The Human Factor in HSE

Episode 7 - Tash's journey from the "checklist approach" to a behaviour based model

December 02, 2022 Bjørn Jepsen - WeFocus Season 1 Episode 7
The Human Factor in HSE
Episode 7 - Tash's journey from the "checklist approach" to a behaviour based model
Show Notes

In this episode Bjørn is guested by Tash Baksh, Senior Manager Quality, Health, Safety, Security, Environmental and Operational Excellence at Kiwa, Houston, Texas.

Tash shares his journey through HSE and his perspective on the current problem of companies not pivoting away from the “checklist-approach”.

Tash takes us through his experience of how, back in the days, HSE was much more about inspection type activities, where he would check to verify things were done and use checklists all the time. This was the core of HSE and most of the job was making sure that people were trained to accomplish the task that they needed to do. He views the field and a part of the present HSE community as focusing more on training the employees, so that they are aware of why they need to do the task and, and that even if they miss doing it there's some built in contingency in the process so it doesn't result in someone getting hurt.

He firmly believes that we need to pause and look at the process. That it is utterly important that we take a moment to stop and think, whether we are currently in the right frame of mind to do the task before us, and if not if we need to reset. 

From Tash’s perspective, the biggest challenge for HSE currently is that not all organisations have pivoted from the checklist approach. They're still on the “is it done or not done?”-task. He describes this tendency as the companies not yet pivoting to a behavior based model with the psychological safety type aspects of providing the skills, the resources, and the ability for the individual to pivot and be able to recognize when they're facing danger or when they're not in the right mindset to be able to perform a task. 

Listen to this episode to learn more about the current tendency of HSE with companies not pivoting away from the checklist approach and gain insight to approaches on how we might deal with and solve this problem in the future!