Forget Best Practice – Aim for Best Fit
Nothing is surer to get heads nodding in a meeting than suggesting that we should be out to achieve best practice. Perhaps we’re even out to set best practice. I’ve been guilty of it myself.
But what actually does ‘best practice’ mean, and why am I against it?
According to Merriam-Webster online dictionary, ‘best practice’ is “a procedure that has been shown by research and experience to produce optimal results and that is established or proposed as a standard suitable for widespread adoption”.
Optimal results for who?
No two people are the same. No two organisations are the same. This makes applying best practice across two people hard enough, let alone two or more teams, departments, or organisations.
It’s aspirational at best. What is best practice for one organisation is not best practice for another. All organisations have different organisational architecture, strategies, technology, premises, plant, equipment, technology, stakeholders, culture, personnel….
There is no cookie cutter approach to best practice.
Enter, “best fit’.
Best fit involves understanding an organisation’s context, including its external environment and internal organisation. We must understand its purpose and objectives, its history, its cultural DNA. We must be able to identify and detail its core competencies and unique value proposition. We must also understand its risk appetite (positive & negative).
Once we know all of this, we can then work on identifying and implementing a prioritised solution that is the ‘best fit’ for the particular organisation, team or individual, that will get them from where they are now to where they need to be. For some it might be a very lean and agile solution, while for others it much be very rigid and structured.
5 steps to effective health and safety management planning
Analyse, Plan, Do, Check, Act
Safety people over the years have done a great job of making health and safety management far more complicated than it needs to be. Health and safety really is very straightforward. It is people who make it complicated.
With 30 June fast approaching, for those organisations who operate on financial year business planning cycles, now is the tie to be finalising your 2019/2020 OHS/WHS management plans.
I’ve developed my own version of the Plan-Do-Check-Act model as I felt the original model wasn’t quite adequate. It missed a few things necessary to achieve success. Namely, the non-negotiable need for:
1. Management commitment at the top of the organisation
2. Analysis of the internal organisation and external environment before any planning can commence
3. Consultation and collaboration with key stakeholders throughout the whole cycle.
So, in my revised model, we have management commitment at the core. We analyse context before we plan anything. And we not only consult throughout the cycle, we collaborate as well. Consulting is not enough if we want organisational ownership of our plan, and if we wish to tap in to the hearts and minds of our people. My model is aimed at changing how whole organisations work, person by person, and not merely at achieving compliance.
Some quick tips before you start:
1. Keep plans concise and practical. Focus only on the things that will have the greatest impact on health and safety performance.
2. Make sure you can actually measure progress. If everything is done manually, you might end up a full-time report writer instead of actually helping the organisation make progress. You may need to first set up automated monitoring and reporting processes before you can make your plan too meaty. If this is the case, stick it in your plan for this year before you embark on chunky, high maintenance (from a monitoring and reporting perspective) plans.
3. This is a group project. Don’t do it alone. You need to get all the right people involved in this if you want it to work.
Here we go:
My revised model has management commitment at its core, and is encapsulated by effective consultation and collaboration. Here’s why…
Management Commitment
This is essential to success so I’ve put it at the core of my version of the model. You need management commitment at the very top of the organisation. Without it, your plan is destined for failure. If you don’t have management commitment, then this is your first priority. You need to sell the benefits of good health and safety management to your executive team. This will include financial savings, plus the well-known benefits of increased employee engagement, discretionary effort, reduced absenteeism, etc. It’s also a great way for managers to show they care; to show their human side.
Consultation and Collaboration
You need to get the right people on your bus. They need to be made a part of the process. It’s not enough just to ask them what they think. What they think should be reflected in the plan. You will need to establish trusting relationships with these people first. If you don’t have their trust and confidence then add that to the top of your priority list, alongside achieving management commitment. The whole cycle is held together by effective consultation and collaboration.
1. Analyse
You need to know where you are now and where you want to go before you can plan how you are going to get there.
In this important first step, you will analyse the internal organisation. This includes reviewing the organisation’s structures, IT, management systems, culture, incident and injury rates, previous audits, conducting gap analysis, organisational culture, workplace locations, resource availability (physical, financial, human, and technological), etc.
You will also need to analyse the external environment. A PESTLE analysis is a common way of doing this. PESTLE stand for Political, Economical, Sociocultural, Technological, Legal, and Environmental.
A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis is a great tool for this, with SW being internal, and OT being external.
Once you’ve analysed where you are, you need to analyse where it is you are going. What is your organisation’s vision and mission? What are your strategic objectives?
