Are we safe?

Are we safe? It’s a question that I have been asked more times than I can remember. The question comes from workers, supervisors, managers, and even those in the C Suite. My answer to that question has changed over the years as my experience and competence have grown.

Like most of you, my first thought is—Of course we’re safe! However, that question carries a lot more inferences than a simple yes or no answer.

They have you!

How can the company not be safe? They do have you after all. A company with an experienced health and safety professional tends to be safer than one without one. Exempting industries where the work is low risk in nature. Being asked if the company is safe is often taken as a direct personal challenge, and of course, the answer must be – absolutely!

That is a strange question

As I progressed in experience, I came to think—Why are they asking me that question? Have they seen something that makes them believe the company is not safe? Has a recent conversation with the client implied there is a problem? Do they have a problem they want to talk about? To be honest, in most cases, it was to reveal something unpleasant.

What did they mean by safe?

I know what being safe means. The problem is that everyone has a different definition and a different viewpoint. I recall a time when the health and safety department reassured a major company CEO that everything was fine, only to be hit by a rash of fatalities. The CEO ended up resigning some time later. Sometimes executives seek reassurance that everything is “safe.” Most of the time, they don’t really know what that means, but something has prompted the question. I could get into a philosophical discussion about whether “safe” means an absence of incidents or negative outcomes, but that’s an article for another time.

Are you really supposed to know the answer?

Depending on your view of the role of the health and safety professional, it is questionable whether or not you should really know the answer to that question. For example, the health and safety function is an advisory one. Health and safety professionals help create a safety system and verify its effectiveness through inspections or other means. Regular reporting would be provided to management and senior management on the functioning and effectiveness of the health and safety system.

Looks safe

This scenario reminds me of one I’ve seen in a movie. The antihero is the only one who can see in the dark, and all the characters are trapped on a planet where it’s dark and full of hostile aliens. The characters approach a crashed ship, and the antihero surveys the inside, saying, “Looks clear.” An alien explodes out of the dark and startles the group. One of the group accuses, “You said clear!” The antihero responds, “I said it looks clear.” When the same person asks how it looks now, the antihero shrugs, “Looks clear.”

Being safe is a lot like that. Everything looks safe until there’s a negative outcome or an incident. The incident is investigated, and action is taken. Once again, everything looks safe.

Health and safety people can’t see in the dark. They are not clairvoyant and have a limited ability to determine whether things are “safe” at any given moment.

The answer

As I said at the beginning, my answer to this question has changed over the years. In the early years, when I was asked if things are safe, I would respond unequivocally with—absolutely! I often felt that I was being asked if I was being effective in my job.

In later years, I would respond with the question. I would ask that person why they are asking that question. The response would often be— “Well, you are the safety director/manager.” I would often point out that that person was in charge of those people and responsible for their welfare, and so they should know the answer to that question far better than I would.

Even later, I found that question rather annoying. I thought it implied that things were not safe or that I was not doing something I was supposed to do. I also found it annoying because it implied that I was responsible for the company’s safety performance. That is very far from the truth. I would have that question posed to me in meetings, and even just as someone was passing by. I thought it showed a shocking lack of understanding of how the health and safety function works, and that person’s responsibility for safety. It reminds me of a time when I was interviewing for a job as the safety director at a company, and one of the questions was how I would promote a “total safety culture.” I asked the panel interviewing me what they thought a total safety culture was or what that might look like. Crickets.

My current answer to that question became – don’t you know? That led to some interesting conversations. I am reminded of the CEO who believed the statements from their health and safety department, even though everything was not fine. There has to be some trust there, but it’s like claiming the company is exercising “Due Diligence.” Can you really tell? I wrote an article all about the compliance trap and whether it was possible to really determine if the company is “Duly Diligent.” When it comes to health and safety, it sounds simple. However, like most things in health and safety, it really is complicated.

The question is a red flag

If you get asked – Are we safe? That should worry you. Being asked such a question demonstrates that someone thinks the health and safety people are somehow in control of their health and safety. That also means they think that you, as the health and safety professional, are responsible for the health and safety of everyone and the health and safety metrics. That is probably one of the reasons why you should never take credit for health and safety successes, as you’ll also be blamed for the failures.

The question implies a completely unreasonable expectation. As the health and safety manager or director, you do not have any special insights into how well the company is performing in terms of health and safety that a manager or supervisor should not have. You may have some data that they don’t have, but if it’s trending in the wrong direction, you should have already shared that with someone. Data trending in the wrong direction doesn’t necessarily make a powerful argument for action.

Why don’t they know?

If someone at the company is asking you if the company is safe, it begs the question – Why don’t they already know the answer? In many cases, I find that they have been misled. They’ve been told by someone some of the big health and safety lies. They’ve been told that the number of near misses is low and that is directly related to the number of serious incidents. They’ve been told that health and safety is easy and completely uncomplicated. They have been told that workers are primarily to blame for incidents. They’ve been told that implementing special rules with zero tolerance has made them safer.

What you end up with is a C-suite that doesn’t view safety as a profession that relies on hard data, but rather as a profession that relies on whatever data they can get. They have the impression that certain activities will lead to incidents. Certain activities may reduce incidents, but the key question is what sort of incidents are you trying to reduce? Maybe CEOs need a bit of re-education. I shudder to think that some organization will come up with a health and safety boot camp for CEOs to spout the same platitudes and incorrect assumptions that misled them in the first place.

The information and feedback provided by the health and safety department are often not very useful to senior management. Although I’ve been saying it for a long time, it finally appears that people are recognizing that injury rates and lost-time rates, amongst other metrics, are completely meaningless.

Most feedback to senior management involves quoting these meaningless rates, which gives them no useful information on which to base decisions. Can we really blame them if they happen to stop the safety director in the hall and ask if the company is safe? They probably really don’t know. How can they be sure that the health and safety system is operating effectively? It is surely possible to do that. However, almost no one does that.

So, how would I answer this question today? That is not a simple one. Usually, I would say something like—The identified risks appear to be mitigated to a tolerable level.

Are you safe? Looks clear.