Safety is Not a Verb

It may seem ironic that a guy (me) who speaks and writes for a living hated English classes as a lad. My English grades would attest that I didn’t like English and it didn’t like me. What I remember disliking the most was the task of outlining a sentence structure. We had to take a sentence and place arrows to note the nouns and verbs and participles and adjectives and conjunctions and adverbs and other autocracies of school teachers trying to insert cognitive worms whose purpose was to root out a young kid’s freedom to split infinitives and worse, end a sentence with a pronoun!

I guess at one point I found words and sentences to be useful enough to begin to try to use them to communicate what was inside my head. After all, what good is being opinionated if you keep it to yourself? And, to be honest, it took an old English major named Scott Geller to pound my sloppy, run-on sentences into a semblance of proper shape. 

With more experience traveling around in the real world seeing safety programs in action (or inaction) I realized that words matter. They not only communicate but they can shape the very approach you take to your safety programming. They can get you stuck or they can liberate your safety culture.

Consider the term “Safety” which is a chameleon of a word. The word used in so many different ways.

“Safety” is most often a NOUN when we decree “Safety first”. This may seem like a great slogan that would inspire the workforce to think through the safety implications of their actions.

However, the great slogan may also just be a feel-good sign with no real benefit. W. Edwards Deming, the late influential quality guru, called these “exhortations”. Exhortations, Deming told us, give us the illusion that these outcomes are achievable and if employees simply tried harder, they would do better. This offends the worker - it does not inspire the worker. Dr. Deming is quoted as saying:

"You can beat horses, they run faster for a while. Goals are like hay somebody ties in front of a horse’s snout. The horse is smart enough to discover no matter whether he canters or gallops, trots or walks or stands still, he can't catch up with the hay. Might as well stand still. Why argue about it? It will not happen except by change of the system. That's management's job, not the people's." 

As time passes the messages become washed out. Without real change no worker seriously pays attention.

“Safety” can also be a PROPER NOUN which is used to denote a particular person, place, or thing: “Let’s call in Safety to take care of this.” As a safety professional you should hate this use of the word because it creates the assumption that safety is a role that is done by one person or department. It’s too easy for individuals, work teams, supervisors, professionals, managers, and leaders to see safety as someone else’s job. They will wait for “safety” to come along to inspect, train, and authorize work.

This is not the type of proactive safety culture you are trying to build. Performing your job safely, making decisions that impact safety, and looking out for the safety of others is everyone’s job.

“Safety” can be an ADJECTIVE that is used to describe a particular quality of another word. Adjectives label.

Consider the sentence: “You are an unsafe employee”. First of all, how can someone be un-something? A un-person is dead. Secondly, when you use adjectives you are labeling the subject of your sentence: “You are unsafe.” We may as well say, “You are stupid”. Well friends, you can’t fix stupid. When you use a label you're under the illusion that you’ve arrived at a root cause of a problem. But all you’ve done is exonerate yourself of the responsibility of finding the real risk and change real behaviors. Your safety programs languish and safety culture becomes driven by labels.

“Safety” can be an ADVERB where it modifies verbs by indicating a place, time, circumstance, degree, cause, or manner such as in “I’m going to have to write you up for not climbing that ladder safely.” Here safety is an outcome; Safety is the lack of injury. This use of the word “Safety” drives our measures and motivations to be outcome-based. Traditional outcome-based measures are a rate of injuries over labor hours, severity indexes, or other rates reported upwards and outwards. These lagging indicators are a mixed bag, its good to have a KPI that can be related to ROI to capture the CEO’s attention (FYI). But lagging indicators do not show you where risks are being taken, only where they had been taken. You can’t manage safety through lagging indicators… if you do you’ll be laying awake at night waiting for that phone call.

“OK guys, let’s be safe in everything we do today”. The use of “safe” in this sentence is a SUBJECT COMPLEMENT ADJECTIVE. It may sound good but be safe is not a call to action; it's a call for inaction. Think about it, the best way to be safe is not to act at all, not to come into contact with hazards, and not work. But in the work world we act. And our actions are badly needed to create a safe outcome. We need to engage the guards, wear PPE, read instructions, talk to others; we need to act.

In none of these grammatical uses is our word “Safety” actually doing anything. For action we need it to be a verb. 

“Safety” is not a verb. 

Behaviors contain real action verbs. Action verbs make them operational; when someone operates they are doing something. That’s why in behavioral science we call behaviors “Operants.”

So consider the following sentence structure when instructing someone how to operate:

• Do What? (Action Verb)

• To What? (Subject)

• When? (Context)

• To Achieve What? (Purpose)

For example:

“Lock out and tag …

the equipment energy source …

after your task briefing …

to remove the risk of energy being turned on while workers

are engaging the equipment.”

This sentence has all the components. It gives you a clear operation. It tells you the context where the operation should be done. And it suggests the consequence of the action. In behavioral science we call this a Discriminant Stimulus because it helps the operator discriminate the course of action. When presented correctly, your safety directions can be discriminant stimuli that exert control over behavior in predictable ways. Otherwise, they can be ineffective exhortations.

So build a disciplined approach to using words to create action. Use this sentence structure when you train, write instructions, give prompts, provide feedback and when you record behaviors in incident reports, JSA’s, and in BBS trend graphs. 

Don’t take short cuts… communicate the action.