Management Aspects of a Museum - Term Paper Example

ART GALLERY HEALTH AND SAFETY MANAGEMENT REPORT Overview Safety issues cannot be singled out from the entire management aspects of a museum. This is because the level of health and safety practice in place in any museum, including Art Modern goes a long way to determine the level of reputation that the museum would have in terms of patronage. This is indeed a valid justification because no one would want to visit and have anything to do with a museum that is constantly in the news for health and safety risks to its workers and visitors. Unfortunately however, managers of Art Modern seem to be more particular and attentive to the artistic enterprise of the museum to the detriment of health and safety issues of the company. There is indeed enough evidence in this assertion in the number of incidences that have been recorded in terms of health and safety issues within the premises of the company. As much as it is a very bad situation for workers of the company to be involved in various forms of health and safety risks, it is even worse that the problem extends to visitors in some cases. This is because once visitors become involved, the company gets a very poor public reputation and this affects patronage of the museum. There are also the legal aspects of each of these incidences of health and safety risks that the company faces. All of these notwithstanding, there is still hope in the fact that the company can make amends with its health and safety policies to ensure that further harm is not caused. For example the company has at its disposal, various forms of risk management systems and principles that it can adhere to in order to ensure improved health and safety practice. Types of Risk associated with Museum Industry Within the museum industry, there are a number of stakeholders who are at risk to various forms of health and safety challenges. These include visitors, workers, contractors and volunteers. Each of these groups of persons may also be exposed to one form of risk or the other. Though not all the forms of risks may be labeled as having the same height of impact, none of them could also be ignored as far as they concern the health and safety of people (quote). The first form of risk has to do with illness and injury. Stress, overwork, lack of touring assistance and environmental factors could cause illness and injury to visitors, staff, volunteers and contractors. Injuries could result from falls, sitting posture, inhalation of harmful chemicals and cases of fire (quote). The same conditions could also bring about illness. Once these forms of risks happen, efficiency and production are affected because the human capital and resource becomes deprived. Damage to buildings has also been found to be another form of risk that is very common in the museum industry. Museum operators have been criticized for their reluctance to relocate even if their buildings become old and weak (quote). This has been due to the fear of losing customers. But they tend to suffer in a different dimension when damages set into the buildings. There are also cases where visitors or contractors or even staff working on part of a building may cause breakages to various parts of the building such as window. Damage to buildings happen in their worst forms when there are cracks; but each of these forms of damage to buildings could lead to injury as discussed above. One other technical form of risk that commonly occurs in the museum industry but has easily been overlooked by stakeholders has to do with the risk of loss of corporate knowledge. This form of risk normally takes place among the human resource base of the company when the company loses staff member with a lot of corporate knowledge (quote). Indeed, corporate knowledge is classified as an intangible asset for all organizations and companies. Therefore when such corporate knowledge is lost, it is counted as a corporate risk. Some of the effects of loss of corporate knowledge include the fact that there becomes a change in the organizational culture, affecting efficiency and production (quote). The final form of risk is also a technical risk, which involves theft, damage or loss of assets. Assets that come in both tangible and intangible forms may be lost in the course of business activity delivery and for whatever form of lost or theft that is recorded, it comes with harsh consequences to the company. It is important to note that museums are what they are because of the value they create in what they have been able to store for years in terms of collections materials. When these collection materials, information technology tools and monetary losses happen, it thus becomes a heavy blow to the progress and welfare of the company’s continued existence. The need for health and safety management system within museums It could be seen from the discussions above that most of the risks discussed are related to health and safety in one way or the other. This is the fundamental reason why there is the need for health and safety management system for all museums. It would be noted that a classical health and safety management system will be a program that is focused on the need to curtail the occurrences of various forms of health and safety risks within museums. Because risks are generally unplanned harms that happen to the outfit, it is always important and appropriate to view the health and safety management systems as emergency contingency plans (quote). With this theory backing health and safety management system, planners of the management system would think of the need to strategizing the systems to deal with risks right at the assessment levels so that effective modules will be structured on ways to preventing the risks from occurring all together. What is more, knowing that in the event of any risk, there are many stakeholders that become affected, it is right to say that a health and safety management system in museums would be a highly decisive factor in determining the kind of competitive advantage that museums create for themselves. In the advent of public media popularization of vents that happen across the globe, it is virtually impossible to think that a type of health and safety risk will be recorded in a museum like Art Modern for this to go unnoticed in the public domain. Health and safety management system is therefore necessary in any museum, including Art Modern to ensure that the welfare of the people who form the stakeholder base of the companies are protected as well as the corporate image of the various museums. Proposed health and safety management system for Art modern The proposed health and safety management system to be outlined for Art Modern is one that shall be described as a process system rather than an event system. What this means is that the health and safety