What is Safety? A Lacasse Safety Consulting Introduction
I’d like to thank everyone who visits the website and indulges in my ramblings about Health and Safety. We will be providing a bi-weekly Risk Tolerance series for the first 10 weeks, and then transition to a monthly blog after that.
For the many reading that do know me, you know I will always be myself and many of the blogs will provide technical information, but I will always have an opinionated piece and even the odd personal story. Blogging is about speaking you mind, and who knows, if I want to be completely technical there may be a book in the future. I encourage feedback and would love to hear any feedback from clients, safety personnel and friends.
As noted on my website background page:
“What is Health and Safety? Some believe it is the emotional component of bringing all workers home safe, some believe it is a method of disciplining employees when they do something that has created risk to themselves, coworkers or the organization itself, and some believe it is a stack of paper that sits on the edge of some desk.”
The term Safety will mean different things to everyone, and to me it means just that, a term. Safety doesn’t have an underlying meaning to me, safety is an aspect of business, a term no different than finance, human resource, sales.
Associating safety with an emotion or a driving metric in organizational success does have its place and will provide many with satisfaction, but is “Safety” really the driving factor for morals, employee wellness, or organizational success?
What if someone said “My business is so safe we had zero injuries this year”, what would your reaction be? Would you want to work there?
What if the same person said “We had zero injuries this year, but we had a bobcat flip over, three employees quit, zero near miss reports, and a record low in sales”. Would your reaction be different?
Finally, what if another person said “We have had a few incidents this year but implemented process to reduce severity, gather input from front line staff to improve those processes, reduced absences, and we just implemented 5% raises”
Nobody wants to get hurt at work, at home, or out skiing, so safety should be about education, learning, reducing risk and reducing severity of outcomes and not a slogan for marketing purposes.
I hope that through my consulting journey I can provide clients with tools, information and processes to both be in compliance with regulation, but also provide an outlook on what safety is and how having good business practices in turn can produce a safer environment for their workers.
Lacasse Safety Consulting
Ryan Lacasse, CRSP