Unfortunately, every day we read about accidents in the world of work, and that too many companies still fail to prevent accidents, even very serious ones. But why in 2023 do the same dynamics continue to repeat themselves, and are there still so many safety problems that often turn out to be chronic?
If the goal of safety management is to prevent accidents, property damage, and injuries, then why do we have to constantly urge people to commit to safety? Wouldn't it be pure common sense for a company to prevent accidents and losses, not to endanger the health of those who work for it, not to risk production stoppages, and not to cause damage to its image?
All accidents can be prevented by eliminating or managing certain very specific causes, which are the so-called triggers. If the real causes of accidents can be removed, then the accident can be avoided forever, while if we are simply able to manage them, we can keep the situation under control and prevent it, in case of problems, from degenerating by creating gaps in security. Why limit ourselves, therefore, to managing the causes and not commit to eliminating them? Unfortunately, not all of these causes can be easily removed, especially when focusing only on profits. It is necessary to rely on a methodology, therefore, that allows us to keep them under constant management, so as not to endanger the health of those who work for us.
We often see companies engaged in continuous efforts to improve safety but falling into unsafe practices when attention is lowered. There is an urgent need to understand the deeper causes of accidents so that safety can experience real improvements. Sometimes it is mistakenly thought that a high level of safety is within the reach only of a minority of organizations that sell products and services with a margin so high that it can justify all the costly precautions to prevent interruptions in their processes. The challenge of a standard like ISO 45001, on the other hand, is precisely to ensure that organizations do not have to rely simply on expensive precautions to ensure safety and that everyone can afford to implement effective and sustainable measures in terms of costs.
Safety management operates in a highly complex system, where deeper causes and their effects are not closely related in time and space. Decisions made by management can result in an accident even ten years later, and investigations conducted after the accident may not be able to link it to the real underlying cause. And yet, to truly solve these safety problems, these relationships - however tenuous - will have to be discovered, even though in complex systems there are many interconnected feedback loops because a new program intended to solve a problem can provoke reactions in other parts of the system and create new unexpected problems. Safety, in fact, is not only about the engineering control of hazards but also about the management of all the people and parties involved, including their actions, their behaviors, and their motivations.
ISO 45001 allows you to do exactly this because it teaches you to manage all corporate security in terms of a system made up of several interconnected processes and to consider how a change in one process can reverberate on another process.
If you get used to managing security at a systemic level, you get greater effectiveness but also greater efficiency of interventions that can be optimized.
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