2. Plan
Close the gaps between where you are now, and where you want to go. Assign actions to individuals. Be clear on what is to be achieved, by when, and with what resources. But make sure you have clearly identified the priorities of actions and activities. If you make everything high priority, then nothing is high priority. No more than 20% of all actions should be high priority. This follows the 80/20 rule. If you only get 20% of the plan’s actions complete this year, make them the 20% of things that get 80% of results. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t complete the lower priority items. You still moved forward, and your people will trust you more.
3. Do
Implement the plan, in order of priority. Don’t move to a lower priority action until you can’t make any further progress with higher priority actions. When you become able to return to higher priority actions, do so; drop the lower priority action. Keep moving forward, but stay focused on highest priority actions first and foremost.
4. Check
Monitor and measure progress, and report it to key stakeholders. I don’t recommend you try and catch people out with this. Let stakeholders know that you are coming to measure progress ahead of time, and offer them support to help them succeed. They will appreciate it. And if they ignore your offer of assistance and fail to proceed, then escalate the issue above them.
5. Act
Not everything runs smoothly. Priorities change. People change. Plans need to change. If you’re finding that the plan isn’t achieving the success you were hoping for, then review it. You may need intervention from top management, or you may need to move things around in your plan. Don’t feel like the plan has been set and we must follow it despite everything else that is happening around you.
Also, when things do work well, take time to recognise success and celebrate it. But give all the credit to other people. Don’t take any of it yourself. The people who matter know what you’ve achieved. This is all about the people who trusted you and came with you. Make it about them. Because without them, you’d have achieved nothing.
So, there it is. My quick guide to planning your next year’s OHS/WHS based on my own adaption of the PDCA cycle. I’ll try and make some time over the next few weeks to expand a bit more on this, and get in to some specifics. It’s a bit hard at the moment to spend much time writing as work is busy and study is crazy. Plus, family time is the first thing to go in my calendar.
Enjoy and stay safe.
Marki
Less is more: get more done by prioritising
Don’t have enough time to do everything?
Overworked?
Juggling so many balls you are 20% of the way
through 10 different things and not sure when you will complete anything?
This is VERY common. I see action plans all
the time that have 20 different actions or initiatives in progress. How the
hell can one person work on 20 different things at once? You can’t! It is not
humanly possible.
A human brain can only perform one cognitive
function at a time. Breathing is a
non-cognitive function. It takes time
and energy to switch between cognitive functions, which results in
inefficiencies.
We often attempt to work on several things at once. Sometimes up to 20 or more. In the end, we barely complete anything. We end up frustrated or burned out. It doesn’t have to be this way. Take control.
Set priorities, and focus on only one thing at a time.
This is what I see a lot:
We chop and change tasks or activities, then rush to complete everything before the deadline at year-end. Throughout the year, we show progress on these things as 25% for Q1, 50% for Q2, 75% for Q3, and 100% for Q4.
But what if we did it like this?:
We have done the highest priority activity 1st
and completed it in the first quarter.
Then moved on to 2nd highest priority to completion, then 3rd,
then 4th. Wouldn’t you feel
good knowing that you’re completing stuff throughout the year? It will save time and energy, reduce stress,
and give you some wins to celebrate along the way.
Another way to look at it is like this:
You’ve worked on 10 different initiatives throughout the year. At the end of the year, how much have you
completed? Nothing! Not a thing.
But what if you did priority A to completion first, then
priority B, then C, and so on? While you
might not complete everything by the end of the year, you will have completed
the highest priority initiatives.
Remember the 80|20 rule: 80% of results come from 20% of the
effort.
In the example above, Priority E came to a roadblock. While the roadblock was being cleared, we moved
in to Priority F. But as soon as the
roadblock was cleared, we moved back to Priority E and continued on. At the end of the year, we completed the four
highest priority things.
I recommend you prioritise your actions and initiatives so
that they are in sequence. Number them
from 1 to 20, or A to Z, or any other system you can come up with that you can
follow. Then follow the sequence. It’s that easy and will change your life.
I’d love to hear your comments on this. Is this how you work now? Have you given it a try? Please share your experiences.
An effective strategy in 9 easy steps
Strategies are the new black. Plans are so yesterday. Every planner is now a strategist. It’s now more popular than ever before to want a strategy. It’s rare to come out of a meeting and not have had someone raise the idea of a new strategy for something. It does make you sound knowledgeable when you suggest we need a new strategy, I must admit. But most of the times these strategies are just plans, or tactics.
So, what is a strategy?