Transparency in Hygiene
How open should a hygienist (or any WHS professional) be with their data and processes?
Occupational hygiene is often seen as an altruistic profession, one focused single-mindedly at helping workers. It may never have occurred to some to withhold information. In theory, more information means a more informed workforce and management which leads to more action. Why hide anything when many hygiene risks are already staved for attention, shadowed by more acute safety risks? And yet we don’t typically send raw data files in a company wide email or pinned to a notice board. Instead we craft very selective messaged based on the data to achieve those altruistic goals.
High transparency of information can lead to misunderstanding of intentions or misinterpretation by those not familiar with the intricacies of OH. Without the contextual understanding that comes with experience in OH, even highly educated professionals like engineers or safety advisors, with their unique risk paradigms, can get it wrong. “The average exposure is lower than the exposure standard. Perfect!” “The (c-weighted) peak is 110dB. Wow, that’s insanely loud. Stop everything!”. Setting aside intentional misappropriate of hygiene data, any well-intended non-hygienist could reasonably make reactionary or misguided mistakes. So why even give them the opportunity to do so?
The road to (hygiene) hell is paved with (misinformed) good intentions
Low transparency, on the other hand, of OH information inadvertently runs the risk of the perceived secrecy. This can result in skepticism and cynicism amongst the workforce. Occupational hygienists don’t typically discuss ideas of culture as much as our safety counterparts, but it goes without saying that this is disastrous for any hygiene management program. It is also possible to expect that limiting access to information can limit operations from making localised innovations improvements without full control from hygienists. A business can undoubtedly gain access to any information in its IT system, and in many jurisdictions so could a regulator. So is the only group restricted the one we are trying to protect?
Invariably we turn to using metrics to selectively communicate information in order to curate the message that will achieve the desired outcome. Our safety friends are in perpetual debate over metric selection. It is not, however, an active conversation in the OH community which raises the question: how do we select metrics for communicating risk and compliance in OH? Have we already found the answers or just avoiding challenging convention?
This post was inspired by the Complexity Podcast - Problems with Value Metrics and Governance at Scale.