Brei Richardson
One thing I have learned throughout my career in safety is that checking the box and controlling the risk are not always the same thing.
We can hold the safety meeting, complete the inspection, document the risk assessment and close the corrective action. All of those things are necessary, but at the end of the day, I still want to know: Did any of it make the work safer?
That question has become an important part of how I lead.
Over nearly two decades, I have worked across construction, oil and gas, specialty chemicals, industrial gases and now glass recycling. The industries have been different, but one challenge has been remarkably consistent: organizations can have good systems and still experience incidents.
I have seen situations where the procedure existed. The employee had been trained. The required documentation was completed. On paper, everything appeared to be in place. Yet when you get closer to the work, you may find that a condition changed, a hazard was underestimated, or the control simply was not as effective as everyone thought.
Those experiences taught me to look beyond whether the process was completed and focus more on whether it worked.
Getting Closer to the Work
In glass recycling and other complex industrial operations, work environments are constantly changing. We have mobile equipment, conveyors and processing equipment, maintenance activities, material handling, changing environmental conditions and the pressure to keep operations moving.
A procedure cannot anticipate every condition an employee may encounter.
That is why I believe some of our best safety work happens in the field.
When I am in an operation, I want to hear from the people doing the job. I want leaders asking employees what can hurt them, what has changed and whether the controls we put in place actually make sense for the work being performed.
"I have focused much of my leadership approach on helping operational leaders move beyond asking, ‘Did we do it? and toward asking, ‘Did it actually reduce the risk?”"
Sometimes the answer is not another procedure. Sometimes we need to stop, reassess the task, involve the right people and fix what is creating the exposure.
That sounds simple, but it requires a culture where employees know they can speak up without being viewed as difficult or as slowing down production.
Safety Has to Be Owned by Operations
Another lesson I have learned is that the safety team cannot own safety by itself.
We can provide expertise, identify gaps, challenge decisions and help build the systems. But the culture employees experience every day is largely shaped by their operational leaders.
People pay attention to what their leaders tolerate.
If an employee raises a concern, what happens next? If someone stops a job because conditions have changed, does the supervisor support that decision or immediately focus on getting production moving again?
Those moments tell employees far more about an organization's safety culture than a poster on the wall ever will.
This is why I have focused much of my leadership approach on helping operational leaders move beyond asking, ‘Did we do it? and toward asking, ‘Did it actually reduce the risk?’
What I Would Tell Other Leaders
My advice to other leaders is not to choose between compliance and culture. We need both.
Strong procedures, training, inspections, risk assessments and accountability give us the foundation. But we also have to stay curious enough to challenge whether those systems are producing the outcome we intended.
Go see the work. Talk to the employees who are doing it. Ask what has changed. Listen when someone tells you a control is not working and when an employee stops because something does not feel right, make sure your response reinforces that decision.
Most importantly, do not let a completed form give you false confidence.
The measure of a safety process isn't whether we completed it. It's whether the risk changed because we did.
For me, that is what moving from compliance to commitment really means.
