Perceptions can affect the sustaining and continued improvement of the safety culture. These perceptions are based not only on the current opinions about the role of safety management held by leadership and employees but include perceptions based on what has gone on in the past, how your predecessors managed themselves, and how safety-related criteria were communicated in style and message. Organizations are not static and are constantly in flux and change. Therefore, safety is not something that is static. Safety is an emergency property that is determined by an ever emerging set of organizational and environmental conditions. It is essential that you fully understand the environment you are in and how to approach and communicate with leadership and employees. To accomplish this goal, you must understand the current perception that your organization has about the role of safety. This chapter will help you to develop a personal working definition for âsafetyâ, understand why perception is important for the safety culture, identify ways you may be perceived in the organization, and identify perceptions about safety and how to shape those perceptions.
Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.
âWayne W. Dyer
Introduction
The development and sustaining of an organizationâs safety culture requires a multi-disciplinary approach that entails understanding the work environment, perceptions about safety, compliance, basic safety management systems, human error performance, communications, etc. For a safety culture to be developed and sustained, the leadership team and employees must change their perception about safety itself and the management system.
Organizations are not static and are constantly in flux and change. Safety management desires stability and wants to build processes that are permanent and unchanging. This sets up an adversarial relationship.
Safety is not simple! It is complicated, as it is a complex network of many business skills and psychological and scientific interactions combined with internal and external resources. Safety management and a safety culture requires following a âLong, Hard, and Winding Roadâ (Pearse, Gallagher, & Bluff, 2001). Improving the safety culture is also dependent on your sphere of influence within the organization and how well networked you are into the organization.
The extent of safety-related information readily available from many resources (Internet, government, professional associations, media publications, etc.) has created an environment in which organizations cannot be excused for not knowing or finding content regarding safety-related issues. We have found through experience that we have shifted from being the sole primary information resource to expanding into researching, teaching, and mentoring how to deploy a safety management system and ensure safety information is utilized.
If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.
Ancient Chinese proverb
The need to shift from a loss-based safety process that uses injury data to drive decision-making to a risk-based approach that decreases the probability of severe loss has been advocated in safety management systems such as ANSI Z10-2012.
We believe in the need for the safety professional to not only be proficient in hazard and risk control, but to understand the impact of communications, social networking (not just the Internet), and the perception of safety when presenting a case for the safety culture to the leadership team.
When this chapter is completed, you should be able to:
⢠Develop a personal working definition for âSafetyâ.
⢠Discuss why perception is important for the safety culture.
⢠Identify ways you may be perceived in the organization.
⢠Identify perceptions about safety and shaping those perceptions.
Defining Safety
Let us start by covering an issue that impacts the safety culture, namely the definition of safety. The assumption is made that everyone understands the term âsafetyâ, but that is not necessarily the case. If a safety culture is to be sustained or developed, a mutually agreed upon definition is needed for the term âsafetyâ. While this may seem to be unnecessary, a second look shows that after all these years, a clear concise definition is still debated and discussed. If an organization is working with multiple definitions or vague concepts, then the potential for improving the safety culture is reduced.
Dictionary definitions for safety include:
⢠âSafetyâ(1) The quality of being safe; (2) freedom from danger or risk of injuryâ.
⢠âSafety: the condition of being safe from undergoing or causing hurt, injury, or lossâ. (Safety, n.d.)
These definitions define safety in terms of itself and imply safety is something you know when you see it. They do nothing for determining latent hidden hazards that may be a high risk with potential that has not as yet been identified. A better definition is:
Relative freedom from danger, risk, or threat of harm, injury, or loss to personnel and/or property, whether caused deliberately or by accident.
(Safety, n.d.)
ANSI/ASSE Z590.3â2011 defines safety as âfreedom from unacceptable riskâ with risk defined as âAn estimate of the probability of a hazard-related incident or exposure occurringâ. Hazard is defined as âThe potential for harmâ (âPrevention through Design Guidelines for Addressing Occupational Hazards and Risks in Design and Redesign Processesâ, 2012). These definitions from Z590 for hazard and risk allow for a relative level of risk acceptance as a practical matter. A higher risk can be acceptable as certain jobs or tasks retain an element of risk even after intense efforts are made to mitigate or control their risks. Examples range from firemen, police, astronauts, race car drivers, stuntmen/women, and so forth where the risk is considered acceptable by society to achieve a goal or necessary or desired activity. High risk must be evaluated and controlled to the degree possible to ensure all feasible protective devices and procedures are effective. We discuss the concepts of risk perception in Chapter 9, âRisk PerceptionâDefining How to Identify Personal Responsibilityâ and the concepts for risk management in Chapter 10, âRisk Management Principlesâ.
Lesson Learned # 1
A colleague and risk control consultant, William Montante, has asked supervisors and managers over a number of years to define safety in supervisor training classes and presentations. He cites William W. Lowrance from âOf Acceptable Riskâ (Lowrance, 1976) that âmuch of the widespread confusion about the nature of safetyâŚwould be dispelled if the meaning of the terms safety were clarifiedâ. Lowranceâs definition for safety is âA thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptableâ (Lowrance, 1976). âSafety is that state of being when risk and the hazards derived from it are judged acceptable or in controlâ (Montante, 2006). The issue of defining safety is not new!
Montante has been given dozens of definitions for safety. In an article for Professional Safety (Montante, 2006), Montante listed responses from 130 safety leaders within one organization. The definitions he received include:
⢠Preventing accidents or injuries;
⢠Freedom from harm or injury;
⢠Being safe;
⢠Being aware of your surroundings;
⢠Not getting hurt;
⢠It is number one;
⢠Following procedures and rules;
⢠It is a state of being;
⢠Looking out for each other;
⢠Complying with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA);
⢠Going home the same way you came to work.
Montante states, âsimply put, safety is no more and no less than a condition or judgment of acceptable control over hazards and risk inherent to what one is doing at a point in time or chooses to do at some future point. That state of being can be personal or a reflection of the business culture (our italics)â (Montante, 2006).
To better align a definition of safety with an emphasis on hazard and associated risk, Montante suggests that safety be defined more in terms of hazard control: âReplace the traditional mantras of âSafety firstâ, âThink safetyâ, and âSafety is your responsibilityââŚStrive for the personal and organizational mastery where each âhazard control managerâ can state with confidence and certainty that s/he intimately knows safety and how s/he and the company manage controlâ (Montan...