Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 146, February 2022, 105521
Safety Science

Safety through engaged workers: The link between Safety-II and work engagement

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2021.105521Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A synthesised review showed that Safety-II and work engagement rely on similar antecedents.

  • A combined framework and principles were provided.

  • Safety practitioners should consider their own role and influence in their workers’ engagement levels and Safety-II mindset.

Abstract

Safety-II (and related concepts such as ‘Safety differently’) are relatively recent developments in the field of health and safety management. The central argument of these approaches is that interventions should focus on collaborating with workers to understand and provide the resources that workers need to allow work to proceed successfully and safely. Safety-II relies upon workers volunteering information, meaningfully participating in discussions around the organisation of work, and being trusted. However, Ajslev et al. (2020) highlight the psychosocial barriers to ‘participatory approaches’. Few papers have explored the psychosocial conditions in which modern, collaborative approaches to safety might flourish.

To address this, this paper explores the similarities between the concepts of work engagement and Safety-II. In particular, this paper identifies that both rely on similar antecedents (such as certain leadership practices, promoting autonomy and creating a just organisation). The inference is that organisations that wish to implement modern, collaborative approaches to safety, will need to understand and address much wider issues regarding how workers are perceived and managed.

This is the first paper to compare the antecedents of Safety-II and engagement, and also the first to present evidence that these two concepts complement each other.

Introduction

Workers’ health and safety (H&S) is of paramount importance to companies. Yet often, especially in environments with a well-implemented safety management system (SMS), adverse incidents and events still occur with varying frequency. Efforts to achieve continual improvement in the field with H&S often reaches a plateau, while low-impact incidents still occur regularly and the occasional surprising high-impact accident seems to be unrelated to the risks monitored (Townsend, 2016). Authors have argued that a continued reliance on procedures will not help to bring these figures down (Parker et al., 2006). Dekker & Pitzer (2016) concur, arguing that workers may come to rely on what may be an imperfect set of rules to govern their behaviour, preventing them from being able to assess and respond flexibly to the real life problems; hence a concept of ‘centralised’ as opposed to ‘individual’ safety (Dekker & Pitzer, 2016).

Hollnagel, 2014b, Hollnagel et al., 2015 also distinguished between two approaches to safety management. The first perspective relies on rules and bureaucratic approaches to reduce variability and deviations from pre-determined behaviours (‘Safety-I’). The other approach, Safety-II, assumes that humans enhance resilience by matching their behaviour and change their routines depending on individual circumstances, allowing work to proceed successfully and safely. As a consequence, the aim of this approach is to better understand how a generally safe and successful working state is achieved (i.e. when things go right) and to proactively anticipate events and situations where unfamiliar challenges may arise. Therefore, the emphasis of a Safety-II/decentralised approach views workers as experts with whom managers must actively collaborate to organise work, and providing them with the resources and opportunities to respond flexibly to real-life situations rather than tightly regulating behaviour.

The worker should, therefore, be at the centre of all safety efforts (Fisher, 2012, Wachter and Yorio, 2014). This is also reflected in the new H&S ISO45001 standard that puts worker participation at the centre of its framework (Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems - Requirements with Guidance for Use (ISO Standard No. 45001:2018), 2018).

Safety-II is not a new or unique concept; it is based on resilience engineering, fragility engineering, and is similar in many ways to other concepts (e.g., 'Safety differently' by Dekker, 2015). All definitions have set their focus on the same problem; they have a system approach, though their approaches may differ slightly when looking into the details (Hollnagel, 2014b, Hollnagel et al., 2015, Martinetti et al., 2019, Salmon et al., 2017, Thoroman et al., 2018).

In the day-to-day business world, practitioners often use a mixture of the Safety-I and Safety-II approaches depending, among other things, on the experience of the people involved, the nature of the work, tasks or duties, and management style (Hollnagel, 2014b, Hollnagel et al., 2015). When investigating the appliance of Safety-II measures, Turner (2017) found that in order to implement Safety-II procedures, cognitive work analysis to understand the work done, risk analysis for measuring resources around risks, and giving workers authority and recognition, were approaches most often utilised. However, many specialists reported that they were also still using traditional methods due to management’s trust in established methods and fear of change (Turner, 2017). These findings are supported by a critical literature review by Thoroman and colleagues (2018) who - in analysing 155 papers on twenty near-miss incident reporting systems - identified a gap in the complete implementation of analyses focussing on systemic factors rather than linear near-miss incidents. Interestingly, a narrative review conducted by the current authors (identifying nineteen papers concerned with intervention design to encourage Safety-II) revealed that most studies focused on the assessment of the procedural landscape, and only mentioned derived intervention recommendations casually without offering further details. Fifteen papers aimed to assess and understand factors that provide resilience and analysis of how ‘work-as-done’ (i.e. what workers actually do on the shop floor instead of the assumed behaviour based on standards that define the processes) looks like within the organisation on a procedural basis while utilising frameworks to aid the identification of relevant factors (i.e. Functional Resonance and Analysis Method (FRAM), Resilience Assessment Grid (RAG)). Only two papers offered recommendations on how to improve safety behaviour through changes in the supervisor role (based on a literature review) (Provan et al., 2020) and through the introduction of an Individual Latent Error Detection method (development described in the paper) (Saward & Stanton, 2018).

