5 Huge Mistakes that Safety Professionals Make

I’ve never been a believer that Safety Professionals, on their own, have the ultimate responsibility for a workplace’s safety performance. I do, however, believe that they are definitely an important piece of the equation and can contribute immensely to a company’s overall safety culture. That includes both its improvements, and unfortunately, its demise.

Let’s take a look at 5 huge mistakes that Safety Professionals can make that have undesirable effects on a company’s safety culture and performance.

Implementing Safeguarding Controls That Don’t “Match” The Hazards

The extent of a hazard can vary dramatically depending on several variables. These variables include the probability of the hazard contributing to an incident and the severity of any injuries that might occur. This means that some hazards can contribute to minor injuries that are unlikely to occur. Other hazards can contribute to very significant injuries that will almost certainly occur.

The level of protection that a safeguarding control provides should always “match” the hazard that it’s intended to mitigate. Simply put, a pair of gloves doesn’t “match” the hazard of an easily accessible shear blade that an employee is frequently exposed to on a daily basis.

Equally, a complex electronic interlocking device is most likely not the correct safeguarding measure for a hazard that can result in a broken finger nail.

Comprehensive risk assessments should be conducted that include safety professionals, supervisors, hourly workers and safety committee members (and other relevant parties) in order to determine risk. Once risk is accurately determined, coming up with the correct safeguarding controls that “match” the hazards will be much easier.

Assigning Blame and Fault to Injured Employees

It’s doubtful that any safety professional or competent investigator would dispute that when an employee becomes injured in the workplace, they have in some way, contributed to the incident.

Does this mean it’s their “fault” or that they’re the ones to “blame”? Absolutely not.

Having investigated, researched or reviewed literally thousands of incidents, it’s been easy to conclude that the vast majority of incidents don’t occur due to a single factor. Most incidents are the result of several factors “coming together”.

And here’s the shocker; the source of these contributing factors are not always the injured employee. What?!

That’s right. Coworkers, Supervisors, Managers, Contractors, “The Company” and many other sources can, and usually do, contribute variables that result in most incidents.

Unfortunately, a culture of blame still exists in many organizations to this day.

Investigators within these organizations will seek out the factors that injured employees contribute to incidents, and when they find one or more, they’ll call these “root causes”.

Even though this is terrible because it’s damaging to the culture and workers end up feeling targeted, the damage extends beyond that. In many, if not most of these cases, the investigation ends when the investigator prematurely believes that the “root cause” has been determined. This means that other factors get overlooked or completely ignored. The sources of those factors, including coworkers, supervisors, and managers, are never held accountable for their contribution to the incidents, and corrective/preventive measures are never appropriate.

This results in absolutely zero improvements in incident rates and the same types of incidents happening over and over again.

Incidents should always be followed up by examining all factors, not just those contributed by the injured employee. Furthermore, the sources that had the most control over those factors must be identified in order to determine appropriate corrective and preventive measures.

Being a Safety Cop

One of the quickest ways Safety Professionals can trivialize their importance is to be a “safety cop”.

What’s a safety cop? You know, that person that angrily walks around the work site looking for employees not wearing their PPE. They do the death stare and point-to-eyes-motion every time they find someone not wearing their safety glasses.

Just to be clear, I’m in no way suggesting that workers should be allowed to freely contravene safety guidelines without consequence. It’s just that being a safety cop is not the best solution and results in diminishing the true importance and function of a Safety Professional’s duties.

I definitely agree that enforcement is an extremely important component of a successful safety program that ensures accountability, but promotion needs to come before enforcement. Also, I’m a firm believer that enforcement shouldn’t come from a safety professional.

Here’s why.

Safety professionals typically are not the ones with the most authority over the workplace and do not regularly give direction to workers. Managers, and more specifically, front-line supervisors are the ones who do give regular direction to workers and have the most authority over the workplace and what goes on in it. It’s for this reason that enforcement measures taken by direct supervision are typically more effective.

If there must be safety cops, supervisors are the logical candidates.

Making Commitments They Can’t Keep

As safety professionals, we’re usually juggling more “requests” than a popular radio station DJ. Depending on your industry, company culture and a few other things, many of the requests you receive can be non-safety related and even completely unreasonable.

I remember several years back an employee approached me who was seemingly irritated and immediately proclaimed that he had a very serious “safety issue” that he needed to report. It turned out that he was very unhappy with the selection available in the vending machine and demanded that it be replaced with “better stuff” at once.

Too often, Safety Professionals make commitments in response to these requests that they’re unable to keep. (There are several reasons for this, but I’ll save that for another blog post).

I know it’s tempting to give a neutralizing response such as, “I’ll look into it” or, “we’ll take care of it”, but why do so if you know that nothing actually needs to be done? Saying your going to do something and not doing anything is much more damaging than being up front and clear from the beginning and saying that nothing needs to be done.

If you get a request and you’re certain that it’s non-safety related, irrelevant or that it just doesn’t require any sort of action, tell the requester that nothing will be done. Be assertive and clearly explain the reason why no action is necessary or why the concern is not safety-related. It may seem that the requester is initially irritated with you, however, being frank will usually result in long-term benefits including increased respect and a reputation for being straight up and direct.

Failing to Include Employees in Hazard Assessments and The Implementation of Safeguarding Controls

Several years ago, I worked as a machine operator on a production line. I remember coming in to work on a particular afternoon shift after I’d been working at the company for about a year. Upon arriving to my workstation, I observed several changes to the layout as well as what appeared to be newly installed physical guarding. There was also one extremely pissed off day shift operator.

After asking what was up, the day shift operator asked if I had any involvement or provided any feedback that might have resulted in the changes. “Nope, none whatsoever”, I replied.

Immediately after, he let me know that he also was not involved with the changes and that he didn’t even know that they were taking place.

To make a long story short, not a single operator was given the opportunity to be involved with or provide feedback regarding the changes that were made. Further, the changes turned out to be completely ineffective and resulted in some significant disruption to the operation, issues with future maintenance of the equipment, and unnecessary animosity with the operators.

All of the issues could have easily been avoided if the operators were included in the identification of the hazards and the determination of the most suitable types of controls to implement.

Here’s the bottom line. If you want to adequately identify hazards and come up with the best possible solutions to a) improve safety, and b) eliminate or significantly reduce any potential for operational delays, include the people that use the equipment every day – the operators! These employees are experts, and in nearly all cases, know the equipment better than anyone else.

Conclusion

There you have it. A short, but significant list of mistakes that Safety Professionals can make that are detrimental to an organization’s safety performance and culture.

What other common mistakes have you seen that didn’t make the list? Let us know in the comments!