Spend enough time on an industrial worksite and you’re bound to hear one of these misconceptions about safety. In fact, they’re practically clichés at this point.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of the statements I’m going to cover here. The problem is with the intention behind them, not the literal meaning of the words.
This is how you’re likely to encounter these statements in the wild. And we’ll unpack each to reveal the misunderstandings behind them.
1. “I’ve been doing it this way for 25 years.”
This may be the king of them all.
Dismissive, dangerous, and worst of all, infectious.
This idea is an affront to both safety and the very idea of continuous improvement. And it’s a particularly stubborn wrinkle in workplace safety because it actually sounds quite reasonable.
Safety is an evolving idea. It’s increasingly managed and promoted by younger people in the organization, since it’s a field still in its adolescence.
New knowledge, insights, and the benefit of global communication allow modern safety professionals to adapt controls to their worksites without a local incident necessarily inciting the change. Instead, they can draw on data from across the whole industry and statistics for workers around the world. Without an incident as its backbone, however, it can be hard to see any changes as necessary, especially when they address something that hasn’t happened on a local site and may never have happened over the course of a worker’s entire career.
In other words, they’re being asked to perform an extra step to avoid a hazard that they’ve never personally experienced – to upset a well-worn and incident-free routine.
The problem is this: hazards that are rare in occurrence can still be severe in consequence, and thus present a high risk. Take entering an underground confined space, for example. You could conceivably do this a hundred times – a thousand! – without incident. But if you don’t test the atmosphere and enter one without any oxygen, you could die within seconds. It could be the millionth entry. It could be the first. It doesn’t matter – we have a responsibility to take all reasonably practicable steps to prevent incidents.
2. “Our goal is zero incidents.”
A zero-incident goal is good, but in most cases it’s meaningless lip service.
Now, it’s not like that objective could have a value other than zero. Could you imagine a company boasting about their 4-incident target for the year? And obviously, no one plans for an incident to happen.
But there are still two problems with this statement.
First, it smacks of meaningless corporate platitude that hasn’t engaged with (or doesn’t have within its roster) safety representatives who understand risk. So, it acknowledges that safety is a thing but maybe subtly suggests that the organization doesn’t actually take it seriously. After all, if safety incidents are unplanned events, how does setting a target make any sense?
Committing to take all reasonable actions to prevent incidents would be better. So would a decision to thoroughly investigate and correct conditions that could contribute to incidents. Those are better than setting a zero-incident goal because they’re steps you can actually take.
The second problem is that this statement actually encourages unwanted behavior. Specifically: sweeping incidents under the rug.
When an organization has a stated goal of zero incidents, reporting an incident feels both like putting yourself in the crosshairs and “ruining it for everyone.”
“Days without incident” scoreboards used to be a common sight in factories. Less so now, because it’s commonly accepted that these don’t discourage incidents – they simply discourage people from reporting them.
3. “It’s all feel-good nonsense.”
To be perfectly frank, there are some late-career workers whose contributions are mostly valuable but who can be toxic to safety culture. And then there are some younger workers who take up that mantle.
They won’t change. Some holdouts that will finish their careers without ever entertaining proactive or adaptive change – and spreading a bad attitude about it along the way. This kind of thinking is as easy to incept and as hard to extract as a drop of poison in a well.
Hopefully, this idea will retire with its more dogged adherents. And whatever… they can feel vindicated about it in their retirement.
Any form of loss control governance (the pillars of the greater move toward “sustainability”) are prone to such a criticism. There are many reasons why, but the main ones are that:
- As a formal phenomenon, it’s relatively new
- It mostly addresses things that haven’t happened and may never happen in a given workplace
In fact, the more our safety performance improves, the less apparent the risk becomes. That makes safety seem less important, and then the pendulum tends to swing back with an increase in incidents.
It’s comforting to think that we can overcome this. That incidents will continue to trend downward because of improved worker knowledge, training, and hazard control. But to paraphrase a quote, “no matter how far along the road you go, you’re still the same distance from the ditch.” In other words, the risk of an incident doesn’t disappear the longer you go without one. We have to remain diligent to protect ourselves and others.
Resistance to safety isn’t new, and it must be baked into the governance itself. Expect resistance, and you can surmount it. Fail to account for it, and you might crumble under its pressure.
4. “That wouldn’t happen to me.”
It’s human nature to succumb to this cognitive fallacy, and it takes deliberate thought to overcome it.
In the fledgling years of the safety profession, it was assumed that we could scare workers straight. The idea was that exposing them to incident details, photos, and illustrations would trigger a sense of empathy for their fellow worker and activate their self-preservation instinct. As if watching someone else “pay the price for complacency” would instill a lesson in the viewer.
And while this does indeed have the intended effect, it fades quickly and gets duller with repeat exposure.
It’s also subject to discounting by the viewer. Everyone can pick out a detail from a story or video and pin blame for the incident on it.
“They were really young and probably inexperienced.”
“They were old and stubborn.”
“They’re obviously working somewhere with no regulations.”
And so on. Countless ways of saying, “That happened to them, but it wouldn’t happen to me.”
Blame it on our lizard brains. Our desire to feel safe can just as easily make us discount the risks we face as it can motivate us to work more safely.
But that kind of thinking puts workers at risk. I’d speculate that a good number of serious injuries and fatalities were immediately preceded by someone thinking, “This isn’t like that other cave-in – I’m not spending all day in there, I’m just going in for a minute.” Or, “I’m not going to bother putting on the fall protection gear just to take one step on a piece of plywood – it’s not like I’m working on a high rise without a lanyard.”
Those other victims had similar thoughts, I guarantee it.
Incidents can happen to anyone on a worksite, and the risks shoot up if you’re not looking after your own safety. “It wouldn’t happen to me” is often the first step to it happening to you.
Conclusion
Effective safety management requires a good understanding of human psychology. In particular, how complacent we can be, even when our lives are on the line.
Listen out for these common statements. They’re an indication of where your safety culture is at the moment. It will also show you which ideas you’ll have to work to overcome.
Safety professionals can’t rewire the human mind, but we can work with its tendencies. That starts with correcting these misconceptions.
Ready to learn more? Check out our free webinar on 5 Steps for Implementing Leading Indicators in Construction Safety!
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