How to remove the need for safety policing from your workplace… Part I

As safety professionals, we’re sick of being the safety police. 

It’s a pretty unpopular role to play, and we know that telling people off to get ‘conformance’ to rules has never fixed the underlying issues.

Is there a better way? How do you get the engagement you want so you never have to police rules again?

The answer is in two parts. The first is peer to peer accountability. The second is removing blanket rules (in an upcoming blog post – watch this space).

Peer to peer accountability is how the All Blacks handle their sticky issues. It’s encompassed in their No Dickheads philosophy.

In order to expect people to take self responsibility as individuals and teams though, we as organisations and safety professionals need to hand the ownership to them.

And that involves us letting go of control. 

In a recent safety role, I took the unusual position of refusing to tell a single person off for any safety breach. At first, this may sound irresponsible on my part, but hear me out.

I accidentally did tell someone off once, out of habit, when someone had their safety glasses on their head while doing a task that wisdom would have said the glasses were better worn.

The moment I told them off, I realised what I’d done, and retracted it by apologising for my policing behaviour. Then I left them to it, so they could make their own decision.

You would have thought this approach would have created anarchy and lawlessness. Quite the opposite, people became more responsible. 

They had to think for themselves. Something our current safety regimes don’t always encourage.

We did have a knarly issue of the use of some machinery that the young guys enjoyed hooning on. "Who wants to go for a spin in the carpark" type style. (Who wouldn’t)?

Again, I refused to tell people off or impose rules. Instead I told the team they had to sort out the problem. Curiously, they then asked my advice on how to do that.

I talked about the All Blacks approach. Get the person’s peers together and explain why the hooning behaviour is letting everyone down. It was, they kept getting in trouble over it.

To be honest, I couldn’t believe it when the hooning problem subsequently went away entirely. I don’t even know the conversation that happened between them.

What do you do though when you see an unsafe behaviour that isn’t mild (forgetting to put safety glasses on being relatively minor).

Perhaps something slightly more unwise, such as blowing yourself down with compressed air. In this case, I simply checked if the person knew the risks. It turned out they did. 

This is the tough part. If they know the risks, then hand back ownership for their safety to them. Let them wrestle with it. Self agency is a powerful motivating force.

Engagement improved in this organisation to levels I’d never seen. But I had to let go of control. My own fear of something going wrong, or getting into trouble if it did.

Because in the long run, everyone taking ownership is a FAR better long term strategy for a safer workplace.

Step out of your comfort zone, try it and you’ll see what I mean.