We can’t ignore it: for several decades, occupational safety has been high on the agenda everywhere. And rightly so.

Since its inception, the field of occupational safety has undergone quite an evolution. In the early days, the most important safety function was that of a safety engineer.

As technological evolution accelerated, the focus of attention shifted from technical safety aspects to the organisational side of occupational safety. As a result, the implementation of all kinds of safety care systems became very important. Occupational safety became more and more an administrative field, in which the management and updating of ‘the system’ became predominant.

Meanwhile, it is clear to everyone in an organisation that the impact of safety care systems on the total perception of safety is running into its own boundaries.

Safety culture is a concept that has rapidly gained popularity. On the one hand, it remains a vague and sometimes elusive concept; on the other hand, it is undoubtedly the aspect with the greatest impact on your safety results. After all, it is about the collective way in which an organisation deals with occupational safety.

Changing and/or developing a safety culture is a matter of influencing collective behaviour. Influencing individual behaviour is quite a challenge in itself, let alone group behaviour. Influencing organisational behaviour, which has often grown over decades, is therefore a challenge of a much higher order.

There are still managers, executives and those in charge of support services who – consciously or unconsciously – assume that (safety) behaviour is the result of a rational and analytical thought process. A thought process that can be steered in the right direction by means of legislation, procedures, instructions and/or other forms of safety communication. However, this vision is outdated.

Insights in the behavioural sciences are now light years away. The research of leading scientists such as Kahneman, Thaler, Ajzen and Cialdini sheds a completely different light on aspects such as consumer behaviour, traffic safety or safety behaviour on the work floor.

All behavioural scientists now agree that human behaviour is largely the result of unconscious, intuitive thought processes that have very little to do with rational considerations.

It should be clear to everyone that in order to develop, change and/or influence safety behaviour, knowledge of the relevant legislation is not sufficient. Insights into electrical and/or chemical risks or the management of the applicable safety care systems in your organisation are no longer sufficient either.

From now on, other competencies are on the agenda: competencies that have their roots in the world of psychology, sociology, biology and anthropology. But also strengthening your personal skills and qualities, such asrelational intelligence, self-motivation and authentic leadership, are of the utmost importance.

Let’s be clear: in existing training courses for safety specialists, the focus is still on legislation, technical safety, organizational safety and related disciplines. The legislator is hopelessly lagging behind.

The legal responsibilities of the hierarchical line do not provide an adequate answer to these behavioural challenges either, and neither do the compulsory training courses that organisations have to offer to their managers.

When you have a few dozen projects on the counter, your memory is inevitably tainted by certain people whom you simply cannot forget, even years later. Not in the least because they emphatically manifested themselves as purebred standard-bearers of occupational safety in the workplace, averse to any form ofpeer pressure.

Call them ambassadors, promoters, naysayers or whatever. It doesn’t matter, they just do it.

The story behind these remarkable employees has always fascinated me immensely.

For example, I still remember Jürgen, site manager at one of the larger construction companies. A solid individual, all positivism.

One day Jürgen and I had an informal chat ‘off the record’ over a cup of coffee. After a short while, I asked what exactly drove him to be so fanatical about occupational safety…

From day one of our programme on sustainable safety culture, Jürgen was one of the most fanatical and active fans. He never missed an opportunity to set up a series of safety improvement initiatives on the sites for which he was responsible, one more creative than the other. ‘First safety, then productivity’ was more than just a slogan to him. What was remarkable was that the profitability of his sites and the motivation of his employees were among the best in the group.

This was (literally) his answer:

“I have actually learned on the job, I started at the bottom step as an assistant/bricklayer on a construction site. I worked for a restoration company for a long time. One day, while my wife was pregnant with our son Benjamin, I was working on the roof of a church, at a height of 45 metres... not buckled up. “We’ve been doing it like this for years, nothing can happen to me,” I thought smugly.

At one point I slipped and slid down. In a split second I thought my life was over. It was a miracle that I got caught in the gutter at a height of 30 metres. I came out of that frightening experience unscathed…”

“At another stage in my career, I was a foreman. Every morning we picked up the people from the team with the bus from work, including D.

One day, the impossible happened: shortly after lunchtime, when walking onto a simple scaffolding, D. stumbled onto the work platform and fell backwards, in between the collective security. He hit the ground as was lethally wounded. He was taken to the hospital, where he died the next day.

You don’t want to know what the mood in ‘team 1’ was when returning home after that accident. It was awful to have to drop off his lunch box and tools at his house.Nobody should ever have to go through that experience.”

After that, there was a blank stare on Jürgen’s face. . It seemed as if both dramas were unfolding in front of him all over again…

“These two events have fundamentally changed my view of life, but above all, they have definitively changed my view of occupational safety.

Since then, I’ve been trying daily to make everyone around me more aware of, first and foremost, working safely. After all, we only have one life.”