Health and safety is one of those departments in the workplace that has a mixed reputation. From my experience with our clients, if you’re an H&S professional, you’ll be well aware that safety is not always met with enthusiasm, big smiles, and initiative-taking responses.
Sometimes, it goes the other way. With an abundance of forms, checklists, and repetitive slogans to help remind your people about the importance of safety protocol, it’s easy for the real essence of safety culture to get lost amid a pile of clutter.
Safety clutter, that is. Safety clutter is the term that’s given to the accumulation of documents, activities, roles, and protocols all performed in the name of safety but do little to contribute to improving the safety of the organisation.
You've likely had some degree of experience with safety clutter. The presence of unnecessary safety practices places a burden on your staff and risks draining time, resources, and valuable attention that can be spent on other tasks.
How does safety clutter happen?
I'll be the first to say it: it’s relatively easy for safety clutter to appear in an organisation. As safety is so heavily regulated, organisations engage in systematised processes to maintain regulatory compliance - essentially, to be seen doing something regarding safety, and often to ensure that a visual trail is noticeable in the event of an incident.
Safety clutter is not always intended badly, or a sign of a safety-reactive organisation which only cares about the bare-bones of compliance. Engaging in a well-intentioned but poorly executed safety initiative can be the starting point of safety clutter. Or leaving health and safety on the back burner, as a bottom-priority box to tick, is an easy way to create more clutter and trip your people up.