De-Cluttering Safety

In recent publications, Professor Drew Rae and Dr David Provan have raised the idea of looking for clutter or “safety waste” in our safety programs. This search looks to find those elements of our procedures that inefficient or provide no actual benefit to health and safety. 

It raises the interesting question of where, within our safety process, do we go back, and re-visit established safety policies, procedures, and checklists to see if they are still relevant and work for safety?

Most systems do have a review process to check currency every 3 to 5 years, but these tend to focus on the process, checking dates and references all still line up, and rarely question if the whole document is still fit for purpose and the right solution for whatever problem they’re trying to solve. 

• Does the problem the process was designed to address still exist within the business, or has so much changed that it is now obsolete? 

• Does it still provide a benefit or just what we’ve always done?

This situation also speaks to a cultural behaviour within the safety profession, where it is ‘safer’ to add new controls, processes, and increase the number of rules for safety than it is to take something away, or to stop doing something which no longer provides a safety benefit. Most companies feel nervous about stopping any safety initiative eg electrical test and tag, even though pre-use visual inspection has been shown to be more effective for safety, but lacks evidence for corporate lawyers.

So how can we begin to clean up “Safety Clutter”?

Set a clear purpose for all elements of your safety program, which is part of your review process, and a trigger to check the purpose still aligns with your organisations needs.

Ask your staff questions like “what is the thing you do for safety that provides the least benefit?” or, “if you could choose one thing to change for safety what would that be?”  These steps could help you identify elements which might be out of alignment with your current needs and could be improved or removed.

Sometimes you need to remove an obstacle to move forward.