Drew Rae, Associate Professor in the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University, co-authored a research paper on safety clutter. He explains why safety clutter exists and how to manage it effectively. The interview offers practical advice on decluttering and highlights the difficulty of reducing safety clutter. The concept of safety clutter and its negative impact on worker engagement, organizational flexibility, and resilience are explored.
Safety clutter refers to the accumulation of unnecessary safety procedures, documents, roles, and activities that do not contribute to operational safety.
Removing safety clutter is challenging because it is easier to add or expand safety tasks than to remove or reduce them.
To address safety clutter, safety professionals should start conversations, prioritize removing burdensome activities, conduct trials for evidence, and adopt effective leadership styles.
Deep dives
Main Ideas Overview
In this podcast episode, Dr. Drew Ray discusses the concept of safety clutter and its negative impact on operational safety. Safety clutter refers to the accumulation of safety procedures, documents, roles, and activities that do not contribute to the safety of operations. Dr. Ray explores the different types of safety clutter, how and why it develops, and its consequences for the workforce and organization. He emphasizes the importance of addressing safety clutter and offers suggestions for safety professionals to manage it effectively.
Understanding Safety Clutter
Safety clutter is the unnecessary accumulation of safety procedures, documents, roles, and activities. It often arises from duplicate or over-specified activities, excessive compliance requirements, and responses to accidents or external stakeholders' demands. Safety clutter can harm the workforce and organization by causing disengagement, taking up valuable time and resources, reducing flexibility, and focusing on administrative tasks rather than frontline operations.
Challenges in Managing Safety Clutter
Removing safety clutter is challenging due to the asymmetry between adding and reducing safety work. It is easier to add or expand safety tasks than to remove or reduce them. Safety clutter persists because people fear criticism or legal consequences if something is removed, or they believe it contributes to safety even if evidence suggests otherwise. Additionally, compliance with goal-based regulatory regimes can lead to unnecessary safety work. Managing external stakeholders and their demands requires open dialogue and clarifying expectations.
Approaches to Address Safety Clutter
To address safety clutter, safety professionals should start conversations about clutter and provide a permission structure for discussing unnecessary safety work. They should identify low-hanging fruit and prioritize removing the most burdensome and ineffective activities. Conducting controlled trials can provide evidence to support the removal of safety clutter. Effective leadership styles that emphasize humility, curiosity, and relationship-building can help influence others and reduce safety clutter. Furthermore, adopting a reflective evidence-based approach allows for critical evaluation and improvement of safety activities.
Conclusion
Safety clutter is a prevalent issue in many organizations, but it can be managed and reduced by fostering open conversations, prioritizing removal of unnecessary activities, conducting trials to gather evidence, and adopting effective leadership styles. Addressing safety clutter leads to better engagement, improved flexibility, and a focus on more effective safety practices that contribute to operational safety.
In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Drew Rae, an Associate Professor in the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University, who co-authored a research paper named; ‘Safety clutter: the accumulation and persistence of ‘safety’ work that does not contribute to operational safety.’
We all know that excess safety procedures, documents, roles and activities cause organizational issues, so Drew helps HSE professionals understand the leading causes and key solutions.
After briefly outlining his research methods, Drew explains why safety clutter (a term he coined) exists, and we learn why adding new safety activities is much easier than removing them.
He then reveals how we can identify different types of clutter, including duplication, generalization, and over-specification, and how they can be managed more effectively.
Drew describes how the word “clutter” was carefully chosen to make discussions about this workplace problem easier, and he provides great practical advice on starting conversations about decluttering. He also shares the crucial question HSE professionals can ask co-workers to identify the main pain points.
A key learning is that safety clutter is surprisingly difficult to reduce - despite apparent absurdities. Therefore, limiting new safety activities is easier than removing existing ones. This rational and insightful interview will give safety professionals many sensible decluttering solutions.