In the safety profession, rules get the spotlight. Compliance is usually what our programs are built on. But if you look deeper, you’ll see what safety should actually be built on: Risk!
Understanding that risk is the real foundation of every safety program and safety decision (whether you realize it or not) is how you move beyond compliance.
This graphic that I put together illustrates my point more clearly.
It’s often said that rules are written in blood, as if this is some sort of justification for us to put all our attention and training on the rules and enforcing employees to follow them. But if you look deeper, it’s risk that caused the bloodshed. So the rules are a result, not the foundation, and not the thing that needs to be addressed first.
Even good rules are only trying to control a risk. The risk was there first. Risk is the place to start, and yet it rarely gets talked about or trained on. Instead, what usually happens is we make a rule that may or may not control a real risk and then we put all the training and attention around ensuring that employees follow that rule.
It often feels like we have rules for everything. But even with all these rules, they rarely cover every risk that our employees will face.
We try to use rules for everything to keep our employees safe, but they don’t really connect with our employees and they often aren’t understood. Risk, however, is already experienced by everyone, every day. It’s also easy to understand, and once you understand the concepts, you not only see it everywhere, but you start to address risk much better (including following administrative controls such as rules).
Rules and compliance are difficult to measure and improve for numerous reasons. One of the simplest reasons is that we can’t observe our employees all the time. Risk, on the other hand, is easier to measure and score. We should even teach our employees to measure it themselves. Then we can all track improvement together as we see risks being identified and controlled.
Rules are impossible to remember. There are already tens of thousands of individual safety rules. Nobody can reasonably be expected to remember that many rules, let alone follow them all perfectly. To make matters worse, we continually add or change the rules, which further makes it impossible to remember. But risk is impossible to forget because it is always around us. We constantly see and evaluate risk, consciously and subconsciously, everywhere in our daily lives.
Rules training, where we try to cram those thousands of rules into our employees’ heads, is often ineffective. It’s boring and easily forgotten, and this shows up when we go out to observe employees and find them not following the rules they were just trained on. But if we teach them about risk, and how to evaluate and control it, it becomes much more practical and useful because it applies to every part of their work and their lives. When people see, hear, and experience stories and examples of real risks, it sticks in their memory much better than rules do.
This kind of risk training enables employees to make better risk judgments in the future and this shows up when we go to observe and have conversations about the risks of the work our employees are performing in the real conditions they face.
I think it’s time for the safety profession to move beyond compliance, look deeper, and start basing their safety programs on the true foundation for safety: Risk!
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