Safety Differently - a paradigm shift or an evolving change?

In recent posts, exploring this question has been about facilitating a conversation about what organisations and the research community are learning when they apply Safety Differently in their context.

So far, we have discussed three core ideas:

Work is the driver of safety performance, not the other way around.

People are the solution to harness, not a problem to control.

Safety is about positive outcomes rather than the absence of negative outcomes.

In this post, we look at safety as a shared responsibility rather than a bureaucratic activity.

For many organisations, the bid to ensure compliance generates an unintended and unwanted consequence, causing a stifling and costly bureaucracy. Gary Hamel asks the question, if we know bureaucracy is so damaging and costly, why are our organisations so riddled with what he calls “bureausclerosis”?

He argues in part the reason is because, “we’ve been insufficiently honest about the cost of bureaucracy, insuf­fi­ciently brave in confronting those who defend it, and insufficiently creative in crafting alterna­tives."

The then UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, made the bold statement in 2012, ‘businesses are in the stranglehold of health and safety red tape... We are waging war against this excessive health and safety culture that has become an albatross around the neck of businesses.’’

The direct and indirect costs are well documented in Australia and across the globe, but what is often not talked about is the impact this has on those who lead and execute the work.

Here are a few thoughts on what transpires:

Workforce disengagement
Reduced innovation
Diminished decision-making ownership
Laying of more processes and procedural requirements
Adding checkers to check the checkers
Loss of confidence
Increased employee turnover
Diminished wellbeing
Productivity and efficiency losses

So what might organisations do to counter this burgeoning safety “bureausclerosis”?

One way forward is to embrace through the Safety Differently lens the practice of safety being a shared responsibility.

So what does this look like when applied:

1. Leaders focus on understanding normal work, the things that help and hinder work, and work proactively to set people up for successful work.

2. Leaders embrace the practice of forward-facing accountability, where they hold themselves accountable for setting up the conditions for successful work.

3. People are invited to be collaborators and decision-makers, where trust is valued and exercised.

4. Autonomy is welcomed and encouraged, which leads to greater accountability and ownership for the decisions made and the results that follow.

5. A work management system is adopted, integrating safety into the work processes rather than being a standalone system or bolt-on requirement.