How often have you thought, when hiring a new employee, that this person would be your biggest risk for a while? No training, no experience and no idea how to do the job. What if I told you that the new employee could be your biggest asset in improving the business? Let us flip the script for a moment and take a deep dive into what a new employee can do for you, the business and your employees if you give them the podium.
How often have we seen an employee become so familiar in a role that they settle in and get comfortable? Maybe you have not had any failures to learn from recently, or you have gotten so good at the normalcy of your role that you do not want to feel that “getting out of your comfort zone” when having tough conversations. But what businesses often do not realize is that their most experienced employee can sometimes be the biggest hazard.
Hear me out. As an employee becomes experienced in their role and familiar with the day to day, do you think complacency plays a role? That mentality — “I have done this job a million times, and nothing has ever happened doing it this way” — can really sneak up on a person. Here is the term I use: They normalize risk.
The term normalization of risk might be new to you. Instead, we often hear “complacency” when hazards exist right in front of us, and we have no other excuse for not seeing them. But normalizing the work we do is often the most accurate way to describe how we see hazards.
Take an ironworker, for example. They work with steel beams all the time. Climbing at heights is not unusual to them. In fact, under 1926 Subpart R, ironworkers engaged in steel erection require fall protection at 15 feet or more. Meanwhile, the standard construction worker must be tied off at 6 feet, and general industry is triggered at 4 feet. I could go on and on about the differences in each standard and why there are three different height standards for workers who, in reality, are all the same. No industry is tougher or can survive a fall from farther. If any one of those workers falls, they have the potential to die, no matter what height they tie off at. But our own governmental protection standards normalize the risks an industry has. The mentality is that ironworkers work with steel erection and are inherently more at heights, so they only need protection at 15 feet or higher.
Instead, if we learned from the new person and took their thoughts and ideas, when they are not introduced to the normalization of risk in an industry, we would all naturally be safer. A fresh perspective raises questions about how work is being performed and can start conversations about how we can engineer it to be safer. Complacency no longer fits my standard definition of workplace hazards.