Why employees still might consciously choose to take risks? Part 2

Why employees, even when they know the safety policy, they’ve been properly trained in the policy and even paid attention to it, still might consciously choose to take risks?  Part 2

In part 1, we focused on mixed messages from management as the reason why employees still take safety risks despite knowing better.  In today’s blog we’ll look at the common human factor for why employees take risks and ignore safety rules—Risk Perception.  Simply stated, employees don’t perceive what they do to be risky or on the flip side, employees are overly cautious about their job to the point that they almost panic about it.

For the former, nothing in the employees’ experience has shown or taught them that their actions are risky and could result in a bad outcome.  They’ve been doing “it” several years and nothing has ever happened before.  For the later, those employees tend to avoid taking precautions because if they do they would have to admit the job they are doing scares them.  They don’t want to do that so to stay in denial they avoid doing things safely.

You may be wondering why this happens?  People try to achieve the optimum level of risk in their lives that works for them.  We all differ, some want more risk, i.e. the bunging jumpers, and some want no risk, i.e. the ones the drive under the speed limit and take side streets to avoid as much traffic and potential for accidents as much as possible.  We organize and plan what we do at work and home to keep that comfortable risk level.

For instance, people who are tree climbers are pretty risk tolerant compared to most.  You really can’t have a climber who doesn’t like a fair amount of risk in his life.  Management may introduce various risk control measures or procedural changes to make the job safer.  But that may backfire as if the job now feels safer than the employee wants then he is going to find some way to alter his behavior in that tree to get the risk back up to where he likes it.  The implication of this is the following:  If you want to make the job safer in ways that work, then you have to make it invisibly safer, i.e. use human factors so the employees don’t know or have a choice to work any other way.  This is best way to “force” an action or a behavior as simply being a part of their job instead of telling and training an employee to do or behave a certain way and hope they follow through.

Key take away:  The problem with most safety policies and training are that they are based solely on training-behavior—and not on work process design.  When this is the case, the work system is obviously flawed and needs a redesign that embeds the desired action/behavior.

Before concluding, I want to briefly mention another issue that may be a contributing factor for employees to consciously choose to take risks.  This issue is related to employee morale. If employee are not engaged and don’t feel valued by their employer they are more likely to get hurt.  If the work environment is perceived as stressful, unpleasant and possibly hostile then employees are less likely to pay attention to safety.  In this case management doesn’t pay attention either.  It’s a self-enforcing cycle.