The Safety of Work

Drew and David discuss how falling injury rates can hide rising severity, why one country's data showed serious injuries but almost no minor ones, and how different reporting practices can make aggregate numbers meaningless. Most importantly, they describe what happened in the boardroom: with a single number, leaders speculated about causes, but with a second metric, conversations slowed down and became curious and data-driven. As Drew Rae puts it, "I can't give you a better metric. I can give you a metric that will give you a different type of conversation." The episode closes with four practical takeaways, including the case for continuous severity measures over categories.

Discussion Points:
(00:00) Why injury reporting conversations matter and past metrics episodes
(03:44) Introducing the Geddert Dekker and Rae paper on injury rates
(07:24) What safety can learn from financial reporting
(10:00) Research design and three ways to measure injuries
(14:48) Case study one where falling injury rates hid rising severity
(20:14) Case study two and why the combined rate stays stable
(22:16) Case study three and inconsistent reporting across countries
(27:23) How a second metric changes executive conversations
(30:33) Practical takeaways including continuous severity metrics
(37:14) The answer to our question is to add one more metric
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Quotes:
Drew Rae: "If you've got one number, that number can only do two things. It can go up, it can go down."
David Provan: "Once you've got one metric with nothing else to have the conversation around, you can tell any story you want about that metric."
David Provan: "Multiple metrics will result in better conversations than any one metric."
Drew Rae: "I can't give you a better metric. I can give you a metric that will give you a different type of conversation."
Drew Rae: "When I'm lying in hospital, the last conversation I want two senior managers in my organization to be having is should they classify me as a moderate injury or as a high potential event."

Resources:
Injury rates tell an incomplete story, but a more complete measurement narrative may be possible - Kevin Geddert, Sidney Dekker, Drew Rae. Journal of Safety Research, Vol. 98, 2026 (open access)
Paper: Signs of safety: An investigation of how OHS professionals interpret injury metrics. James Pomeroy and Colin Pilbeam, Journal of Safety Research, 2025.
Organization:
Construction Safety Research Alliance.
Previous episodes referenced:
Ep. 136: What is the symbolic purpose of injury rates?
Ep. 133: How do policies and metrics shape the outcome of investigations?
Ep. 109: Do safety performance indicators mean the same thing to different stakeholders?
Ep. 104: How can we get better at using measurement?
Ep. 97: Should we link safety performance to bonus pay?
Ep. 85: Why does safety get harder as systems get safer?
Ep. 74: Is a capacity index a good replacement for incident-count safety metrics?
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The discussion traces how bonus structures, unrealistic targets, and "green" dashboards (99.4% on-time closure, later revealed as closer to 60%) pushed the lie from front-line workers up through management, with middle managers who once flagged the problem later normalizing it once promoted. As David Provan puts it, quoting the paper: "If you put workers in a position where it's very difficult, if not impossible, to meet the target, then organizations cannot be surprised if this results in gaming." The episode closes with five practical takeaways for auditing your own organization's incentive structures.

Discussion Points:
(00:00) The paper – a case of collective lying
(05:06) Pge and the dial before you dig background
(08:16) The whistleblower and 110 million dollars in fines
(12:44) Four types of lies and why organizations breed lying
(24:19) The gas leak bonus scandal
(28:09) When 99 percent on time hides the real number
(33:59) How middle managers become senior managers and keep lying
(40:34) You cannot blame workers for impossible targets
(47:15) Practical takeaways for safety leaders
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Quotes:
Drew Rae: "Organizations are not made up of robots. If everyone is doing the same bad behaviour, this has got to be coming from somewhere other than individuals wanting to do the wrong thing."
David Provan (quoting the paper): "If you put workers in a position where it's very difficult, if not impossible, to meet the target, then organizations cannot be surprised if this results in gaming."
Drew Rae: "We're not lying. We're just turning off the alarm while we finish getting the order."
David Provan: "A safety culture, a good safety culture, is one that lets the boss hear bad news."
Drew Rae: "Yes, 100% we are lying about our safety performance."


