Straight Talk Safety doesn’t come with any brand loyalty - that’s how we can deliver safety without the spin!
No buzzwords, no fads, no trends, no cliches, no BS! There are no magic bullets, or magic beans, or magic anything able to immediately ‘fix’ construction safety and we wouldn’t even want to pretend otherwise.
So what is the Straight Talk Safety philosophy?
It’s built on a combination of the latest research and science, but also - and perhaps most importantly - the lived experiences necessary to place both of those things into real-life construction jobsite contexts, and to help make them work for the places and people you find there.
Because construction is an industry like no other!
Construction is a rock and roll industry— fieldworker quote from Sherratt et al 2018
It’s a place in which there is nothing we can’t do! Where production and progress is vital for success. It’s a place of noise, dust, weather, big machinery and heavy materials. It’s a place of collaboration and interaction, with different highly-skilled trade workers appearing and stepping away as the project grows. It’s a place where everyone’s work either follows or releases someone else’s, and when long supply chains and tight contracts are the norm, timing really matters and pressures can easily mount. It’s a place where we actually need workers to be braver than most, asking them to climbing higher or go deeper underground than many people would be comfortable with, then we wonder why construction workers take other risks on site! It’s a place in which your surroundings change on a daily basis, and they must, because if things aren’t changing, you ain’t getting paid and nothing is getting built! It’s a loud, noisy, dynamic space with a wonderful mixture of laughter, shouting, swearing and singing, and it’s a place Fred is both highly familiar with and – let’s be honest here – very comfortable in!
And this all matters for safety.
Because many safety philosophies and programs work really well in fixed environments, with a consistent and stable workforce, where the hazards stay still and the risks don’t change.
But construction just doesn’t work like that!
In fact, the philosophy of Straight Talk Safety is actually grounded in what to some are considered the rather boring foundational principles of good management and good administration.
Henri Fayol, one of the godfathers of contemporary management theory, set out his 14 Principles of Management back in Victorian times. And they’re still fundamental for good safety management today. For example, Fayol argued that Equity in the form of kindness and justice for all workers was essential. That’s pretty much a just culture, with a bit of psychological safety thrown in…
Administration is certainly not sexy either - no-one wants a certificate in safety administration to put on their wall! But when systems and processes grow ever more complicated (thanks in part to technology), with myriad documents and tools necessary for their support and delivery, the frustrations and time wasted in not being able to find the right thing at the right time seeps into how folks think about safety. If finding the right form is a real pain, then safety by association also becomes a pain…which is the total opposite of what we want!
Despite the fact that good management and administration are not considered to be exciting (or particularly sexy!) they are critical in supporting safety in the field. This point is crucial especially as it is so easy to get distracted by the latest shiny safety thing that turns up – which is of course also why safety so easily gets cluttered!
Building on these solid foundations and fundamental principles , Straight Talk Safety ascribes to a blend of contemporary evidence-based science and theory, ever mindful that things need to be both flexible and robust in order to fit within the slightly crazy construction environment. For example, Energy Based Safety (Alexander et al 2017) make perfect sense - the higher the energy involved, the more likely it is to cause greater harm, so let’s focus there for our SIF elimination mission. HOP also nails it when it argues that context drives behavior (Conklin 2019). Construction workers don’t want to have accidents, but we put them in a high-pressure, time is money, just get it done environment and then wonder why folks take risks and cut corners? Or worse blame and fire them for taking that risk in the first place! Srsly?!
But you probably wouldn’t be here if you didn’t already have those safety fundamentals embedded in your organization.
So what’s different?
Well, Fred is a social scientist, and at the root of Straight Talk Safety’s philosophy is that safety is a Social Construct (Sherratt 2016).
Put simply, this just means that safety is what we make it.
We construct and reconstruct safety on an ongoing basis through interactions in person, through safety signage, and via documentation. Every organization, jobsite and workspace is therefore constructing safety in a slightly different way.
Experience tells us this makes sense. It explains why one site seems to be having more incidents than another. It’s why a safety initiative worked great in one region but not in another. It’s why some work crews just seem to care more about safety than others. This is what underpins the HOP principle that context drives behavior. Safety is messy, fluid, changeable, and bespoke to specific spaces and places in time.
So how does this philosophy help improve safety?
When we accept that safety is a social construct, the ways we should best research and look to manage safety also change. Accepting things are inconsistent and messy means that we can step away from trying to fit engineered safety square pegs into round social science holes.
Because people aren’t the steel beams that engineered safety solutions really want them to be – folks can do some really strange stuff! And that’s OK. In fact, another HOP principle tells us people make mistakes, and they certainly do! So we should not be surprised when rules don’t always work, or that folks aren’t following procedures that don’t work that well either. We should instead be focused on how we can help make safety work better and actually be relevant in such situations, and here’s a hint: it’s not by writing more safety rules!
The social sciences (rather than the hard sciences of engineering) enable us to explore and unpack safety in ways that accept and work with this messy inconsistency. Social science methodologies can reveal what safety really means to different folks – from the C-suite to boots on the ground – individually and collectively. Social science research can help illuminate why you can ‘get away’ with some things on one site and not another, why some things are ‘encouraged’ on one site and not another, and how as the mix of people and place changes, safety changes with it. Stuff can even be a ‘little bit unsafe’ (Sherratt and Ivory 2019), as things constantly change, and the eternal struggle between work and safety shifts and rearranges itself all the time.
It’s certainly the best way to look at safety within the ever-changing world of construction.
And once a picture is revealed of how safety works within say a work crew, or on a jobsite, or across an organization, precisely tailored solutions able to fit into those unique spaces can be developed, fully mindful of how that context is driving behavior. As a social construct safety is what we make it, and it’s only when we know why and how it isn’t working as we’d want it to be that we can really start to make positive, impactful and lasting change.
Can you put all that in a nutshell, please?
Yes! How about this:
- Safety is a social construct – it’s what we want and allow it to be.
- Safety is not isolated – it’s a consequence of everything we do in construction from contract award to procurement to delivery to maintenance.
- Safety has a smaller physical aspect – controls, physical barriers and safeguards matter.
- Safety has a bigger social aspect – it’s people that get hurt and matter most.
- Safety solutions should be grounded in the unique contexts they need to work within, co-created with the people asked to both implement and use them – safety is a team game and everyone should be involved.
CITATIONS
Alexander, D., Hallowell, M. & Gambatese, J. (2017). Precursors of construction fatalities. II: Predictive modelling and empirical validation. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 143(7), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0001297
Conklin, T. (2019). The 5 principles of human performance: A contemporary update of the building blocks of human performance for the new view of safety. PreAccident Media.
Sherratt, F. and Ivory, C. (2019) Managing ‘A Little Bit Unsafe’: Complexity, Construction Safety and Situational Self-Organising, Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, 26(11), 2519-2534, https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-09-2018-0376 .
Sherratt, F. (2016) Unpacking Construction Site Safety, John Wiley and Sons, Chichester. ISBN: 978-1118817285
Sherratt, F., Welfare, K., Hallowell, M. and Hoque-Tania, M. (2018) Legalized Recreational Marijuana: Safety, ethical, and legal perceptions of the workforce, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, DOI: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/%28ASCE%29CO.1943-7862.0001502