Beyond the Process: Accountability, Honest Talk and Gut Feel on Site

On day two of the Workplace Health & Safety Show, Rachel Gledhill from JLL and Galen Myers from Lendlease shared the Summit stage for a session on shared accountability. It got me thinking about what happens a long way down the contract chain, on the tools.

Process tells you who. It doesn't make anyone own the result

Big partnerships are good at setting boundaries: who the client is, who the principal contractor is, who's responsible for what. The law asks for that too. When more than one business has a duty for the same thing, each one must consult, cooperate and coordinate with the others, under section 46 of the WHS Act.

But knowing who the stakeholders are is only the start. Things rarely go wrong because a policy was missing. They go wrong when everyone does their bit of the paperwork and nobody owns the outcome, when a signed form gets treated as if the hazard was dealt with. The shift I want on every job is from "I followed the procedure" to "I made sure it was safe".

• What gets measured. Compliance counts forms signed and audits passed. Accountability asks whether the hazard was found and fixed.
• What happens to a risk. Compliance writes it down so it becomes someone else's problem. Accountability owns it and sorts it out with the people around you.
• Who people become. Compliance turns people into task-doers. Accountability makes everyone on site a guardian of it.

Judgement shuts people up

Everyone says communication matters, but it's the tone that decides whether it works. Judgement looks backwards: "Why didn't you know better?" It makes people defensive, and the next small problem stays hidden until it's a big one. Real communication looks forward: "How do we make sure everyone knows next time?" When people aren't afraid of copping it, they report the near miss, the small failure and the thing that doesn't look right, early, while it's still cheap to fix.

Trust the gut feel

Checklists are built for the human: the part of us that reads, follows steps and works through data. They miss what I call the being: the part of an experienced operator that senses something is off before any checklist or sensor does. That's not superstition. It's pattern recognition built over years: the sound of a machine, the look of a trench wall, the mood of a crew first thing in the morning.

When safety becomes box ticking, people learn to ignore that feeling. When leaders back it, "something feels off" becomes a reason to stop and look, not something to be embarrassed about.

What I'd ask of any leader

• Treat the checklist as the floor, not the finish. Check that the controls that matter are actually working on the day.
• Make reviews about learning, not blame. Start with what happened and what changes, not who stuffed up.
• Back the gut feel. When someone says something feels off, stop and look, and thank them even when it turns out to be nothing.

Process, contracts and data all matter. They work best when people own the result, can speak up without being judged, and are backed when their gut tells them something isn't right.