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Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Safety
Can a supervisor or company pour on safety too thickly and end up overwhelming, turning off or angering workers as a result? Definitely, says an Australian psychologist whose session I attended at the 2007 American Society of Safety Engineers' conference in Orlando, Florida. Here are some of the key things I learned from the session.
How Safety Overload Overwhelms Workers
Zara Hart, senior consultant with the non-profit Industrial Foundation for Accident Prevention (IFAP), told her audience that there's a general assumption among safety professionals and companies that you can never stress safety enough. The more you warn workers to be safe and remind them of safety procedures, the thinking goes, the safer the atmosphere you create. However, Hart's interviews with employees suggest a different reality.
Here are some quotes taken from Hart's discussions with workers at a large corporation with a poor safety culture:
"I feel restricted in my human ability to work safely. I am a mature person with a lifetime of experience and my confidence is undermined by the psychological pressure of the safety requirements."
"We are developing a culture of safety where we spend our time thinking about the safety system and devising ways of how to get around this."
"Sometimes safety procedures take away your good decision making and reduce awareness. Rather than looking at hazards, you read the procedure. It takes away common sense."
The Hazards of Safety Saturation
Of course, safety reminders and messages generally do improve cultures and outcomes. But there comes a point at which added efforts fail to improve and can even harm safety results. Hart uses the term "safety saturation" to describe this point. "Safety programs sometimes go bad because they demand too much time, effort and attention," according to Hart.
Using the example of traffic jams, where drivers will lose patience and begin to take chances, such as running yellow lights, Hart says workers can become similarly frustrated with too many safety procedures and too much information. This is especially true if they're dealing with overwhelming responsibilities or feel too pressured to produce, while simultaneously dealing with complicated safety requirements.
At that point many workers will begin cutting corners on safety, either deliberately or subconsciously.
How to Handle Safety Saturation
According to Hart, workers need a balance between what's required for safety and what's provided. "We need to have fewer safety initiatives and more safety interventions."
Of course, that doesn't mean providing too little safety training and waiting for a near miss or worse before intervening. Too little safety is worse than too much. What Hart is suggesting is providing the appropriate amount of information in an easily understandable way - neither too little nor too much.
She suggests that supervisors need to listen to their employees and find ways of simplifying safety to avoid overwhelming anyone. Cutting down on the need for employees to fill out complex and excessive paperwork is a good place to start.
Conclusion
"People can have too much wine, too much chocolate and too much love," Hart said. "Why not too much safety?" A good safety program is important and training is critical. Be sure that information overload doesn't undermine your efforts.
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I am a safety professional and over the years have seen a huge change in how safety is implemented and indeed used (particularly by major clients)to meet their requirements when it suits. My major fear for the future is that we are going to create a vaccum in the area of Supervisor/Manager in skills level. Example - The safety of today allows a Supervisor to be responsible and accountable, but unfortunately without any authority, not even allowed to use their own initiative to solve minor problems, any deviation from a written procedure or work method statement, work must stop, complete re-plan, followed by more approval and in some cases 2 days lost time for something that would have and should have taken a matter of minutes - ever wondered why a gallon of petrol costs so much??
Surely a Supervisor must be allowed some authority, some decision making powers, the key being that they are aware of their authority making limitations. It is my opinion that we will be diluting future skill bases if we do not take a step back now and look at the direction in which we are going.
Equally, today a tremendous lot of Safety Professionals run around taking pictures of unsafe acts and situations and instead of immediately challenging and rectifying the situation, using some mentoring skills, they disappear and send in reports days after the event without even knowing the names of the people involved - Where are we going folks???
Good article.
I'm a safety manager in the construction industry, and I find a lot of times that people are too busy coming up with new safety initiatives, and forgetting what business we're in. The key is balance. I have 5 different companies and consultants doing inspections on my current jobsite. Daily checklists, tool box talks, procedures, and people are looking to introduce more. At a certain point you have to say enough already, I think we're covered.
Highly agree with this approach. Well done.
Can you honestly tell all of us that there is such an approach as "too much safety"? Seems like you are writing this article for the sake of spurring on discussion. Take the example of the NASA Space Program - is there really too much safety built into this program? If there is, what needs to go, where do you start? What are you willing to throw out first and what are you willing to compromise on in order to put a life at risk? Another example is high risk confined space entry - too much safety?!? Hardly! If you are wound up in daily inspections and checklists then look for another position. Safety professionals need to look at "continuous improvement", just as the quality control professionals do when looking at production. If we look at improving training, or how we are delivering the training in order to make it more engaging and workers retain the message and realte it to their jobs or even to off-the-job activites, we have done our jobs. That is not too much - is it? More is not necessarily better - we need to look at the quality of the message and what is happening to the data being collected. Enaging, educating, mentoring and empowering the workers in the field is key. However, what do we do with our mobile, transient and NEW workers. We need to stay on top of this and sometimes too much is not always enough! Chew on that for awhile.
Good safety implementation I think it will boil down to engineering controls. If safety measures are already incorporated or integrated in the design stages of materials, equipment, work areas, and systems, I believe there will be less intervention required to be directed at the worker during the performance of his responsibilities and activities. However, trainings prior, and during the work process are a must but by then it will be less hectic and less demanding to the workers because safety controls are already maximised in place.
Too much safety? Of course you can have too much safety. The danger often is that the messasge that safety rules MUST be obeyed is hammered non stop, however, diffrent people within diffrent departements interpret the rules diffrently.
All the more dangerous is this kind of environment were a company is also pressuring employees to produce more and more, while management does not understand the impact on production that rules can have. The employee finally feels compelled to sacrifice the rules to satisfy his boss' pressure to produce. It works for a while, until the first incident, then the pendullum swings way out beyond reason towards ''too safe'' again.
Were I work we implemented a 6 foot rule for wearing a safety harness. The rules say a harness must be anchored to a engineer approved support point, of which we had none. Now we must erect scaffolds (sometimes 3+ days of work). Now management can't understand why jobs take longer and jobs are often pushed as emergencies to speed them up. I think we can all agree that a planned and scheduled job is safer than an emergency job.
When an employee (in a plant across the country) cut his leg with a knife, ALL knives we immediately banned on every site. The simple act of opening a box went overnight from sliding a sharp blade over the edge of the tape and putting the knife away. To grabbing a metal file and using the sharp edge and tearing it across the tape while the box is wedge against your leg (because we had no knives).
Now for everyone reading this who has worked with tools, which way is safer to open a box? I think we can all agree that a sharp knife is the proper tool.
Safety is very personal and makes sense for those who take it so. I do not believe that you can overdo safety. However; I do believe that there are safety initiatives that tend to disrupt the workforce. We must recognize also that compliance with OSHA, MSHA and other Federal Regulators is mandated and effects all our safety initiatives and programs. We know that the majority of accidents and injuries are behavioral based and that leadership plays a big role in safety. If you as a leader believe that safety is over rated or a burden, you need to let someone else make the safety decisions because you are putting production over safety. An effective safety initiative is a result of commitment by the total workforce. Everyone must have a voice in safety and be provided a way to submit safety suggestions for review and implementation if warranted. Without safety feedback from your workforce you are setting the stage for continuous accidents and injuries. With safety feedback you will know exactly what is needed and where. You will enable your workforce to take ownership for their safety and at the same time establish a safety record that will prove safe production is the best production and reducing accidents and injuries is not only possible, but sustainable.