For the record, if you are new to the SAFTENG family, I despise the mantras “Safety is #1”, “Safety is our top priority”, etc. It is a nice thing to say, and most of us know it is said often; but what does it mean?
My favorite example of how these mantras cause confusion, which leads to loss of credibility and trust in the workplace, is when a legitimate hazard gets identified; safety assigns a high-risk to the hazard and then provides sound safety engineering options to control the hazard through the Hierarchy of Controls (e.g., using science in safety) and then management then decries it is not within the budget. Wait – so safety is not #1? Budgeting trumps safety? Impacts on operations/production have to be considered?
This is the real world – this is WHAT WE ARE PAID TO DO – MANAGE safety so that the business can be SUCCESSFUL in its core purpose, which is NOT safety.
Risk is everywhere, and we are paid to manage that risk(s) without putting the business out of business. For us, as safety professionals, our professional careers revolve around the following:
- Identifying Hazards in the workplace
- Analyzing those hazards using a recognized methodology
- Assessing and assigning risks to that hazard so that we can put the hazard into perspective, and
- mitigating the risks that hazard poses down to a tolerable level within the business
In fact, the hazard that I used at the beginning of this article may in fact be so low on the risk scale that it may not get addressed properly and fully for months. But when workers HEAR “Safety is #1” and they SEE the low-risk hazard that is impacting them go unaddressed, our explanation to the worker will often fall on “deaf ears” and this will negatively impact the trust and credibility amongst the workforce. Do this often enough and impacting many workers, we will have dug a hole that will be difficult to climb out of.
Workers NEED to SEE actions in line with what management is SAYING and when there is a conflict between what is being seen vs. what is being heard, credibility and trust are lost.
