What if we could make sure that every person we met on site went home fit and well, every day?
It sounds like an obvious ambition for anyone working in health and safety. But achieving it may require us to challenge some of the ways we have traditionally approached risk.
Across construction, enormous amounts of time are spent producing RAMS, procedures and other documentation describing how work should be carried out safely. Those documents are reviewed, approved and briefed to the people doing the work.
And yet unsafe practices still occur.
Perhaps, then, the question is not simply whether we have told somebody how to work safely. We also need to ask why somebody might choose not to.
Look beyond the unsafe act
Imagine walking onto a site and finding someone standing on the top tread of a stepladder.
The immediate response is easy: stop the work and provide more suitable access equipment. We might check the RAMS and remind the worker of the agreed method.
All of those things may be reasonable, but they miss an important question:
Why did the person choose to work that way in the first place?
Anyone who has carried out accident investigations will recognise the principle of repeatedly asking “why?” until the underlying causes begin to emerge. The same thinking is useful before an accident occurs.
Perhaps the correct access equipment wasn’t available. Perhaps returning to the depot to collect it would mean several hours of lost time. Perhaps the job was under pressure. Perhaps somebody previously improvised in exactly the same circumstances and nothing bad happened.
In those circumstances, simply instructing someone not to stand on the top of a ladder addresses the behaviour, but not necessarily the reason for it.
Risk often starts long before the task begins
And this isn’t particular to any one trade. The same pattern can be seen across construction: the unsafe act we encounter on site may be the final link in a chain of perfectly understandable decisions.
What we sometimes describe as “unsafe behaviour” can actually be the predictable consequence of decisions made hours, days or even weeks earlier. A lack of planning, unsuitable equipment, incomplete information, unrealistic time pressures or poorly coordinated work can leave the person doing the job having to solve problems in the place where we least want them solved: at the point of risk.
Traditional metal roofing provides a good example.
The work brings together many familiar construction hazards, including work at height, roof edges and fragile surfaces, manual handling and hot work. It can also involve wind acting on sheets, sharp edges and swarf, awkward materials and existing materials such as lead or concealed asbestos-containing products.
Now consider a team arriving on site with material that has been prepared on the basis of the information available beforehand. Once at the workface, an awkward interface turns out to be slightly different from what was expected.
Measuring begins again. Then marking out, trimming and checking. Off-cuts accumulate. Tools spread around the work area. Fifteen minutes becomes thirty, and thirty minutes becomes an hour.
Nobody has deliberately behaved recklessly. Everyone may genuinely be trying to do a good job.
But work that should primarily have involved installation has gradually become measuring, setting out and fabrication in a location where exposure to risk is much greater.
Meanwhile, other pressures begin to appear. Access equipment may be booked for a limited period, other trades may be waiting, the weather may be deteriorating and everyone wants to finish the job before leaving site.
Suddenly, the conditions in which workarounds and compromises occur have been created.
The example happens to involve roofing, but the same principle can be found throughout construction.
The electrician who discovers that the specified cable route won’t work. The maintenance engineer who arrives without the right access equipment. The groundworker who finds an unexpected service. The installer whose components don’t quite fit the opening. The worker asked to complete a task with equipment that is nearly, but not quite, right for the job.
In each case, it is tempting to focus on the decision the worker eventually makes.
But perhaps we should look further upstream.
Was the unsafe act really created by the person carrying out the work, or was it the foreseeable consequence of the circumstances we created for them?
That distinction matters. If we only correct the behaviour, we may solve the problem for the next ten minutes. If we understand why the behaviour made sense to the person at the time, we have a chance of preventing it happening again.
What leaders tolerate becomes normal
There is another problem with concentrating solely on paperwork.
An organisation can have an impressive health and safety policy, professionally written RAMS and third-party accreditations. But workers will ultimately judge its commitment to safety by what actually happens around them.
Imagine being told that safety is the company’s number one priority while knowing that the equipment needed to do your job properly isn’t available, or that completing the job quickly takes precedence when pressure increases.
Which message will you believe?
This is why I often come back to one phrase:
Every time a leader walks past something that is below standard, they set the new standard.
Leadership is not demonstrated principally by what an organisation writes in its policy. It is demonstrated by the decisions its people see being made.
Even subtle differences in language matter.
Compare “I want you to work safely but get the job finished by Friday” with “We need to get this job finished by Friday, but it must be done safely.”
The ingredients are almost identical, but which message makes the priority clearer?
Give people permission to stop
Good systems and equipment still aren’t enough. People must also feel able to challenge what is happening around them.
The important lesson isn’t simply that workers should be more careful.
We should be asking what makes it difficult for somebody to say“stop”.
People may worry about delaying colleagues, disappointing a client, being seen as difficult or simply letting the team down.
That is where psychological safety becomes relevant.
Psychological safety does not mean everybody feels comfortable all the time. It means creating an environment in which, when somebody says“this isn’t right”, the first response is curiosity rather than criticism.
People raising genuine concerns should be regarded as contributing to the success of the job, not obstructing it.
Make the safe way the easy way
Perhaps there is a simpler test we should apply when developing risk controls.
Having identified the risk, rather than demonstrating how knowledgeable we are by listing every control imaginable, ask:
Can the people doing the work actually use these controls easily?
Is the correct equipment available?
Are the materials where they need to be?
Does the workforce understand the precautions?
Are those precautions practical in the environment where the work will actually take place?
And, crucially, is following the safe system easier than finding a workaround?
The same principle applies to documentation. A COSHH assessment can have all the correct information and still fail in practice if the person using the substance cannot readily understand what they need to do to protect themselves.
Paperwork matters, but paperwork is not the outcome.
Safe work is.
Leadership. Culture. Simplicity.
If we want to improve safety further, I believe three things deserve particular attention.
Leadership: business owners, managers and supervisors need to demonstrate through their decisions that safety really matters.
Culture: teams need to develop shared expectations about what they will and will not accept, supported by sufficient trust for people to challenge poor practice.
Simplicity: we need to design work so that people have the right equipment, information, training, time and support to do the job properly without having to fight the system to do so.
The aim shouldn’t be to produce ever more complicated safety arrangements.
It should be much simpler than that “Make working safely easier than not”.