Stop Work: a powerful tool or wishful thinking?

I remember when I first heard the expression “Stop Work”, around the middle of the 2010s.  It was  presented to me as the essential tool in the Human Performance toolset, the infallible barrier between worker and serious incident, the ultimate we should expect from employees and contractors.  It became part of training, posters, and even an indicator whose value folks wanted to go up.  Are more work interruptions good?  I thought instability was detrimental to safety!

For many leaders Stop Work was then and continues to be today a source of frustration.  Investigations continue to point to somebody’s failure to stop work as a cause of accidents, in spite of awards, communications, and repetition about this panacea.  To find out more I just followed my favorite pragmatic approach: I went to the shop floor, I visited projects, and I met with groups of hourly employees.  At least two challenges quickly became evident around the Stop Work predicament:

1- Unresolved conditions and behaviors practiced by leaders sometimes undermine their best intentions.  It is unrealistic to expect impeccable worker behavior when issues dear to front line employees have been reported and remain unaddressed, or when leaders are invisible and promote untested programs imagined in an office.

2-  Hourly employees are contractors are smart, very smart.  They know that during a shutdown, a supervisor standing next to them with their arms crossed can’t wait for production to get back online, even if they don’t say a word.  In the absence of a supervisor, people still know that production tends to support the bottom line, and they will naturally try to do their job as best and as fast as they can, in spite of all the talk about Stop Work.

Of course there is a moral imperative to promote Stop Work.  The alternative is unthinkable.  However greater sustained progress can be achieved in safety by gaining deeper understanding of the world at the front line, involving employees in how work is designed and planned, having leaders spend more time on the shop floor coaching, educating and correcting, engaging in dialogue with workers, and responding to their needs faster.  Hourly employees and contractors are not to be “fixed”, they need to be supported.