Why Raising the Visibility of Health and Safety in your Workplace Might Increase your Incident Rate

And Why that can be a Good Thing ...

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of the Safety First Journal.

This week I want to talk about an interesting phenomenon I’ve seen many times over the years. It goes something like this:

A company decides that they want to increase their focus on health and safety in the workplace. They might hire a new Health and Safety team, increase visibility with regular safety talks and signage, add a new training program or put a slew of new policies and procedures in place. The expectation is that with all the increased time and attention spent on safety improvements, incident rates will show an immediate drop.

It’s a reasonable expectation, but that’s not what happens.

Many times in my career I’ve seen that increased focus on safety often leads to an increase in incident rates, not a drop.

When this happens, managers and safety professionals are often confused. “We put all this emphasis …