The Narcissism of Safety

Ever been to a party and got stuck with the drunk who keeps repeating themselves, or worse the person who’s evidently done too much cocaine and talks about themselves for hours? Well… That’s safety! It’s the sound of the safety profession and it’s obsession with safety. Safety talks, safety walks, safety moments, safety conversations, safety stand downs, safety culture, safety, safety, safety…

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been on an accountancy amble, tax tootle, stock stroll or a wastage walk. The only walk I want to do is the Lambeth Walk or perhaps the Harlem Shuffle. The conversations I have are just that, conversations. They don’t start with safety, I want to understand employees’ workloads, pressures, challenges and how they are getting on in their roles.

It’s about time we drop the safety this and safety that. I can’t think of another profession that repeatedly rams the point home about what they do. We must sound like a broken record or a deranged cult. Perhaps it’s time to change the record? To focus in on our people with empathy, care and compassion. To drop safety from being the first word on our lips. Perhaps it’s time to stop being so evangelical about safety? Perhaps it’s time to stop using the S word (thanks Zoe) and start focusing on engagement with our people, on alignment with organisational missions, visions and purpose. For some this will sound like a revolution but for thousands of safety professionals out there, this will resonate with their current operating mode.

There is a lot being made about the recognition of the OSH profession and OSH professionals post pandemic (if we are even post pandemic). How businesses have suddenly woken up to the fact that OSH is a critical element of sustainable business. I read such an article this week and winced. This is not a critique of the author but the concepts and principles, or perhaps more accurately how we articulate the benefits of OSH. The article “4 elements of a new health, safety and wellbeing transformation” presents four elements that are reasonable: Integration, Simplicity, Focus and Agility.

Integration: Safety not being a bolt on, but an integrated function of sustainable business isn’t anything new and nobody is going to argue that OSH should be an enabler rather than a function of friction.

Simplicity: isn’t a new concept either. This was well in play before the pandemic as the modern OSH professional looks to reduce the ambiguous and complex safety systems to focus in on critical risk mitigation and drive performance improvement.

Focus: Weaning the profession away from managing noncritical risks, again isn’t new and is fundamental in helping businesses to understand the value of OSH professionals, it’s also key in making the OSH professionals job achievable.

Agility: Safety needs to match the agility of a modern workplace. Again, the OSH professionals I know and respect, have been on this track for quite a while now, flourishing in their organisations and their organisations thriving as a result.

So, what’s stuck in my craw? Well… it’s the benefits. It’s this constant parroting of stronger legal compliance and better business performance or worse “good business sense”. These phrases miss a few critical factors.

It assumes that the law is fit for purpose and designed with the health, safety, and wellbeing of the human at its epicentre. We’ve seen organisations comply with regulations to enable them to build cheaper, less protected and ultimately unsafe housing. We see organisations not designing out risk and being reliant on PPE, we see a race for cheaper products and wider profit margins where the legal noncompliance is outsourced.

That somehow legal compliance is an aspirational goal to be proud of, some form of differentiator and not the baseline to which businesses should operate from. We must move the profession away from the simplicity of legal compliance. We must move the business world away from stronger legal compliance being a lofty aim. It should be a given. In focusing on striving for legal compliance, we limit growth, development, and continuous improvement. If we want the OSH profession to be future fit, amongst the uncertainty and complexity of the world of work, then it must bend, flex, push and pull its way to the centre of business performance. It must add value, it must enable people to become their very best. Focusing on human performance, maximising potential, enhancing health, wellbeing and enabling people to take that out of the workplace into their homes and communities.

Better business performance or as I read in People Power “good business sense” grinds even more. It has no depth, no reference, no definition. It is perfectly feasible to see how a decision could be made that is abhorrent to people’s health, safety, and wellbeing, if it quadruples an organisations profit margin, if we’re measuring business performance by profit.

The narrative needs to change. We need to focus on people and the intrinsic value of people to the sustainability of businesses. We need to create environments that are physically and psychologically safe, where organisations encourage people to thrive, becoming their best version. Where the benefits of work and working for an organisation equally benefit the employees and their organisations and that the impact of work is positive on the environment, local and global population.

That’s all I’m asking for. A better sales pitch for OSH. One that’s ambitious, that puts people at the heart of OSH, that recognises sustainable business enables people to perform at their best.?