Taskforce Challenge

Ever sat down after a site visit, a tour of the production area or a day looking at your business operation and asked yourself "how are these things still not getting picked up?" or "how much training do we have to do before things actually start improving?" 

The unfortunate reality is that even the most willing and able participants often find it difficult to take what they learn on a training course and apply the principles back in the workplace. After all issues and opportunities often present themselves in ways that were never discussed or envisaged. 

Taskforce Challenge is designed to deliver both immediate returns and ongoing continuous improvement capability.  Based around a structured business improvement approach, applied to safety and safe working practices, the programme activates learning so real change happens.

Each Taskforce Challenge is tailored to the individual client as everyone’s operational reality is unique and has its own challenges and opportunities.  However, each Challenge is designed to deliver safety improvements following the same broad structure:

Safety Principles

A re-cap on some of the key principles on the drivers of effective safety behaviours, how safety systems are designed to work and potential barriers to safety improvement activity.  Whether these principles have been covered in other 2macs’ courses or elsewhere in people’s career, the idea here is to get everyone to common start point.

Current Situation

Here the group start to form ideas about the problems, issues and opportunities for safety improvements.  At this point it is very much based on their collective understanding, experience and beliefs – but it provides a useable start point.  At this stage in the day the group are introduced to some basic problem solving techniques and also plan how they go about testing their assumptions and beliefs once out on-site.

Information Gathering

Then it’s “Boots on the Ground” time as the people get out on-site and work in smaller groups to check out their ideas and test assumptions.  They do this by engaging with the site teams, gathering opinions and perspectives, observing how the safety procedures and systems work in reality and what actually drives people’s behaviour and work practice.

Decide

Armed with this information and insight, the teams develop a series of potential solutions to the issues and opportunities.  This includes agreeing a set of priorities and key-focus areas.  Not all problems can be effectively resolved quickly and the group themselves aren’t always the key decision makers, so the session focuses on what can actually be done in the short term and the steps required to engage and persuade decision makers outside the group, for improvements that are achievable in the mid to long term.

Act

To end the session the group reviews the solutions they have developed before focusing on implementation issues.  The group then agree a set of individual and collective actions to get the identified improvements off the page.

At the end of a Taskforce Challenge, therefore, the organisation ends up with a series of improvements which should make a quantifiable and noticeable difference to safety performance as an immediate payback.  In addition, the teams who have taken part ion the Challenge have developed, and displayed, a set off tools, techniques and associated skills which can makes ‘continuous improvement’ a key feature of your safety management systems.

See what one of our clients thought of the Taskforce Challenge 2macs designed and delivered for them.