Oof, bold words coming from a safety professional.
But it's true, when safety gets exciting, that's usually when something has gone very wrong. It usually means you're responding to an incident that should not have happened. Someone might have gotten injured.
The truth is, much like IT and the maintenance world, when safety is working, it's easy to forget about. If you've got a good system in place, with controls that include training and engineering controls and the correct PPE, paired with a robust risk analysis and management program, you're probably doing pretty well.
It can feel easy to take your eye off the road and your foot off the pedal then.
We're always preaching not to fall victim to complacency and stay vigilant, but if you're doing things right, safety can start to feel, well, a little boring.
If you've gone through the huge effort it takes to get your safety culture in place, you've got not only supervisors but front line employees on board with safety initiatives, having everyone watch out for each other, then you've got good reason to pat yourself on the back.
Keep doing what you're doing. Do those housekeeping inspections in your facilities. Make sure you have a training plan (TT&S can of course help!) and stick to it.
Maybe it's even accepted in your organization that good safety is good business: the practices that keep employees safe are almost always the same practices that make them efficient and help to prevent frustration and turnover.
In that case, you've created a self-sustaining system, and you just need to keep on making sure you're evaluating for new risks and that the system is being followed.
And it might seem, yeah, a little boring.
Congratulations, if you're there, you've won the safety jackpot!
A word of caution though: If you're here, sometimes an organization can start to question what the purpose is of all those little actions that make up your system. Why do our routine inspections, someone might ask, since nothing is ever found wrong? Why keep up with training if we're training on the same topics? These small, routine actions are the bedrock of your system: when they start to crumble, that's when safety might start getting exciting again. In a bad way. With incidents and injuries starting to ramp up again.
Congratulate yourself, and then get right back to work reminding others why you're all doing what you're doing. It's all part of a system, and if you start losing pieces, then the system will start to fail too.
Keep safety boring, that's when you know you've got a few things taken care of.
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