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Field monitoring – ‘Walking the floor’

Issue: Field monitoring is an important part of safety management.  It is quite different to routine re-assessments or similar re-validations which would generally be carried out by someone of technical advisor status.  Field monitoring on the other hand can be carried out by any experienced manager.

1. Field Monitoring is one of the six key stages in implementing risk management policies with regards to staff (the “Cycle of Competence” model);
   • Selection;
   • Induction;
   • Validation and re-validation;
   • Deployment;
   • Field Monitoring;
   • Further training.
2. Field Monitoring will help to:
   • Ensure that management knows what is being delivered in their name.  In wider industry this is often referred to as ‘walking the floor’.  It is an important task and cannot easily be delegated or replaced with a paper trail.  Large organisations may need to deploy appropriate management to carry out some monitoring functions;
   • Observe practices at the delivery end.  Any anomalies or uncertainties would generally be raised either with the individual instructor, an appropriate technical advisor or both.  Misunderstandings will generally come in one of several categories including:
     1. The procedure is generally misunderstood by the staff;
     2. The procedure is generally understood by most staff but not by certain individual(s);
     3. The procedure is no longer appropriate.
        (Each of these problems will require a different solution)
   • Provide opportunities for positive feedback to staff;
   • Help to identify further training and experience needs before there is an accident or incident.
3. One of the main advantages of field monitoring is that staff feels valued.  If they see that their work is sufficiently important to warrant management time to look at what they do, they are much more likely to take it seriously themselves.  Because of this they are more likely to act in a safe and responsible manner than they would if they felt that management didn’t care.  To act safely and efficiently any team of instructors, no matter how well qualified and experienced, needs to be valued.
4. Field monitoring can be adequately conducted on a prioritised sampling basis, rather than making sure that everyone is routinely monitored or observed.  The former tends to inform the open-minded manager and the latter tends to become a cumbersome bureaucratic “bottleneck”.
5. Many group management issues are holistic.  Managers with expertise in group management should be comfortable monitoring sessions beyond their technical expertise.  Concerns or uncertainty about holistic issues should be addressed by management while technical issues can be referred to someone of technical advisor competence for an opinion.
6. Field monitoring may be used as an opportunity to revalidate a particular person for a particular task.  Management should be precise about the brief they give to those carrying out field monitoring.  In particular they will need to know why they are monitoring a particular person so that appropriate outcomes can then be recorded.
7. There will be benefits to recording all types of monitoring, even if only as a diary entry.  Recording key outcomes will help to implement them and it is to be encouraged.
8. Sampling may be done on a prioritised sampling basis with priority given, for example, to:
   • Newly qualified instructors (NQI);
   • Freelance staff;
   • Staff who regularly work in isolation;
   • Sessions with which management may be least familiar;
   • Potentially the most hazardous, or new activities or venues;
   • Staff not seen for a long period
     It would be good practice to monitor all staff over a period of time.
9. Managers who routinely work alongside staff may find less need for dedicated monitoring sessions (i.e. observing the session without being part of it).  However, there is no substitute for being able to focus on the delivery of a session as an observer and there will therefore be times when being ‘out of the system’ allows for better monitoring of the session overall.

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