Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

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.

Training has always been an obvious response to any operational issue and safety issues are no exception. Further to an accident, training, and more specifically safety training, almost always forms part of the recommendations. More than that, safety training has always been considered by many as one of the major pillars for ensuring the safety of hazardous activities. This is the case in regulatory requirements as well as in many internal safety policies. Although this seems to make sense intuitively, intuition is not always of sound advice when it comes to safety. In reality, safety training conveys a number of implicit assumptions as to what contributes to making the operation of an organization safe. These assumptions, once made explicit, become debatable. However, unravelling them makes it possible to examine potential ways forward to reach beyond what seems to be the current safety training escalation dead-end.

This chapter presents an approach to training design oriented by a holistic real-world works analysis based on several works of research. This approach proposed to design training in order to make people able to deal with real-world work situations, rather than only to know and apply exogenous standards. Two main axes of progress in the design of vocational training are identified and could develop into guidelines in order to train people to deal with work situations. (1) The approach requires project management in order to use participatory methods, including end users (trainers and trainee) and integrate a works analysis. (2) The approach needs to move from classical teaching-learning methods to “active” methods, which often imply transformation of both the trainer and the trainee’s activity. Examples from previous research in training design are presented to illustrate the argument.

Promoting industrial safety is a complex field requiring collaboration between academia and industry across a range of professional and academic disciplines. Whilst human factors are recognized as being key modifiable determinants of risk across all professional groups and disciplines the variety and type of theories, methodologies and practices can make it difficult to identify commonalities and integrate findings into a conceptually coherent framework for research and intervention. The science of behaviour change offers possibilities for integrating cross-disciplinary understandings of the contributions of human behaviour to industrial safety through the use of models and frameworks like the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW). This chapter describes the principles and processes involved in designing behaviour change interventions using the BCW illustrating this with examples drawn specifically from the industrial safety sector. The potential applications of the approach in the areas of workforce development and research are highlighted.

Building on other contributions, this chapter highlights how safety is a situated activity, which relies greatly on non-technical skills. As such, professionalizing in safety implies creating spaces for debate. In this context, the question of power is key to consider: indeed, professionalization is first a matter of identity, which in turn questions power, be it formal or informal. One of the key question is: ‘how to cope with increasingly powerful specialists in support functions?’. As an attempt to answer it, this chapter argues that shifting from a ‘love of power’ to the ‘power of love’ is the key to liberated organizations in which (safety) performances are enhanced. Giving more power and consideration to working teams and middle managers in the field by creating space to discuss rules and practices is a first step to doing so. A second, more in-depth, step implies a change of paradigm from a ‘simple’ steering of safety indicators to a broad empowering of employees, giving them vision and autonomy to do their jobs. This involves a “liberation” process by which the classical vision of hierarchal structures is reversed, and the importance of learning and knowledge is acknowledged as a key source of motivation.

Professional development in safety lies at the crossroads of various logics, each with their own objectives, limits and power games. The arbitration and choices that are made at different levels (individual, collective and organizational) are therefore subject to constraints. It is of major importance to be aware of these constraints, to take them into consideration and recognize them in order to identify the levers for improvement in safety performance. This chapter synthesises the main findings from the book, highlighting what is currently considered to be at stake in terms of safety training, in the industrial world (industry and other stakeholders such as regulatory authorities), and offers avenues for further research.