How do you take the next step with a real solution in a market that pays lip service to progress, but acts against change? One of the most significant challenges we have faced, throughout our history, has been a basic problem not unlike the Catch-22. Unlike that paradox though, the challenge of creating an actual safe outcome in a workplace is less paradox than it is an expression of indifference. Walk into any workplace and you can see posters declaring “safety is number one,” and a slew of similar focused posters that we can call proclamations to avoid anyone observing we did nothing practical the last fifty times someone slipped and fell. You can also hear people, who lay claim to being managers, spouting terminology-soaked mantras about safety, such as “zero incidents is our goal,” and making assertions such as “we have a world class safety program.” And yet, the same accidents occur with a regularity, across industries, that puts these lies to shame, and most of the people making such statements haven’t even a vague idea if their training is relevant.
Part of the problem with changing a culture of indifference is that they are so often supported by so many words. How can you argue wonderful ideals like the one stating a goal is to have zero incidents? Sure, you can observe how many dead bodies these mantra-heavy firms have generated in a given period, but that comes across as unpleasant, and indifference has the side-effect of creating a habit of deflecting, often while spewing self-righteous anger. The barriers raised by that approach benefit no one.
A more problematic part of the problem is that scale kills, often literally, because executive suites have almost no contact with the operational context that creates danger. It’s fairly easy for even an honest executive to drum the mantra out in speeches when they are ignorant of the real risks to their company, their workers, and their reputations. Even where legislation makes it clear you can’t defend yourself by claiming ignorance, ignorance remains blissful. How does the conscientious executive have a clue they are ignorant? And once they find themselves embroiled in a mess, what benefit comes from flogging them for being isolated to a degree where they really had no clue?
Indifference is engrained by three things: ineffective management, ineffective communication, and ineffective solutions.
Managers generally don’t wake up in the morning and cheerily whistle a death march, hoping to kill a few dozen employees, and yet people die every day because of poor management, and that management failure always starts at the top, where the culture is defined. Create a culture where questioning the dictums of superiors is frowned upon, and no one will question the decisions that cost lives. Create a culture that generates open discussion about decisions, and lives are saved.
But even effective managers can be undone by ineffective communications. Even if all the right messages are being generated, are they arriving where they need to arrive? Would that Chief Executive who barks about being a world-class safe workplace actually make that statement if they had access to real-time, reliable metrics about safety states? Or would they blanch and ask the hard questions about why so little of what is actually happening operationally is being reported? And if they did, would they get the answers or just raise more questions?
At the end of the day, what really highlights indifference is not an individual attitude, but that the “solutions” simply aren’t solutions. They are, almost always, reactions to unexpected risk encounters. When someone falls off a catwalk and died, as happened in Toronto, Ontario, just the day before Christmas, what is the outcome? An inquiry, maybe a fine, and perhaps more…but those four people remain dead. And regardless of the inquiry, they remain dead because the risk was unmanaged, meaning that no matter what “solutions” existed to manage those risks, they failed. They failed because people are indifferent, and systems built by indifferent people generate indifferent systems.
Maybe the culture of indifference is a form of Catch-22, since it reinforced itself.
Breaking the culture of indifference is about taking actions that have measurable outcomes, not about littering hallway walls with posters people notice the day after a disaster. It is tantamount to stringing a yellow warning tape around a construction site, and referencing it as being in place the day after a piece of falling board crushes a child. Words are no defence against reality; words are no proof of diligence; and words do not, ever, speak beyond actions.
Indifference is why many workplaces expend enormous resources on addressing minor concerns, having bizarre safe practices that go beyond rational sense and subsequently miss obvious, highly dangerous risks altogether. The number of times one can review a practices manual and find pointless drivel like warning against spinning in office chairs is stunning, especially if you do it the day after an untrained employee kills or injuries another worker using a forklift. This happens because of the attitude that says, “this paperwork is necessary to meet regulation B,” and because that slack effort absorbs so many resources the other “minor” details slip through unnoticed – like the untrained summer student being in the wrong place at the wrong time and ending up in a six-foot deep hole because of it.
Another Catch-22…which isn’t so much true, as the excuse for not acting to achieve a safe outcome in the first place.
Until safety is viewed as what it really is, which is a by-product of proper management, words will defy achieving safe workplaces. People will drown in verbiage without ever even asking if the cost of those words is abysmal, repetitive, preventable failure.
The first step to embracing real operational risk-management is recognising that actions are the only measure of commitment.
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