Why Should Managers Care about and Invest in Safety

1 Why Should Managers Care about and Invest in Safety  

Most managers do care about safety. The problems usually arise because of misunderstandings about what is required to achieve high safety levels and what the costs really are if safety is done right. Safety need not entail enormous financial or other costs. 

A classic myth is that safety conflicts with achieving other goals and that tradeoffs are necessary to prevent losses. In fact, this belief is totally wrong. Safety is a prerequisite for achieving most organizational goals, including profits and continued existence. 

The conflict myth arises because of a misunderstanding about how safety is achieved and the long-term consequences of operating under conditions of high risk. Often, with the best of intentions, we simply do the wrong things in our attempts to improve safety. It s not a matter of lack of effort or resources applied, but how they are used that is the problem. Investments in safety need to be funneled to the most effective activities in achieving it. 

Sometimes it appears that organizations are playing a sophisticated version of Whack-a-Mole, where symptoms are found and fixed but not the processes that allow these symptoms to occur. Enormous resources may be expended with little return on the investment. So many incidents occur that they cannot all be investigated in depth, so only superficial analysis of a few is attempted. If, instead, a few were investigated in depth and the systemic factors fixed, the number of incidents would decrease by orders of magnitude. 

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