adaptions at work, and organisational learning through 4D workplace insights and learning team activities. “The Board is genuinely focused on understanding the capacity of the business to handle variability, and the critical risk is being managed, whereas the initial focus used to be on statistical performance and injury rates,” he said.
There has also been positive feedback from the regulator, with the Chief Inspector of Mines for Queensland sharing the firm’s critical risk management implementation, use of H.O.P., and investigation and learning reports with all inspectors “as we have shown what can be done with a small team in a contracting business”.
There has also been a shift in perception of the WHS team, which Bryant said is now seen as a trusted advisor. “The team is seen as a resource that can make a positive operational change, and not as one who is there to enforce paperwork, process, or purely to complete ‘safety work’,” he said. “The best part has been being able to openly share everything that we have done with other industries, businesses and the wider safety community in Australia and globally.”
