Safety Professionals – We Are Our Own Worst Enemies

New article from Rockfordgreeneinternational’s Blog. and well worth a read

Extract:

“Making the workplace safer and improving overall working conditions is difficult, but the greatest threat to worker safety may be the very people charged with protecting workers. While safety professionals whine about the lack of leadership support, chase every safety fad that rears its expensive head, raise their voices in righteous indignation at the lack of a safety culture, and grouse about workers not being held accountable for their own unsafe acts people are dying.

Of the four biggest challenges facing the Safety profession today, the safety professional is a significant contributor to each:

1. Viewing Safety as The Lack of Injuries. Picture a job being performed, any job. At what point are you prepared to pronounce that job completely safe. Before you answer, recognize that if you are wrong you face criminal charges and personal civil penalties……

2. Fads, junk science, and quackery. Perhaps far more than any other industry, Safety has never met a hair-brained scheme that it didn’t absolutely adore. Providing safety solutions is big business, and since safety is the relative risk of an injury, and since the probability of injury can never be reduced to absolute zero, providers of the latest magic bullet can always shrug off failures as a statistical outlier, anomaly, or just plan bad luck. ………..

3. No common language, professional qualification, or understanding. About two years ago someone in one of the safety forums posted a simple question: What is the definition of the term “hazard”. The ensuing hundred-odd responses consisted of spirited debate, hurled insults, intelligent arguments, churlish bellyaching, insightful observations, and childish name-calling. ………..

4. Pursuit of the impossible. Seemingly daily, someone finds a new way to argue that if we are going to be successful in making the workplace safe we have to change the “safety culture”. I have worked in organization development and culture change and I am here to tell you: the vast majority of safety professionals (both internal and external) aren’t qualified to create a safety culture……..

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: Rockfordgreeneinternational’s Blog