If you have provided the employee with sufficient information, instruction and training and the 'root cause' was an act or ommision on behalf of the employere I am with your Director.

Oh for an edit button! Should have read: ..............were (and not Where) the employees involved in the risk assessments or the development of any subsequent SSOW?

Disciplinary action is a very important part of upholding safety standards, and one that most companies seem to apply badly. However, once an accident has occurred it has to be used very carefully. You should be using your disciplinary processes whenever people violate your rules and procedures; or behaves negligently in any way. The vast majority of these cases will not result in accidents. If you are only uncovering these actions as part of an accident investigation your processes and control measures are clearly (in my opinion) failing. I would not rule out using disciplinary action following an accident, but only if you are totally sure that processes and control measures were correct and present. Any doubt about this and I think employees have every right to feel aggrieved. To pick up on other points raised: * If suitable and sufficient processes and control measures are in place they should address behavioural issues, otherwise they are not sufficient * An act or omission on behalf of the employee would never been the root cause of an accident * If people are acting negligently this is as much a failure of supervision and management; as well as of the individual involved * A disciplinary process will rarely result in punishment, except for the worst or recurring offences. I suggest you google the phrase "Reason just and fair culture" and have a look at the links this throws up.

One of my last employers disciplined for H&S violations after a report and if report recommended this. There wasn't a blanket disciplinary action. Some items were immediately discipline if they fell into the category of gross misconduct or misconduct. It was management who made the decision and HR that took it forward using H&S report.

Discipline should be used sparingly and only as a last resort. I am amazed how many practitioners want to go down the big stick route all the time - what do they teach in Nebosh or Uni these days?! Prof Jim Reason promotes a fair or just culture, where the reporting of accidents/incidents is held in higher esteem than disciplining the culprit - which will just drive the reporting of unsafe acts and accidents underground. Indeed, the just culture model includes mentoring and training at one end of the spectrum and discipline at the other.

Agreed RayRapp, but sometimes the last resort is the only one left. I do think that it is harder to get people to change to new practices than to adhere to the norm as well so sometimes, as in the case I cited earlier, you do need to sometimes use a big stick as you put it. The reason I say this is thet there was never a problem getting the new starters to comply, only the old hands. ctd167, I assume your company has looked at all other options in these processes? e.g. do they really need to use knives and if so can they use safety versions that will not cut them so readily? Do thet really need to lift heavy weights, can the load be lifted using a mechanical aid? etc. Not saying you haven't but we had a number of Stanley Knife cuts which tend to go pretty deep so we banned them and bought the engineers each a safety knife and issued them with a toolbox talk on knife safety, problem solved.

Quote from O.P. "that suitable and sufficient processes and control measures are in place to prevent these accidents from happening". Taking that as given and comprehensive then we should not be afraid to discipline. A measure should be what discipline would be applied for other failures such as poor timekeeping or poor quality work or significant matters such as theft or fraud. That is to say that there is action proportionate to the severity of the offence. The same level of consideration as to whether discipline is appropriate and what action is approved should apply to unacceptable safety practice as any other disciplinary actions. The most common problem with this approach is that it is often applied quite robustly to coal face employees but not so robustly elsewhere. If indeed it is the responsibility of a Supervisor to ensure his staff work safely then, if they do not, hasn't that employee also failed? I agree it is not a way to manage safety in isolation but it has to be a part of any sensible management system. The test is how often it has to be used to correct poor OSH performance. p48

Yes let's have disciplianary action. Against their managers. They will all agree to being judged by results will they not? Here is an example of that. If they cannot control their workers (and there are lots of way to do his) then they have failed.

ctd In reply to your request for 'comments', I wonder what rewards your company provides to people at all levels who combine complying with safety regulations and high performance. Relevant motivational research goes beyond James Reason's observations about a fair, just culture to indicate the value to the organisation of connecting actions, results, evaluation, rewards and need satisfaction. This includes positive actions as well as negative ones, unless your company is simply in the business of hunting unsafe behaviour, the bugbear of safety practice for the last century.

Correction, based on empirical evidence these forums often promote the use of disciplinary measures rather than address behavioural issues through coaching, mentoring, training, supervision, etc. These are the types of interventions I would expect to see before any talk of disciplinary measures. It's not something I have dreamed up but well documented in safety publications and research. I never said that discipline was not a valid method of correcting poor behaviour, just that it 'should be used sparingly and only as a last resort'. My comment re safety practitioners and Uni was mild a tongue in cheek rebuke/banter - call it what you like. Apologies if I have offended anyone. Meanwhile, you really need to lighten up a bit pal.

This may be OT but its a thought for implementing a Just Culture, the type where people are held responsible AND people are accountable. A very clever (well I think he is clever anyway) gentleman by the name of James Reason put together a decision tree for determining the culpability of unsafe acts. I have used this before when there have been demands for disciplinary action to help management make a decision. We tweaked it to give a number of options based on where the level of capability lay, ranging from dismissal, misconduct and "rehabilitation", to review of Standards of management/supervision (not be confused by management standards i.e. actual v's whats written down). It does involve a more detailed investigation and in our cases reviewing activities and practices for a while and across a few sites. Through the process you also have to determine (regardless of what process or procedure was in place) why it has made sense to the person (given the situation they were in) to do a task in the way they did it. Ultimately someone else given the same circumstances (regardless of what process or procedure was in place) to do the same thing. You may also find that much of the time procedures are not followed (operational/procedural drift) most of the time the operators get away with it, the more they get away with it the more they drift from the procedure (Why? find this out and you get to the root cause!) sometimes the moon the stars and the sun align and they get hurt There is a version of it here: http://www.coloradofirec...finitions-principles.htm