Recently, during a consultation visit to a utility insured in this program, the discussion turned to inspections and the value that inspection visits can add to building a safety culture within a company. The Safety Officer I was visiting (I will call him “Mark”) articulated a particularly clear vision of the benefits that inspections can provide that went beyond what we usually hear. I thought it might be good to share this approach with everyone.

When we began to talk about inspections, Mark mentioned that he had implemented a program of “pop inspections,” conducted by a group of employees selected just for this task. They have a pre-selected group of staff members, first-line supervisors and above, who make up the “inspection pool.” From this pool each inspection uses a smaller group of 4, drawn from both the office and field staffs, to conduct unannounced “pop-in” inspections of facilities, worksites, and office locations. 

Most “inspections” are designed solely to check up on work habits or compliance with safety rules and general company work practices. They are commonly done by a single inspector, often the Safety Officer, who all too frequently comes to be seen as the “bad guy,” trying to catch people doing things wrong. (To read more about catching workers doing things wrong or doing things right, you may want to revisit our archived two-part article on Positive Feedback found here Part I and here Part II.) In addition, the single inspector needs to know everything about everything, all aspects of all jobs, in order to do this task, which is an exceptionally challenging skill set to develop. Since we know the adage says, “Two heads are better then one,” why not look at how to improve on the single inspector approach?

Mark found that by using a small group to do these inspections, there was nearly always someone who knew the task intimately and that group discussions often led to the discovery of ideas that would not have come out with a single person review. And, there is an additional benefit, since the inspections provide the inspectors themselves with some cross-functional exposure, since the process puts office and field workers into each others’ environments. 

This strikes me as a great idea to get multiple benefits from the inspection process. This approach offers a better outcome in the stated goal of finding safety issues, including process errors in progress, while also exposing more supervisors to the varied tasks within the utility, adding to their personal knowledge growth, and building appreciation for the safety function across these tasks. It’s an across the board win! Why not give it a try?