The changing face of safety: Lessons learned at an industry safety forum

Safety is evolving. Protecting the environment, plants and – crucially – people, remain the top priority, but how that’s done is always changing and improving. As business leaders, it’s our responsibility to monitor and adapt quickly. As someone put it during a customer’s recent global supplier safety forum: “Safety doesn’t just happen – you have to make it happen.”

The forum, which I attended, was an excellent opportunity to consider new thinking on safety and how practice is changing. Three things stood out for me.

The first was an increasingly broad and demonstrative concern and care for employees’ well-being. A “culture of caring” was mentioned more than once during the conference.

In part, that’s probably down to the pandemic. It has changed working methods – in many cases for the long-term. Practices like virtual risk assessments, audits and walkdowns, for instance, may need further refinement, but they’re likely here to stay. Increased use of remote working in the industry and across economies has put a focus on issues such as mental health. That focus is – perhaps belatedly – being brought to areas such as offshore work. Long hours and worker fatigue, too, are now being talked about more.

This culture of care starts at the top and then cascades down organizations. To take another comment from the forum, “Safety results are a result of where we, as leaders, put our focus.”

Building an open organization

While the concern for employees’ well-being is increasingly broad and holistic, the focus on mitigation efforts is increasingly laser-like. There was a clear message from those presenting that organizations are intent on drilling down to, identifying and reducing the most significant risks: Those putting lives in danger or risking serious injury.

That doesn’t mean ignoring minor incidents and injuries. But it does mean recognizing that consequences matter. As a result, some are working to simplify overly complex controls and standards to focus on metrics that reflect outcomes. It’s not about making compromises but recognizing that rules don’t determine safety – practice does. Appropriate responses can yield better results than strict enforcement.

As one presenter put it, when people make mistakes – and they will – you can learn, or you can punish. It’s difficult to do both. Taking too hard a line on minor infringements can actually discourage people from speaking up and prevent managers from understanding how work happens on the ground. A more open, cooperative approach means “silent deviations” – those gaps in good practice that have grown to be tacitly accepted over time – are more likely to come to light.

We need to encourage a speak-up culture.

Integrated answers

And that relates to a final lesson I drew from the event: Operators and technology providers accept that to really have an impact on safety, they need to fix the work, not the worker.

The focus on keeping people safe means a focus that can’t just be on people. The way people work and the interaction between personnel, technology, processes, and the wider organization determine safety.

For us at Honeywell Process Solutions, that’s not news. We’ve long been converts to integrated solutions that connect people, processes, and equipment. But our safety mindset has to go even further.

Organizations need to understand these interactions and examine them – even when injuries are not happening. We need to ask workers what they need, not tell them what they should have, because the people you’re trying to protect also have some of the best insights into what’s likely to work. And organizations also need to pay attention to the context of events. We have to understand how operations, processes and culture contribute to the actions that directly cause safety incidents.

That will require a team effort. Those within organizations and those they deal with outside need to work together – and we all need to listen and learn. As someone else at the conference said, no one has all the answers, but collectively we might.

Learn how to prepare your workforce to meet both today’s and tomorrow’s productivity and safety challenges from this Digitized Workforce Management ebook.

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