management system would be part of a long term strategic plan to ensure growth and development through improved health and safety standard. As a process, the safety and health management system would be undertaken or delivered through phases or stages. A guiding principle in the allocation of tasks within the system shall follow the principle of working from known to unknown and from the least to the highest. A vivid breakdown of what is expected in the proposed system is given below: Phase 1: Risk Identification and Assessment: This is going to be the stage where inherent risks within the organization are going to be outlined and critically assessed according to the level of risk it posses to the organization. Phase 2: Assignment of Risk Owners: Depending on the label that is given to individual risks, there shall be the assignment of each risk to a risk owner. The duty of the risk owner shall be to undertake further critical study of the risk to come out with potentials interventions in handling the risk (quote). The wisdom in having risk owners is that it is going to ensure that there is the efficacy of treatment given to each form of risk. Phase 3: Setting of Risk Appetite: By risk appetite, reference is being made to the allocation of risk targets to each form of risk. At this stage, the risks that shall be dealt with shall be those that are coming as products from the risk owners. These risks would therefore be of less harm than they were initially identified because they shall have accompanying control mechanisms attached to them. Phase 4: Evaluation of Mitigating Controls: leading up from the risk targets set, there will be accompanying effective mitigating controls for each form of risk. Risk mitigation shall basically concern strategies and approaches designed to make the effect of risks less devastating. For example with the identification of the risk of injuries and illness, there could be a mitigation control that looks at the opening of in-house clinics within the company to offer comprehensive first aid to victims of various forms of health and safety risks. Phase 5: Assessment of Residual Risks: there is the likelihood that the mitigation control will not cover all areas or aspects of risks. To this end, there will be residual risks. Though residual risks are generally containable and less harmful, they still deserve assessment to identify if there are any means of mitigating them all together (quote). Once such mitigation approaches are found for the residual risks, the approaches become incorporated into the larger risk management system Phase 6: Control Implementation: having critically diagnosed and assigned mitigation plans to all forms of risks, it then becomes time to implement the controls. To make the implementation more effective, it is important to ensure that they are carried out on a departmental basis rather than assigning all of them to a single individual. What is more, it is important to make the health and safety management system a continuous system so that on a daily and constant basis, the cycle will be repeating its self (quote). Review of previous incidence with the exhibitions 2 - 167 There have been previous incidences with exhibitions before, which borders on various aspects of health and safety guidelines. Reviewing these incidences will be highly useful for future decision making processes. In this regard, the following paragraphs are dedicated to critically reviewing the incidences to understanding the technicalities involved with each of them. The first incident is one that could be traced with a number of components and dispositions. Generally, the incident could have been said to be a result of leadership crisis as there was massive disregard for opinions and views coming in from staff of the company to the management. The facts of the incident have it that the museum was previously using scaffolding for climbing purposes from the down flowor to the top flows. Management however felt that the processes involved in the use of scaffolding was slow and so was preventing management from getting the needed number of exhibits it wanted to host in a day. Management therefore took a decision to change the scaffolding system to a mobile elevated work platform. But right at the time that the elevated work platform was put in place, workers made complains to management about the risk involved but trusting their risk assessment, management said the risk assessment had confirmed that the elevated platform was okay. Analytically, it would be said that the fact that management had undertaken risk assessment did not give them justification to abandon what was being said by the staff. This is because risk assessment is expected to be a continuous process and so what was being said at the very stage should have been taken into consideration as the neglect eventually resulted in a fall by a visitor. In the second incident, The last incident is such that, Analysis of the risks involved and legal interpretations in the various incidences with the exhibitions 2 Judging from the first incident, there are a number of risk involvement discussions and corresponding legal interpretations that can be given. In the first place, the risk of the visitor falling and breaking her hand can be classified under injury and illness type of risk. In such forms of risks, there is often physical pain caused to a part of the body (quote). Legally, the art gallery will be said to be involved and possibly surcharged for further legal hearing if the injury or illness resulted within or as relating to the premises of the art gallery (quote). From this perspective, it would be said that the art gallery is directly involved in the risk of injury that happened to the member of the public because the accident happened while the member of the public was using the company’s mobile elevated work platform. What is more, this health and safety risk happened while the member of the public was part taking in an exhibition put together by the art gallery. The company therefore has a legal premise within which to give an account. In terms of the actual legal interpretations however, it would be said that the company has some level of justification in pronouncing its self innocent. This is because there was a sign that was indicating to the member of the public how the mobile platform should be used but the member refused to obey the instructions. In this however, the visitor could again raise a defense in the absence of a tour guard to guide her around the premises. In conclusion, it would be best for the art gallery to seek for an arbitration settlement on the case Proposed management schemes for previous incidents 2 Legal perspective of health and safety in art gallery Art Gallery’s position in law ----appendix-----Pragmatic actions for future installations 3 Conclusion Read More