Why Employers Consciously Decide to Permit Risky Situations While Ignoring Solutions?
The last two blogs have focused on why employees, despite knowing policies and processes and even paying attention to them most of the time still consciously choose to take risks. The next question that should be considered looks at the flip side, “Why companies/CEOs/directors/managers, even if there’s great evidence that safety solutions are cost effective, will lead to more productivity and profitability, consciously decide to ignore those solutions and continue to permit risky situations?”
A common perception regarding management’s view of safety is that is rational, solely built on numbers. If it’s profitable they will do it and it’s not they won’t. Well, there are other reasons why management may not consider work design changes. The first reason may be guilt. I realize this first one may be difficult to believe at first glance but think about it from a C-suite point of view. You are the CEO who has operated the company the same way for a long time knowing and accepting the risks involved. So what happens if I convince you, the CEO, of the need to change something that is cost-effective to prevent a certain kind of accident or error? Now all of a sudden you have to acknowledge that your “inactivity” resulted in all of the previous issues. That can be a very heavy burden to bear or a huge blow of the egos for some people, especially CEO-types. If you’re the CEO and I come along with a solution that will resolve 90% of the incidents & errors and has an ROI in less than two years then you may believe all of the prior accidents were due to your stupidity and now it’s your fault. That’s a tough pill to swallow and some will avoid doing so to avoid looking “stupid”.
Another reason safety ideas may be shot down is that they are related to safety. Safety unfortunately is the “ugly duckling” of organizations. Safety people generally have lower salaries that operations, finance and company decision makers so there may be a sense, perhaps unconsciously, that safety ideas are simple, low level stuff from “simple, low level people”. Certainly that’s not true but the perception exists. Many people think safety is simply “common sense” however common is not common. Being good at safety and at the same time being good at efficiency or productivity is not common sense. It may not take an MBA, but it does take theory and understanding of human factors and ergonomics to make effective and sustainable change.
The last reason I’ll cover management’s perception that employees are expendable. You might think this could never be true. Unfortunately experience has shown me that while it certainly isn’t common, it does occur. In this case management believes they can simply replace employee if they get hurt. Or, on a similar line of thinking, management may think spending more on safety is pointless as the company already trains, trains and trains employees but they just don’t pay attention and still get hurt. They are just careless—lack common sense, nothing can be done—injuries are inevitable so why bother. Can you imagine a CEO/CFO saying this same statement if the company lacked the desired profit margin or if sales wasn’t meeting its goals? Of course not! The CEO/CFO would insist on making work process changes to achieve the desired result. However, their perception and expectations of safety is not at the same level as operations and sales. They don’t automatically see the direct correlation between safety, efficiency, productivity and the bottom line.
Key take away: Management doesn’t always view safety “rationally” nor do they perceive it to have the same value as operations. Relating and proving the interconnectedness of safety to productivity to employee engagement is necessary to overcome most resistance form management. However, if management has a “guilt complex” even then the business case for safety and productivity may not be enough.