Turning your Safety Records Un-Dead

I was reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula to my son the other night and we came across a funny little passage that I felt could be a great record-keeping lesson for airport operators. For me, the whole context was ripe for learning because, up until that point in the book, I would have considered this character’s actions, completely reasonable, if not, meticulous.

So what can the good Count Dracula teach us about good record keeping?

Please Allow Me to Introduce Dr Seward

Without going into too much detail, Dr Seward is a significant character in the novel. He is the rejected suitor of Dracula’s first UK victim, the administrator of an insane asylum, and good friend and former student of Dr Van Helsing.

As is the style of the novel, we learn about Dr Seward through his diary. The novel is written as a succession of diary entries and correspondences by the main characters.

Dr Seward, being the learned doctor he his, is very particular with his diary keeping as it would appear that it also serves as a medical record for his observations of patients in his asylum.

And as he is a very “modern” man, he records his diary through a phonograph.

That’s right, Dr Seward, over 100 years ago, was recording his diary into the digital media of the day. Well, not quite digital but the Victorian-era equivalent. Everything seemed, to me, to be a great example of comprehensive record keeping.

The Fatal Flaw

The passage that destroyed this misapprehension came as Dr Seward and Mrs Harker, another key character, were pulling together records to prepare for the coming battle with Dracula. Mrs Hawker and her husband were also avid diary writers.

When Mrs Harker learns that Dr Seward records his diary on a phonograph, she excitedly asks questions about it. She implores the good doctor to let her listen to some entries and suggests that he could allow her to listen to his notes regarding the death of Dracula’s victim, Miss Westenra, who was also Mrs Harker’s best friend.

Despite this being a tense period in the story and subject being quite morose, the situation is quite funny, for Dr Seward seems reluctant to let her listen and then:

At length he (Dr Seward) stammered out: —

"You see, I do not know how to pick out any particular part of the diary." Even while he was speaking an idea dawned upon him, and he said with unconscious simplicity, in a different voice, and with the naivete of a child : "That's quite true, upon my honour. Honest Indian!" I (Mrs Harker) could not but smile, at which he grimaced. "I gave myself away that time!" he said. "But do you know that, although I have kept the diary for months past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any particular part of it in case I wanted to look it up?"

Recording is Just the Beginning

Airport operators, I hope, understand the importance of good record keeping. As Safety Management Systems have developed in maturity, the uses for records have expanded.

Where once good records were primarily a means of proving compliance with regulations to your friendly, neighbourhood aerodrome inspector, they are now a vital source of information for internal compliance processes, internal investigations, trend analysis and safety performance monitoring. If your airport is big into Lean and/or Six Sigma, your use of records and data is even greater.

This understanding drives the development of good recording processes. Nearly every airport I have inspected or audited maintains a range of records including checklists, registers, completed forms, and sometimes an electronic database or two.

And while many aren’t quite as bad as Dr Seward, I would say that much less than half would or even could use their data to make decisions. For me, Dr Seward’s records were useless. It might sound cool, as Mrs Harker’s response suggests, but as they stood, Dr Seward’s recordings could not be used without significant rework.

Capturing for Later Use

It is often easier to set up your recording systems in a way that makes using the records later possible. Handling data, this means someone reading a record and transposing into another format, creates opportunities for errors.

So, it can be of great benefit to have your initial recording go straight into the system that will be used to retrieve or analyse the data later. Well-structured databases can be helpful but even well-structured paper forms can work well.

But front-end loading the recording process is a double-edged sword. It must be easy and efficient for the front-line worker to capture these records and they should be relevant to the actual job. When designing the system, you need to consider the tools available, the operating environment, human factors and work pressures.

Raising an Old Example

At one of my previous airports, I was responsible for the terminal cleaning contract. I had inherited a cleaning service with little definition and it had taken me a couple of years to restructure and renegotiate the contract. My biggest challenge was accommodating the flexibility one needs at an airport and the predictability the finance department demands.

With this new contract, I wanted to make sure I could measure performance. At the time, my company was doing a lot of work with Lean and wanted us to develop the manufacturing mindset. Unfortunately, I had quite a bit of trouble applying this philosophy to the airport environment (see one of my previous posts).

Cleaning services need to be reactive. You can produce a clean floor every six hours but what if someone just spilled a coffee on it. That needs to be cleaned up now and that could mean the bathroom cleaning is going to be delayed and so on.

But I did like the concept of work menus.

Honestly, this is the name that was described to me and I can’t remember exactly all the details but what I took away was the idea that you detail all the jobs that need to or could be done and the team documents what they did. It seems simple enough but how was I going to use this information?

Designing for Efficiency

At its lowest level, the work menu was a way of ensuring people did their work. A bit above this level was that it helped prompt my team on what to do next and where they were up to. But I wanted more!

I wanted to see how passenger traffic impacted output, output over time, whether I needed more team members or if they needed more resources.

Before I designed the mechanism to capture the data, I thought about how I would use it. At the time, I had a weekly operations meeting with my team leaders. In this meeting, we would review the previous week and these work menus could guide this discussion. This meant that we had to capture data a week at a time.

I also wanted to capture longer term trends and compare them to other data sources. This meant I needed to have this data electronically in a format similar to my other data sources. But I didn’t really want an electronic device sitting on a cleaning trolley which required my team members to constantly remove gloves or be a target for theft.

So, I settled on a paper form covering a week. In our weekly meeting, we would review the completed week’s form, calculate the daily total and weekly average adherence to work menu, identify gaps and discuss any issues.

After the meeting, I would transfer the daily and weekly statistics to a central spreadsheet for trend and comparative analysis. The trend chart would be updated weekly on our Lean Board.

With the final process there was a little of extra handling but I had to balance the needs of the front-line worker and my desire to have as much data as possible. In the end, I had to make a decision about how I was going to use the data. How I was going to, realistically, use the data.

Don’t Do What Dr Seward Did

The lesson here is try not to be like Dr Seward. Your recording system needs to be designed to retrieve those records in the future. Otherwise, what is even the point of recording the thing you are recording?

It seems simple enough but I have seen many airport operators forget this. They focus on the fact that they have to record something and then neglect to consider why they might need that information in the future.

I would love to hear more good record keeping stories (yes, I am that boring) - please share them in the comments below.

Image credit: Levin Corbin Handy (via Wikipedia)