Increasing Safety Confidence
- By Robert Pater
- Mar 01, 2023
Real, not overblown, self-confidence is a good thing, right? When it comes to safety, true confidence essentially means trusting that the tools, PPE, training and work methods provided are actually beneficial and accessible, that you can rely on them to up your odds of performing tasks as safely and effectively as possible, and further, for a worker to trust themself, that they know well enough and remember how to use these to protect themself from injury while working.
Safety confidence is self-reassuring, echoing an internal validation that their training and embraced procedures can make a real difference between their, say, pulling away from a potentially unsafe task before something bad happens (like stopping to take the time to find and then correctly using a lifting aid or training method) rather than just proceeding the same old higher risk way, especially being mindfully alert to changes in the environment and themselves, where new hazards emerge or fatigue or recent personal hampering limits or changes how they can actually perform.
Safety self-confidence also has cultural elements, such as being willing to potentially tick off a supervisor or co-workers for slowing down production by calling out an over-the-top risk or diverting time towards accessing the right PPE.
Self-confidence seems to be valued by almost everyone—at least for themselves. But what about others having greater safety and self-confidence? Leaders might squarely consider if they even want to help others become more self-confident about their own safety. After all, in my opinion, this smacks squarely in the face of a long history of safety paradigms and practices, much of which were founded on the principle that the best way to motivate worker safety is just the opposite, to ramp up their fears of dire vulnerability, scare them to comply and convey stomach-turning videos/pictures/stories of what might very likely happen to them if they don’t firmly follow policies and procedures without question. And above all, to make sure they don’t drift into complacency, the parent of inattention-driven incidents.
So isn’t instilling “healthy fear” into workers critical to their acting safer? Best keep others off-balance to motivate ever-on wariness, safer decisions and actions?
Counterpoint: First, if leaders indeed aspire to have greater self-confidence for themselves, why would they endeavor to undermine this quality in others (other than out of the insecure desire to control them)?
This article originally appeared in the March 1, 2023 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.