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Feb. 7th, 2019 08:39 pmOnce upon a time, by which I mean about four years ago, I worked for a very large department comprised of two very different divisions, which decided to de-merge and become separate, standalone departments. My team being a support team, we were a bit like the children of the divorce, with both of these new departments wanting to retain our services. It was decided that one department would get custody of us, with the other retaining access, i.e. we would remain part of the one, while still providing support to the other - running their health & safety administration for them, in particular - and this arrangement has persisted for several years
Now, though, we are handing over health & safety responsibility to the other department, as they’ve had plenty of time to get their house in order, and this resulted in the following conversation:
Dept. Boss: So it looks like you’ve been managing our health & safety to a really high standard. How can we avoid having to do too much work to maintain that? What isn’t essential, that we can drop?
Us: Everything we do is essential if you want to pass audit. That’s why we’ve been doing it. We certainly don’t do it for fun.
Dept. Boss: What if we lower our standards?
Us: If you lower your standards, you will fail audit.
Dept. Boss: We were thinking of benchmarking against one of the other departments, which aren't so rigorous.
Us: You mean the ones that regularly fail audit?
Dept. Boss: Surely some of it must just be ‘nice to have’ rather than essential. We can drop some of it, right?
Us: Once we’ve handed over, you can do anything you want, but please don’t tell us you’re doing it.
*sigh* And yes, that was an actual conversation that was held in an actual, formal Health & Safety Committee meeting that I had to formally minute, which meant finding a diplomatic wording that still captured what they were actually saying. Record retention on those minutes is 50 years (yes, I know!) so there will be a permanent record of the intention to downgrade, if it all goes wrong!
I am not sorry to say goodbye to that particular area of work...
Now, though, we are handing over health & safety responsibility to the other department, as they’ve had plenty of time to get their house in order, and this resulted in the following conversation:
Dept. Boss: So it looks like you’ve been managing our health & safety to a really high standard. How can we avoid having to do too much work to maintain that? What isn’t essential, that we can drop?
Us: Everything we do is essential if you want to pass audit. That’s why we’ve been doing it. We certainly don’t do it for fun.
Dept. Boss: What if we lower our standards?
Us: If you lower your standards, you will fail audit.
Dept. Boss: We were thinking of benchmarking against one of the other departments, which aren't so rigorous.
Us: You mean the ones that regularly fail audit?
Dept. Boss: Surely some of it must just be ‘nice to have’ rather than essential. We can drop some of it, right?
Us: Once we’ve handed over, you can do anything you want, but please don’t tell us you’re doing it.
*sigh* And yes, that was an actual conversation that was held in an actual, formal Health & Safety Committee meeting that I had to formally minute, which meant finding a diplomatic wording that still captured what they were actually saying. Record retention on those minutes is 50 years (yes, I know!) so there will be a permanent record of the intention to downgrade, if it all goes wrong!
I am not sorry to say goodbye to that particular area of work...
