History of Safety

There are a 101 different perspectives on how to ‘do’ safety. Management consultants provide different perspectives with their own insightful ways into organising and improving safety.? The majority, if not all, aim to improve safety within an organisation by looking at cultural or behavioural improvements.? The reason being pulled straight out of a lesson from history.? You may have been shown a graph of numbers of incidents over a period, often stretching back to the industrial revolution.? This is the history of safety, it shows how the introduction of legislation and safety ideologies have created step changes improvements in safety.

Back in the mid 19th century we saw the introduction of the first safety legislation in the form of the Factories Act which required safeguarding of mill gearing and prohibited the cleaning of machinery in motion.? Prior to this, safety was purely instinctive but now organisations were required to provide engineering controls to prevent accidents.

In the UK, the next step change came with the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations.? This legislation introduces a requirement for risks to be assessed and safe systems to be implemented.? This was the start of the management system and has eventually given rise to a situation which many organisations find themselves in today.? That the safe system is seen as a way of meeting safety regulations.? This has got to the point where organisations find themselves system obsessed, which is especially dangerous when the organisations safety culture is also highly reactive.? This combination will create a situation where, for every incident an additional level of procedure is placed upon the work force.? The worst of these will see an organisation that has multiple procedures and systems relating to the same subject, where organisational requirements often contradict and where the management system or framework has become so cumbersome that it is difficult to find what you need, to the point where employees have started to ignore it, preferring to do what they feel is right than go through all the documentation that makes up the management system.

Management systems did create a step change in the number of incidents and for most organisations any documented safety procedure was better than none.? Most organisations will now find themselves in the bottom of the graph, often referred to as the safety wave.? Where an organisations safety performance is fairly constant with a slight variation in the numbers of incidents.? An incident will occur and the organisation will react to put into place measures to control the risk, bringing the number of incidents down again, then something else may happen and so on.

This safety wave is not just limited to individual organisations but also to wider industry and society.? We have got to the stage where we need another step changing initiative to bring the accidents down any lower.? Many believe that this next step will be made through behavioural or cultural safety.