Exploring risk-awareness as a cultural approach to safety: exposing the gap between work as imagined and work as actually performed

This is a pretty well-known and cited paper from 2009. Via ethnographic methodology, it explored the impact of a risk-awareness program on workers’ awareness of risk at two sites within a large contract maintenance organisation in Australia.

The risk awareness program has two components, 1) a pocket card used by workers before commencing work to get them to stop & think about risks, 2) a formal process requiring workers to complete a form that apparently demonstrates that they have assessed risk before starting work.

Because this was an ethnography, I can only scratch the surface of the findings.

Results

First, it’s highlighted that workers didn’t value the risk awareness program, “viewing the paperwork as a means for managers to protect themselves from any threat of prosecution” (p6), or as said by one worker “it’s all arse-covering at the end of the day” (p6).

For workers, completing the paperwork “became a ritual that served to appease the organisational rhetoric about safety but had minimal influence upon their awareness of risk and their risk control practices” (p1).

In contrast, managers focused on collecting the paperwork from the program; which gave them “a sense of security that workers were working safely” (p6).

An implication of the risk awareness program and how people conceptualise safety is an “illusion of safety”. For workers, risks are expertly navigated via their own “common sense”. However as was highlighted in this study, there were instances where workers’ own perceptions of hazards were inconsistent or lacking – leading them to overvalue (illusion of safety) their risk perception and missing sources of harm. Indeed, this type of sense-making may be highly context specific to an individual’s prior experience and training; thus lulling them into a false sense for safety.

Likewise, managers had an illusion of safety where they placed too much value on completed paperwork as an indication that hazards were identified, thought about, and mitigated. An example highlighted how two workers identified hazards (different to each other) that also weren’t identified on their risk awareness paperwork earlier that morning.

Another example of an illusion of safety with the risk awareness program was discussed. In discussing risk awareness against three levels of hierarchy – perception, comprehension and projection, it was found that most workers’ responses were incomplete across the three levels. It was most incomplete at the level of projection, which is considering the future implications or meaning of what they have perceived and comprehended. The implication being that workers “become fixated on completing the paperwork to please their supervisor or their manager, as opposed to actively thinking about and becoming aware of risks” (p7).

As the author also notes, “simplifying the paperwork to make it easier to complete has resulted in a potentially more mindless ‘tick and flick’ exercise that may not prompt workers to think about risk” (p7). Also, because completing the risk awareness form at the start of the shift has become ritualised at one point in time, “, this may dull the workers’ awareness of changing circumstances and risk and lull them into a false sense of security that, because the paperwork has been completed, the job must be safe” (p7).

Another implication is about the balance of workers’ awareness of risks versus the decisions and actions of risk control. For instance, even though workers may be aware of particular risks, the actual practices and risk controls in the field may differ substantially from the formalised rule. A number of reasons were given, including some rules being seen to be over-the-top, impractical for completing the work or even increasing the risk of failure, or just too contextually insensitive for them to complete the work and thus, rules regularly require their own judgement and “common sense” to enact.

The illusion of safety is therefore aggravated further because managers aren’t aware of the gap between formalised rules & systems and actual risk control practices – nor aware that the use of formalised systems, which give them some confidence, “are inconsistent with the workers’ basic underlying assumptions that safety is common sense” (p7).

These findings highlight a clear gap between work as managers imagined it to occur versus work as it was actually performed by workers. The author spends some time discussing the implications of these findings.

One is that because workers’ perceptions of risk control differ from managers, there may be substantial sets of collective practices across organisations which differ from expected or formalised expectations. Therefore, leaders need to be more invested in learning about what those collective practices are, the assumptions underlying the practices & why they have that meaning to the communities of workers if they want to influence sustained and effective change.

That is, “leaders’ practices should be more focused on eliciting a shared understanding of how workers go about dealing with risk on the job rather than compliance with paperwork” (p6), and this can be accomplished in part by a better understanding of work as done.

Author: D Borys, 2009, Safety Science Monitor