Towards a new tool for measuring Safety Management Systems performance

This paper deals with the assessment of Safety Management Systems performance and presents a new tool developed for that purpose. It recognizes two dimensions in a SMS: a structural facet corresponding to the formal description of the system and an operational one focused on the system’s influence on the working environment and practices of people. Building up the operational performance of a SMS actually strengthens the overall resilience of the organization. Authors of the paper believes that the operational performance of SMS can be measured using Tripod Delta. This method is actually designed to detect weak areas in the environment in which people are working and the level of control that the organization has on it. The method and its interesting model of organizational resilience are presented in the paper. In the framework of this paper, Tripod is used as an input to measure the SMS operational performance. Both of the tools designed to measure the structural and operational performances of Safety Management Systems are then described. 1 PERFORMANCE OF SAFETY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS Many companies are implementing a Safety Management System in order to manage health and safety in the workplace in a more coherent and more effective way. This “emerging” mode of managing safety mainly comes from the growing need for a global and structured approach of risk management. Despite the several benefits of its implementation, experience show that companies sometimes fail to implement an effective SMS. As shown by Favaro (Favaro, 2005) and Drais (Drais, 2005), if special care is not taken when SMS is designed and formalized, the system can end up being quite superficial, disconnected from real work situations, be poorly dynamic and can also introduce additional constraints for workers or rigidity in the way the safety is managed in the company. In other words, the system is more likely to go against workers if the inherent prescriptive and normative tendencies of the SMS are not well managed when the system is designed and implemented. Avoiding such shortcomings in the system inevitably includes the acknowledgement of two dimensions in the Safety Management System: a ‘structural’ dimension and an ‘operational’ dimension. 1.1 The ‘structural’ and ‘operational’ dimensions of a SMS The ‘structural’ facet of the SMS can be defined as the formal description of all the efforts that are made by the company into managing health and safety at the workplace. These efforts can be categorized into several Safety Management Processes (i.e. secCambon, Guarnieri & Groeneweg ha l-0 06 37 87 4, v er si on 1 3 N ov 2 01 1 Author manuscript, published in "2nd Symposium on Resilience Engineering, Juan-les-Pins : France (2006)"