Hence, to date, the focus on Safety-II interventions appears to be process- and system-related, rather than focussed on empowering and supporting the humans in the system by way of creating resilience. Thus, Safety-II fails to explore the mindset needed amongst the managers and workers of an organisation to make a success of these empowering and collaborative approaches to safety. Simply proposing that an organisation amends their approach to managing safety fails to account for numerous pre-existing values, beliefs and attitudes that may hinder this endeavour. For example, managers may have different perceptions of how trustworthy workers are and how prepared they are to move from a centralised approach. Equally, workers may also resist active collaboration. They may perceive it as beyond their paid remit, or the psychosocial environment may deter them from participating. For example, Ajslev et al. (2020) described how the perceived fear of losing face could prevent workers from taking part. In ‘The Safety Anarchist’, Dekker (2018) reflects on the various political models that influence how work is organised and, in particular, how safety is managed in organisations. For example, Safety-II requires managers to collaborate actively with workers to create mutually-beneficial working environments and this is contingent on them viewing workers as experts and ceding some of the managers’ own authority to workers. This challenges traditional models in which workers may be seen as simply providing their labour in return for a wage, with the owners having the knowledge and the power to control and change the workplace and the organisation of work. If the senior team of an organisation has this outlook, it seems unlikely that they would be willing to invest resources into work engagement or moving away from a centralised approach to managing safety.

The concept of engagement could offer some answers to this dilemma. When workers are engaged they are described as being in a “positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption” (Schaufeli et al., 2002), hence showing traits of (among others) psychological presence and extra-role-behaviour, such as ‘being fully there’ and ‘going the extra mile’ (Schaufeli et al., 2002). If workers are motivated, focussed, and driven to support task or organisational goals, it could be argued that they are much more likely to participate meaningfully in efforts to collaborate. To successfully engage workers, authors have proposed a range of necessary antecedents such as psychological meaningfulness, i.e. the characteristics of the work (i.e. the feeling of getting something in return for the self-invested in role performance; e.g. task and role features), psychological safety which is affected by the social environment (i.e. the sensation of being capable to present one’s self without stress of punishments; e.g. relationships, norms, leadership style), and availability of e.g. personal resources (i.e. the feeling of owning the physical and psychological resources to engage one’s self at work; e.g. energy) (Crawford et al., 2014).

In essence, these antecedents are actions or conditions that will create the psychosocial climate in which a worker might become engaged. Some authors have proposed that engaged workers are more likely to be safe, which could be due to the fact that they are more alert to their work and the working environment (Wachter & Yorio, 2014). Therefore, with an actively engaged workforce and a Safety-II approach, it may be possible for managers and workers, collectively, to identify and agree changes to those aspects of the workplace, work organisation and other relevant areas that could create unmanageable risks (e.g., where required resources are frequently insufficient leading to difficult work-arounds). This indicates that it could be worthwhile examining safety and engagement in tandem. However, no research to date has specifically examined how engagement and Safety-II might relate to each other; for example, whether engagement and Safety-II share similar antecedents.

Section snippets

Method

This paper synthesised results of narrative literature reviews surrounding Safety-II promoters and principles and empirical publications with regards to WE antecedents. A narrative review is regarded as a literature review aiming to generate an overall understanding of the evidence while developing new insights (Bailey et al., 2015, Popay et al., 2006). In this paper, the results presented are the sum of several individual literature reviews (e.g. on Safety-II antecedents, on WE antecedents, on

Results

Here, the results of the three steps, as described in the Method section, are presented.

Consequences and application for practitioners

The review presented in this paper has highlighted the current developments in safety approaches towards focusing on the human factors and how the concept of WE can support safety performance in the workplace. Indeed, there seems to be no agreement found yet in what direction WE and safety performance and climate affect each other as evidence was demonstrated in both directions (e.g. it can promote or hinder H&S engagement). Surprisingly, only a few papers (N = 21), researching WE either

Implications for future research perspectives

This paper presented a theoretical narrative evidencing the link between WE and Safety-II that culminated in a respective framework and recommendations for practitioners. While the research that the narrative and theoretical assumption are based on can be considered sound, the direct link between Safety-II behaviour and WE needs to be tested empirically.

Therefore, research should focus on identifying and testing interventions that not only focus on WE improvements in general but also in the

Funding

The research project is sponsored by the Knowledge Economy Skills Scholarships (KESS 2), a major pan-Wales operation supported by European Social Funds (ESF) through the Welsh Government. KESS 2 links companies and organisations with academic expertise in the Higher Education sector in Wales to undertake collaborative research projects, working towards a PhD or Research Masters qualification.

Author’s note

This research is part of a wider PhD research project. Therefore, parts of the content of

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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