Paradoxical Safety: Going Beyond ‘Best Intentions’
Well-intended safety interventions can backfire in the workplace, as illustrated through real-world cases and practical leadership strategies to enhance safety effectively.
- By Robert Pater
- May 01, 2024
Do you ever think you’ve discovered a potentially promising solution to a vexing safety problem only to find it backfired or actually made things worse?
According to a study in the U.S. National Library of Medicine, “A reaction is called paradoxical when a substance that is generally therapeutically effective induces the opposite of what is intended.” In other words, these are more than side effects; they are when the medication incites the exact opposite effect it’s meant to have, such as pain medication that actually makes pain worse or anti-inflammatories that actually increase inflammation. This occurs in safety as well as medicine. Here are two instances:
First Case Example
A Fortune 500 manufacturer of large transportation equipment was concerned that their riveters were experiencing an increasing raft of vibration-related upper limb injuries.
The understandable reflexive response from their ergonomics team? Replace existing riveting guns with recoilless ones with a spring-like mechanism designed to absorb, not transfer, forces away from riveters. That sounds good, except after disseminating these well-made tools, upper limb injuries sharply rose further.
Initial reactions ranged from head-scratching to blaming the tools or the workers, but some wiser and calmer heads prevailed. One revisited the original intention: to ultimately help riveters reduce injuries in real practice, not just to mechanically lower those external forces they assumed riveters would otherwise absorb. Going back to workers, but this time with a mindset of asking rather than prescribing, the ergonomists discovered that, in riveters’ view, the new guns made their work more difficult, not easier.
Those interviewed revealed they relied on a kinesthetic “feel” for the set of a rivet, and the new guns made it harder to sense this. To compensate for the new rivet guns absorbing vibration, the riveters were increasing extra force to compress the springs in the guns (to simulate the feel of the old guns), thereby working with greater effort and lessened potential safety — unexpected and just the opposite of what the ergonomists were shooting for.
The wise ergonomists decided to set up a “lab” where riveters could practice and learn to “recalibrate” their kinesthetic feeling of setting rivets with the new guns on scrap pieces of metal. Riveters varied in how much time they required to “get it,” but once time pressures and concerns about damaging material were taken off, everyone did — and injuries considerably dropped.
This article originally appeared in the April/May 2024 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.