Why practice is as important as planning when it comes to safety

Back in May, I talked about why following the rules doesn’t guarantee a safer workplace. I pointed out that while rules guide what’s right and wrong, they can also create a situation where people assume any behaviour that isn’t breaking the rules is fine.

That’s not necessarily a recipe for a safer workplace. It’s more likely to create a situation where their people focus on doing the minimum, rather than acting safely.

Plus, are you going to create a rule for everything? If you try to, you won’t get improved safety, just bloated safety systems. This is one area where less really is more.

When rules are obstacles

It’s also important to remember a related issue: that employees will only follow rules to the extent that they are convenient.

Most people show up, do their work as effectively as possible and go home. If an obstacle stops them from doing that, they will look for a shortcut or way to circumvent it.

When that perceived obstacle is a rule intended to keep workforces safe, that’s a major issue.

The problem with punishing rule breakers

So, what should we do in that situation?

One option would be to censure offenders. After all, if the rule is there to meet a regulatory requirement, the business could be non-compliant. Why shouldn’t we punish people who not only jeopardise the safety of themselves and their co-workers but impact the company as a whole?

This approach rarely works in the long term. Compliance might improve, but employee engagement will decrease. When workers know they’re going to be punished for breaking rules that disrupt their daily activities, morale takes a hit. Plus, it entrenches the view that safety is about following rules.

How we focus on safety as practised

Before I go into a feasible solution, I want to make one point clear: there are some things that we need to enforce. What we’re discussing is not an agenda for ditching the safety case. We need to embed a collective understanding of how to operate safely.

But for that to happen, every organisation needs to:

• Make the safety case suitable, proportionate and realistic
• Recognise that other measures are needed beyond the safety case. That means building safety thinking in day-to-day activity, not just relying on rules

That means that, as leaders, we should focus on safety as practised and not just safety as planned. The objective must be to make working safely the easiest way to work.

There are three steps to achieving this:

• Design the safety case based on insight into work as practised, not work as imagined. Make it a collaborative process, involving the frontline who will have to follow the rules as part of their daily work
• When employees are going to be inconvenienced or hampered by rules, limit those regulations to the big risks where they are absolutely needed
• For everything else, such as smaller routine risks or dealing with the unexpected, we must focus on building the right culture, which is about integrating safety thinking in day-to-day activity

Safe and effective

The point of this is to embed safe practices into the flow of effective operations. As the maxim goes, “A task done properly is a safe task, but also an effective task.”

Embedding such a safety culture creates the kind of engaging, productive environments that people want to work in. The sort of workplaces that deliver great business results and support employees.