Depends if you coach, advise, manage, police or officiate

 In a rare 60-minute free time slot I started safety daydreaming. It’s a thing, right? Ok, maybe it’s just me. I started to dream (maybe that’s too positive a word for it), let’s call it ponder. What’s the next decade of occupational safety going to focus on. “The next big thing” if you will. You know what? I’m truly unsure. Will it be something unknown or that sort of ‘unknown’ that is just ‘ignored’ - because it’s in the too difficult to tackle or the effects of which are too latent?

If you’d asked me that question three years ago, I certainly wouldn’t have said viral infection, I’m avoiding the word pandemic because actually pandemic management wasn’t something very many of us had to tackle. We suddenly became focused on managing a whole host of viral spread reducing strategies, which was challenging given that the local, national and international advice changed almost continuously. But COVID is for another blog. 

Back to the next big OSH thing. I don’t mean the next big safety management thing (think Safety 2.0, Zero Harm and the rest), I mean the next genuinely taxing work risk - I avoided the pitfall of saying workPLACE risk - as what has become of the workplace in modern working lives? You know, that kingdom - the boundary of which is marked, conveniently by a fence, signage or at least local knowledge. Where (hopefully) those foreseeable risks can be eliminated or controlled, because we are in control of those places. What of hybrid working? The employer’s responsibility for the home workplace – or even the coffee shop workplace? And the answer to my daydream? I just don’t know. 

It might be another biological hazard - and that’s full of challenge, because apart from a very limited few of us, who truly has an in-depth knowledge of virology or bacteriology? I’m based in Western Europe and already this month the media is going crazy about Monkeypox. Monkeypox for goodness sake.

In the UK recently (May 2022), there were just under 60 cases, in a population of over 60 million. Reasonably foreseeable risk? I guess they might have been equally cynical in Wuhan in early winter 2019. This is another challenge that our commercial and marketing colleagues faced years even decades ago, and now it’s our turn; in the (objective) risk vs (media subjective) outrage battle, I don’t know who is going to win – but it begins with m.        

I wondered if it might not be something significantly more fundamental. I started to think that significant, career changing emerging risks might not actually transpire. Sure there might be an artificial intelligence or internet of things challenge that my brain isn’t large enough to consider. Eventually there’ll be enough tech in everyone’s personal and professional lives that EMF or IR or some other ‘invisible’ hazard becomes a thing. 

As an aside, I’m not a physicist either (not a biologist, not a physicist; has this guy got an “ology” to his name?), but I’ve wondered for a long time if there’s enough tech on our workstations creating EMFs or emitting IR from all our wireless devices - at or around reproductive organ height, could it have a cumulative deleterious effect on reproductive health?

Maybe that wouldn’t be truly fundamental either. So I got to thinking, that for as long as I have been in occupation health initially and then more ‘mainstream’ safety - I’m afraid that’s three decades now - we have derided the safety ‘officer’ with his (pronoun used advisedly) clipboard. Admit it, you have laughed at that mental image.

But is that derision fair? Has that safety professional, on the shop floor, at the frontline, the coal face if you will, always got it right? They are at the work/person interface, where hazards are experienced, and risks realised. They are the ones that naturally interact with the exposed worker, not the theoretical “more senior” safety person advising on policy, auditing, stimulating culture change. They are working hand in glove with the immediate supervisor, coaching their development and ownership of their safety risks. At the root they are the ones who have stayed grounded to essential, practical and dynamic risk management. 

Have they got it right? Should we be closer to ‘the tools’? Should we think, feel, experience the work activities as workers do? Collaborate with them on practical and pragmatic risk controls; after all it is them who know their jobs better than us and if we can’t accept that, maybe we need some more self-reflection. It reminds me of Dan Peterson’s phrase ‘paper doesn’t save people, people save people’ and I wonder if we have become a lost profession. One tied to the industry of qualification, higher education for professional development, one that has abandoned the basic tenet of providing and promoting health and safety for workers. 

I guess this then generates all sorts of follow-up questions that we don’t immediately know the answer to. Is our role to coach, advise, manage, police or officiate? We all have our views. And probably the answer is a hybrid of some or all of those. But why don’t we immediately know? It reminded me of a question in the bank of options the professional review panel at IOSH has for those of us that chase Chartered Membership. “Can you explain the 5 steps of risk assessment”. And several candidates are tripped up by that question - because the answer can’t be that simple. It is. It is our fundamental building block. It is what grounds us in everything we do together. So why do we trivialise it? 

Because we are determined to prove our worth. In the race to professionalise we’ve complicated things, attempted to quantify what is essentially a people thing, a qualitative thing. Safety is protective and preventative (or maybe the other way round for you hierarchy fetishists), analysing risk is a lived and breathed practical activity. Let’s ground our practice and embrace safety 101. It’s what our customers (ok co-workers) want. Ask them, I dare you.