Stop work authority: making it more than a poster

Almost every operation has a stop work policy. Far fewer can tell you how many stop work events happened last month, how quickly each was answered, or whether the person who raised one ever heard back.

That gap is the whole subject. Stop work authority is not a policy problem, it is a response problem.

The first stop work card is a test

When somebody stops a job for the first time, they are testing whether the policy is real. If the response is quick and visible, the next person will raise one too. If it disappears, the policy is finished, and no amount of signage will revive it.

This is why response time matters more than volume. A site with many stop work cards and fast responses is healthier than a site with almost none.

It has to be raisable where the work is

If raising a card means finding a supervisor, borrowing a desk and filling in a form, it will not happen at the moment it matters. It has to be possible from a phone, standing in front of the hazard, with a photo and a location attached, in less time than it takes to talk yourself out of it.

Treat it as a leading indicator, because it is one

Incident counts tell you what already went wrong. Stop work volume and response times tell you what is about to. A sudden drop in stop work cards on a site is rarely good news, and is usually worth a conversation before the next incident report explains it for you.

What this looks like in HSE360

Any worker can raise a stop work card with photos and location from the mobile app. It routes to a supervisor, records the response, and flags cards that breach the response-time SLA, so the thing being measured is the answer rather than the complaint.

Across client site networks, HSE360 currently holds more than 24,000 stop work reports and more than 55,000 tracked corrective actions.