If more rules guaranteed safer workplaces, we’d have eliminated accidents long ago.
Unfortunately, despite ever increasing regulations and policies, incidents still happen.
It’s not that policies and procedures are a bad thing to have, quite the opposite, actually.
The problem is when you start drowning your team in safety rules and regulations, it tends to dilute their focus, confuses people, and leads to compliance fatigue.
Why This Happens
Workplaces tend to become procedure heavy after they’ve had a few significant incidents. Once this happens, management typically decides to lean into prevention to help protect themselves against liability and the costs associated with multiple incidents.
Again, this is a good thing of course, but unfortunately it can lead to businesses overcompensating by drowning their workers in rules and procedures. The mindset becomes one of control rather than cooperation.
Every time there’s an incident, there’s another rule created to prevent it. Eventually there are so many rules no one could possibly remember, much less implement them.
And this is the problem.
The Problem with Rule Overload
Rule overload can be a significant problem in workplaces. Here are some of the problems it creates:
Dilution of focus. When there are too many rules, workers can’t prioritize what’s critical. In today’s world we all deal with a substantial amount of mental clutter. This distraction can make workers prone to incidents.
Compliance fatigue. When faced with too many policies and procedures to remember, employees stop paying attention. Rules simply become background noise that everyone kind of knows but no one follows.
Box-checking culture. This type of environment leads to a culture where the focus shifts to ticking off requirements, rather than careful assessment and prevention. This is short-sighted and opportunities to identify and correct hazards can be lost if they are not part of the normal procedure.
Workarounds. When there are too many impractical rules, employees find ways to ignore or bypass them. If safety becomes too difficult or inconvenient for workers to follow, they will find a workaround. Every time. An overabundance of rules and procedures makes getting worker buy-in a nightmare.
Instead, setting fewer, simpler rules can be safer than complex systems. Prioritize those key rules that are non-negotiable, and consider reducing others that don’t add value.
What To Do Instead
Here are 5 steps for eliminating rule overload.
1. Prioritize: Identify the most critical rules that prevent serious harm.
2.Communicate clearly: Make sure everyone understands these rules. Use everyday language, visuals, and stories. If you have workers who speak different languages, make sure they are translated and accessible for all.
3. Engage workers: Involve them in shaping rules so they’re practical and realistic. People support what they help to create. Your workers do the job every day and have a good sense of what is important to do the job safely and what rules are consistently ignored or bypassed. They have a wealth of knowledge and feedback. Use it.
4. Enforce consistently: Once you’ve established a small list of non-negotiable rules, enforce them relentlessly. A few rules, enforced every time, build credibility. People know what to expect and act accordingly.
5.Review & prune: Finally, don’t be afraid to review the rules you have currently. Drop outdated or redundant rules regularly. Focus on the necessary and delete the rest.
A shorter rulebook can mean a safer workplace. The key is to find what’s important, implement it consistently and get your workers to do the same.
Are you struggling with rule overload in your workplace? What’s one safety rule in your workplace that everyone ignores? Can it be simplified or scrapped?
Let me know in the comments.
That’s it for this week, Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn and Substack.
