NASA safety needs employee input

William Atkins
Monday, 27 April 2009 21:00

Opinion and Analysis

They, instead, should focus on the unhappy employees. Why are they unhappy? Is it because of an aspect of the job? Or, just because they are unhappy people? But, they need to find out which cause is the real problem with their unhappiness. When management focuses on the content employees, they miss out on identifying problems and weaknesses in the system. Then, safety is compromised. Thus, the key to maximizing safety is with the disgruntled employees.

Remember: If there is one problem nagging at one employee that has not been identified by management, then safety cannot be maximized.

Think about that statement and its repercussions further up the line when trying to launch a space shuttle.

I call such style of management “Parallel Management” because employees have the right to control their jobs and have the obligation to tell their managers how they want their jobs to be performed so it can be performed at the most efficient way possible.

Employees, under this style of management, will evaluate their management each year just like management evaluates their employees. It’s parallel management—employees are managers, too. They manage their own jobs.

When these employee teams tell managers their problems and the solutions to these problems, then managers go off and incorporate these improvements into their operations, coordinating this work with the work of their other employees.

Thus, the only job of some managers is to supervise employees so work is performed as efficiently as possible, and as safely as possible. They are the employee-managers.

The only job of other managers is to make sure that the policies made by management above them are accomplished. They are the manager-managers.

There is nearly an equal mix of these two groups of managers. However, I’ll estimate that today most managers at NASA and NASA-contractor companies are performing work for higher management than making sure that jobs by employees are being efficiently performed and, thus, being performed in the safest way possible.

I’ll also estimate that this is the way that most large organizations operate, too.

My suggestion is that a comparable ASAP report be issued each year that begins at the employee level, with employee groups, and that eventually winds up reporting on how employees see safety and efficiency at NASA and its contractor companies.

This report must include the employees of NASA’s contractor companies because most of the employees at NASA are not NASA employees, but contractor employees.

If NASA does, indeed, want to “interweave safety as a consistent and more powerful operating parameter by hardwiring safety into the fabric and procedures” of its operations, then it needs to start that interweaving with the employees.

Fixing all problems at the employee level, in my opinion, is the only way you are going to even come close to maximizing safety and efficiency in any organization and, especially, at NASA where safety is so important.