Are You Doing Enough? A Leadership Perspective on Preventable Incidents
Summary: Genuine workplace safety goes beyond paper documents and legal compliance. Is your organization genuinely safe? Is leadership doing enough to ensure workers and visitors are not at risk?
Business owners and executives of high-risk industries tend to have something in common: the dangerous assumption that they are doing enough to keep workers safe by meeting basic requirements. This assumption is typically built on a foundation of what is clearly visible. This includes the official safety manual, regular employee training, and a dedicated compliance officer ensuring the organization meets OSHA and industry standards.
Unfortunately, things that are visible usually pertain to compliance only. But being compliant and being safe are two fundamentally different things. Compliance is the starting point. It is the baseline. It’s also the bare minimum required by law. Being safe is about risk control. It is a conscious decision made by company owners and executives, a decision followed by action.
April 28 is Workers’ Memorial Day in the U.S. We encourage organizations in high-risk industries to honor those who have lost their lives on-the-job by scheduling and implementing a leadership audit. The truth is that many of the most serious workplace injuries and deaths occur within organizations that were compliant on paper. As such, preventable accidents are not normally the result of too few rules. They are almost always the result of leadership gaps, poor execution, and a lack of accountability.
The ‘Good Safety Program’ Illusion
As experts in workplace safety, we often observe a disconnect between an organization’s safety program and the reality of the plant floor or job site. This disconnect results from the illusion of safety.
On paper, everything looks good. Owners and executives see written safety programs and completed training logs. They see, and even participate in, toolbox talks. But in practice, things could be quite different.
On the plant floor, supervisors may be cutting corners in order to meet production deadlines. Likewise, workers may be adopting what they feel are common-sense shortcuts to save time. On the job site, supervisors start looking the other way in order to keep things on track. Meanwhile, hazards both on the plant floor and at the job site go uncorrected. “This is how we’ve always done it” is often the explanation.
Business owners and executives need to understand that when OSHA arrives for a post-incident inspection, they do not look at paperwork and call it a day. They also scrutinize enforcement. For example, a safety manual is worthless to an inspector who witnesses a foreman allowing workers to bypass tie-offs despite the company’s official 100% fall protection policy.
Proper safety should never be an illusion. It should patently combine written policy and effective action demonstrated on the plant floor or at the job site.
Why Accidents Still Happen
In the workplace safety consulting space, we like to say that accidents are predictable. This is because they tend to follow verifiable patterns. Most accidents are also preceded by ‘near misses’ that were ignored or completely written off.
Accidents leading to serious injury or fatality typically stem from one of three leadership failures:
- Risk Normalization – When a shortcut does not produce incidents over time, it could easily become the new operating standard. Leadership begins accepting small deviations from established safety procedures – at least until a serious incident takes place.
- Production Pressures – If leadership signals that the production schedule is more important than the process, even to the slightest degree, safety could be compromised. It often is.
- Delegate and Forget – Leadership is prone to the unsafe practice of delegating safety to a single person or department and then forgetting about it. Delegate and forget is an invitation to safety that is siloed rather than being a core cultural value.
A candid leadership audit reveals these failures and their daily consequences. An audit also gives company owners and executives an opportunity to correct failures before a disaster occurs.
Identifying Leadership Blind Spots
Overcoming the illusion of safety and leadership failures must include identifying leadership blind spots. Like the blind spots a truck driver needs to account for, leadership blind spots increase organizational risk. Here are a few examples:
- Historic Tunnel Vision – Leadership can develop historic tunnel vision when they rely too heavily on lagging indicators like TRIR and EMR. These are lagging indicators because they only reveal what happened in the past. Good numbers do not necessarily equal low risk. They could just be the result of dumb luck.
- Lack of Visibility – What goes on in the boardroom tends to lack the context of the plant floor or job site. If leadership isn’t seeing work as it is being performed, they lack the visibility necessary to ensure that processes, systems, and equipment are safe.
- Lack of Accountability – Safety rules must be enforced uniformly. If enforcement is selective, an accountability gap emerges. This leads to a level of inconsistency that can destroy an organization’s safety culture.
Although leadership blind spots are common, they are not necessary. They can be identified with an audit and corrected with policies and verifiable actions.
What Doing Enough Actually Looks Like
Doing enough to keep workers safe is not a one-off exercise. It is not a destination to be reached. Rather, it is an ongoing process of risk management and policy evolution. It requires shifting an organization’s focus from compliance-only to compliance supported by field-level implementation and execution.
Doing enough includes:
- Giving persistent attention to high-risk tasks.
- Monitoring both leading and lagging indicators.
- Equipping supervisors with the training and authority they need to maintain safe environments.
In the weeks leading up to Workers’ Memorial Day, we hope your organization’s leadership will honestly assess its ability and willingness to prevent accidents. We encourage you to consider the following in observance of this annual day:
- Conduct a safety walk by getting out of the office and going into the field.
- Choose at least one high-risk task and determine whether written procedures are being followed.
- Speak with your workers, asking for their input on the biggest risks they face.
- Work with supervisors to ensure they are held accountable for safety.
We also encourage you to contact Compliance Consultants for a FREE safety audit. We can help you transition paper compliance to real-world safety that actually prevents accidents. We can also help you develop a comprehensive safety program if your organization currently lacks one.
FAQs
Why isn’t OSHA compliance enough to ensure safety?
OSHA compliance focuses on meeting a basic set of legal standards. Genuine safety goes further by turning compliance into real-world action.
What is the illusion of safety you refer to?
The illusion of safety is the belief that an organization is doing enough. It is the result of a disconnect between documented safety policies and the reality of the workplace.
Are lagging indicators misleading in terms of safety?
Yes. By nature, these indicators only reveal what happened in the past. They do not differentiate between genuine safety and dumb luck.
How do leadership failures contribute to a lack of safety?
Leadership failures, like risk normalization and a lack of visibility, prevent company owners and executives from seeing and understanding the realities of daily work. They are in no position to ensure safety because they don’t know what it looks like.
