It is a common thing to hear regarding safety in workplaces today… “Own it”. The concept is solid; management wants broad ownership of safety. Safety is NOT safety’s job, after all. But like many safety movements, this one usually fails in significant ways because it takes years of educating and motivating a workplace to accept owning safety broadly. This is talking about organizational values – NOT personal values; we have to first LEAD BY EXAMPLE before people begin to step up on a personal level to own their safety.
But far too often, what we see happening is the organization grows tired of the turnover of safety pros and the different approaches to managing safety by all the new safety pros and decides that they no longer need (or want) a safety pro/team, and instead, they adopt the “we will just share the role of safety via this ownership” approach.
