The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error, 2nd Edition

19 Making Your Safety Department Work

Being a safety department can be tough. Often you get pushed into roles like: ¹

• Being a mere arms-length tabulator of largely irrelevant or unusable data. For example, you may find yourself gathering numbers and producing bar charts about events or incidents every month that nobody really seems to use;
• Compiling a trail of paperwork whose only function is to show compliance with regulations or safety targets set by the company;
• Being a cheerleader for past safety records and remouthing how everything was better before (e.g. before deregulation, or before the new management);
• As a cost center whose only visible role is to occasionally slow down production;
• Getting excluded from organizational activities ...