The machine does not care who is in the seat

Some operators need to watch it done twice before they will touch anything. Some need to be in the seat inside five minutes or nothing goes in. Some need it written down so they can read it again at smoko without anyone watching them read it.

A trainer who can only teach one of those three is a trainer who gets a third of the crew across the line and quietly decides the rest are no good. They are not no good. They were taught once, in one way, and it was not their way.

The standard never moves. The route to it moves every time.

Plenty of good operators are working in their second or third language. They will nod at everything, because on most sites nodding is what stops the questions.

• One instruction at a time. Not three joined by "and then".
• No slang inside a safety instruction. Say the actual words.
• Never check understanding with "got it?" — ask them to tell you back what they are about to do.
• Point at the thing while you name it. The word and the object arrive together.
• Write the numbers down. Everyone's second language falls over on numbers first.

This is not being soft. A misunderstood instruction is a hazard sitting in the cab of a hundred-tonne machine.

New starters straight off the induction are easy in one way and hard in another: nothing to unlearn, but no picture in their head of what a bad situation looks like as it forms. They need time in slow conditions, not lectures.

Operators coming across from another fleet or another site are the opposite. They have the picture, and they have habits from a machine that behaved differently. The trap is assuming that ten years somewhere else equals ten years here. Ground is local. So is the fleet.

An experienced operator being re-assessed deserves the courtesy of being told why, up front. Do that and almost all of them will do it properly. Skip it and you have made an enemy of the person the crew actually listens to.

Every safety system on a mine site depends on one thing that no system can install: a person deciding to say something.

They will only do that if speaking up has been safe for them before. That is decided long before the incident, in ordinary conversation — whether the new bloke's question got answered or laughed at, whether the woman on the fleet gets asked her opinion or asked how she is coping, whether the quiet one ever gets asked anything at all.

A crew that can have a laugh together is worth a lot. A laugh that lands on one particular person costs you that person's next hazard report, and you will not know what it was going to be.

Get that right and the reporting looks after itself. Get it wrong and you can write procedures forever.

Nobody gets waved through because they remind me of me. Nobody gets a harder time because they don't.

They either did the task to the standard, safely, on the day, or they did not and they come back and do it again. That is the fairest thing on a mine site, and it is the only part of this job I have never had to think about.