Ep. 111 Are management walkarounds effective?

The Safety of Work

The research paper discussed is by Anita Tucker and Sarah Singer, titled "The Effectiveness of Management by Walking Around: A Randomised Field Study," published in Production and Operations Management.

Discussion Points:

• Understanding senior leadership safety visits and management walkarounds
• Best practices for safety management programs
• How management walkarounds influence staff perception
• Research findings comparing intervention and control groups
• Consequences of management inaction
• Effective implementation of changes
• Role of senior managers in prioritizing problems
• Impact of patchy implementation
• How leadership visits affect staff perception
• Investigating management inaction
• Effective implementation and consultation
• Key Takeaways:
• The same general initiative can have very different effectiveness depending on how it's implemented and who's implementing it
• When we do any sort of consultation effort, whether it's forums, walkarounds, reporting systems, or learning teams, what do we judge those on? Do we judge them on their success at consulting or do we judge them on their success at generating actions that get taken?
• The answer to our episode’s question – Your answer here at the end of our notes is sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on the resulting actions.

Quotes:

"I've definitely lived and breathed this sort of a program a lot during my career." - David

"The effectiveness of management walkarounds depends on the resulting actions." - David

"The worst thing you can do is spend lots of time deciding what is a high-value problem." - Drew

"Having the senior manager allocated really means that something serious has been done about it." - Drew

"The individual who walks around with the leader and talks about safety with the leader, thinks a lot better about the organization." - David

Resources:

Link to the Paper

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

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