We began our journey many years ago focused on the idea of hazards, and over time began to reject them as limiting not because the term itself isn’t descriptive, but because traditional safety practitioners had a weird belief that hazards were what they claimed them to be, rather than what the word implied. In essence, the term came to be so restrictive and categorised as to become almost useless as a management tool. And while the best safety managers always viewed this suspiciously, the larger industry embraced the limitations of the hazard to excuse bad practices. We eventually rejected the term hazard not because it was wrong but because it had been co-opted to explain away failures of management. We introduced in its place the more generic term “risk factor.”
Part of the drive to escape the focused term hazard was that because of its common use for so long it had become too subjective. It obscured the fact that operational risk-management was about managing risks, not perceived hazards, which had by the time we walked the path of the risk factor been relegated to symptomatic expressions rather than causal ones. Prosy terminology aside, what we were discovering was that people actually expressed nonsense like “hard hat hazard” as if it meant something intelligent, forgetting that what they were actually describing in such a statement was a control of sorts. How could anyone apply controls to “hard hat hazard?” The obvious one, of course, was “wear a hard hat.” But then you create a peculiarly awkward construct to describe the actual risks someone can encounter, because you are simply stating the control twice in a clumsy way. This imprecision was rendering hazards useless as control envelopes.
Under the changed model we began to construct we used the term “risk factor” precisely. We could then say something like the risk factor is “falling objects.” Part of the control set for that becomes “wear protective headgear.” This separating effect has a further value in that now that we have a generic risk factor for falling objects we can actually describe a real “hazard,” without imparting clumsy associated control. We could say, for example, “This project site has a falling objects risk, and all controls to avoid or suppress that risk upon encounter must be obeyed.” Fancy as that sounds, it is significantly different from saying, “hard hat hazard,” which implies little of value and limits us to a control that is probably always going to be inadequate. There is, in essence, no way to contextually qualify that “hazard.”
Contextual qualification was a breakthrough we all knew about for at least a decade, and one of the dirty secrets of the safety industry. It is what leads to safe practices manuals where the same basic control is listed fifty times under fifty separate hazards. It is what makes managing the documentation almost impossible, and keeping it updated practically impossible. Every time a basic control (wear a hard hat, perhaps) was tweaked, the manual was changed in fifty places or became contradictory. Worse, this lead to improper aggregation of protocols for safety – who wants to maintain a separate manual for every occupation?
By divesting the hazard term, which was really a rejection of how it was being used, we created a model where we could focus on actual risk factors (things that impart risk), and apply controls to them in a rational way. So, in our “falling objects” risk factor, we end up with controls that are far more effective by being rationally comprehensive. We have the standard “wear protective headgear,” and perhaps also “ensure posting signs” (and more) to guarantee when the risk is actually extant the entire spread of controls is applied.
The proof of this semantic shift is easily found in asking a worker one of two questions. If you ask, “What hazards do you face?” the response will be mostly mechanical, and almost never go beyond direct physical risks. Ask them “What risks do you face?” and they will almost always include a broader range of management opportunities. The reason is simply that years of traditional safety has reduced hazards to some specific meaning, and the term risk is considered broader.
Another side-effect of focusing on risk by way of the “risk factor” is that the control sets are not only broader, but the imparting of the knowledgebase is made easier. Worker orientation can be more easily broken into risk exposure based upon demands via job tasking, and even by project sites, etc. So, instead of handing someone the five-hundred page manual they will never read, you hand them a list of risk factors they are likely to face, followed by a reduced list of controls. This reduction comes through both the use of something called synonymous risks, and via the discrete association of controls of like form. Or, in English, if six risks they face require them to wear a hard hat, that control is mentioned once rather than six times under six different sections. Less is more, when the reduced controls focus the workers on actual compliant behaviours.
This also increases the opportunity for competency to generate qualified feedback. A worker exposed to a limited expression of their risks based upon job tasks is going to see the missing elements instantly, rather than have them obscured by five-hundred pages of repetitive drivel. And when seen, the culture that generates job-focused risk awareness will be such that the worker will reveal the deficit, leading to better controls that suddenly express themselves across the entire organisation.
“Hazard” is simply too tired a term to encompass the value found in the idea of the “risk factor.” We abandoned it because it rejects returning maximum value.
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