When Is Safety an Excuse?

A legitimate safety problem is always a defensible reason to stop work on a specific task or in a specific location. But there are people who seem to find a problem that isn’t really there or who use a problem as an excuse to slack off. How can you tell the difference and what can you do about it?

Whether you’re a supervisor or a coworker, you don’t want people faking a safety concern to avoid work. This corrodes the safety culture while also damaging team performance. On the other hand, you don’t want someone minimizing a legitimate safety problem just so work can continue. That kind of behavior also corrodes the safety culture and can get team members killed.

People are going to make mistakes. The question is what kinds of mistakes do you prefer? Ones where nobody gets hurt or where somebody gets killed?

Let’s say Ron is supposed to change out a motor, but says the motor is too hot for him to work on. Is Ron scamming safety to get out of doing work? You can tell by his next steps. If Ron is not scamming safety, he’s going to find a way to cool that motor or find something else productive to do while the motor cools on its own. If Ron idly sits in the shop to wait for the motor to cool, he’s scamming safety as a work avoidance practice.

Now let’s say Ron needs a 12-ft ladder to complete an assigned task. He can’t find a 12-ft ladder. You’re Ron’s supervisor, and he comes and tells you this. Is Ron slacking? No, he presented a legitimate problem and is making you aware of it. You should assume he’s waiting for your instructions on what do to next. If you had to go looking for Ron and his excuse for playing a video game on his phone was he couldn’t find the ladder, that’s a different story.

Do you see the pattern, here? There’s never an excuse to continue specific work if a safety problem is unresolved. And there’s never an excuse to stop working just because you encountered a safety issue. You resolve that issue or find other work to do.

What about false alarms? An employee raises a safety concern, and it turns out to be nothing. Is that a problem? Consider this situation, as an illustration of an important principle. You’re driving a car and jam on your brakes because you thought you saw a child darting out. But it was just a plastic bag blowing in the wind? You acted correctly, because there wasn’t time to get more information. Waiting to make sure that was a child might have ended badly.

A supervisor should never be dismissive of an employee’s safety concern. Even if it’s not real, like that bag blowing in the wind, you have to trust that the employee perceived it as real. A false alarm with no injury is much better than no alarm and a fatality.

The problem isn’t what excuse a person uses to avoid work, the problem is the work avoidance. If you encounter work avoidance where safety is given as an excuse, address each of these separately.