I work at a company with a very strong safety culture because we produce and work with very dangerous substances. We have a company-wide safety meeting every week for office people, and worksites have short safety meetings every shift, and at pretty much every meeting. We talk about safety all the time. However, at almost every safety meeting, there’s a reported near miss or an actual injury, and they come with an explanation of which basic rule they violated.

This is one of the best cases of “safety first” thinking, the company is basically stating that safety is its responsibility, and violations of company rules are a problem the company needs to solve (i.e. more training, etc). However, the company has an opposing priority of profit, meaning that the primary reason the company implements safety procedures is to protect it from lawsuits and whatnot.

Safety Third recognizes this conflict of interest and clearly states that safety is the responsibility of the worker, though the company will do what it can to keep the work environment safe. At the end of the day, it’s the worker’s responsibility to keep themselves safe. Anything else is just a lie that makes workers feel safer than they actually are. It’s not about reducing the safety considerations the company puts in place, but to clearly communicate to the worker that it’s their responsibility to ensure they get home safety each day. Even the best company processes don’t matter if workers ignore them. The most important part, IMO, is “Stop Work Authority” (or “Andon” in Toyota processes), where any employee can halt any part of the process if they think something is unsafe, and that should be what the company focuses on, not all the checklists and reports that people have an incentive to ignore.