Resources:
"A Case of Collective Lying: How Deceit Becomes Entrenched in Organisational Safety Behaviour" — Jan Hayes, Sarah Maslen, Paul Schulman, Safety Science, Vol. 176, 106554 (2024)
Open access: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106554
Diane Vaughan — introduced by Drew for her concept of "normalization of deviance," developed from her analysis of the Challenger launch decision. Her book: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (University of Chicago Press).
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo23528040.html
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David and Drew unpack six organizational uses of injury metrics — from controlling work and motivating the workforce to self-promotion and risk signaling — before distilling these into four broad symbolic meanings: management control, image management, risk management, and trust in leadership. The episode reveals that injury rates are unstable signs whose meaning shifts depending on context, observer, and organizational culture. Understanding the emotional and symbolic dimensions of these metrics is shown to be essential for any safety professional seeking to challenge, replace, or engage more honestly with the measurement systems that shape how safety is understood and acted upon in their organization.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) The intersection of safety measurement and social safety research

(03:26) The paper — Interpreting injury metrics

(06:57) Known limitations and critiques of injury rate metrics

(09:03) The puzzle of why injury rates persist despite their well-documented flaws

(10:46) Semiotics as an analytical lens for understanding safety indicators as symbols

(14:00) Research methodology — 20 interviews with experienced OHS professionals

(16:18) Six organizational uses of injury metrics

(26:40) Four broad symbolic meanings of injury metrics

(36:45) Safety activities as anxiety reduction and the central role of emotion

(38:56) Practical takeaways for safety professionals and researchers

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Quotes:

Drew Rae: "People are not dumb. These criticisms are fairly easy to understand, and there are so many of them from so many different directions that people know these criticisms and believe some of them. But injury rates still happen. That puzzle needs to be understood."

Drew Rae: "Something could be a bad measure of whether you're actually safe, but a good measure of how your injuries are affecting these other types of risks that you're facing."

Drew Rae: "Safety activities are driven by affect — emotion matters. We do things in safety because we are afraid, or because we are uncertain, because we are anxious. And our safety activities change those emotions."

Drew Rae: "We've now got both pieces of the puzzle. We know that they don't work objectively, and we know that people keep using them because of these symbolic meanings. That's pretty much the full story about injury rates."

David Provan: "Be curious about the meaning that's being ascribed to the injury rates in your own organization."

Resources:

Primary paper discussed: Pomeroy, J. & Pilbeam, C. (2025). Signs of safety: An investigation of how OHS professionals interpret injury metrics. Journal of Safety Research. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022437525001410

Related papers referenced in the episode:

Rae, A., Provan, D., Weber, D. & Dekker, S. (2018). Safety clutter: the accumulation and persistence of 'safety' work that does not contribute to operational safety. Policy and Practice in Health and Safety. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Safety-clutter:-the-accumulation-and-persistence-of-Rae-Provan/5bef7afb671b32977f688afbffe328407cf48039

Hayes, J., Slotsvik, T.N., Macrae, C. & Pettersen Gould, K.A. (2023). Tracking the right path: Safety performance indicators as boundary objects in air ambulance services. Safety Science. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925753523000814

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Drawing on Edmondson's extensive psychological safety research, the episode provides practical guidance for safety leaders seeking to improve workplace conversations. The framework reveals that effective safety communication requires more than encouraging people to speak up—it demands deliberate leadership to create environments where contributions are productive, silence is reflective rather than fearful, and meeting goals are clearly articulated. The findings offer significant implications for safety professionals working to enhance organizational communication and change management capabilities.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) Background on psychological safety and employee voice

(04:05) Introducing Amy Edmondson's reflections paper

(08:00) Why workplace meetings are often unproductive

(11:13) The four-quadrant model of workplace conversations

(16:44) Withholding when productive silence becomes problematic

(19:49) Disrupting and the challenge of unproductive voice

(26:33) Contributing through productive voice and disagreement

(30:05) Processing the importance of reflective silence

(35:53) Practical takeaways for leading better meetings

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Quotes:

"The employee voice and silence literature is a lot more precise because it's looking at a specific question: what do people speak up about, when do they speak up, who do they speak up to, what do they say?" - Drew Rae

"A good meeting is when all participants are either contributing or processing with minimal withholding or disrupting." - Drew Rae

"It's not just that disruptive people take up time and space, they raise the threshold for others to speak up." - Drew Rae

"Where there's diversity in the room, race or gender, it can make this a little bit more difficult because people might feel personally vulnerable." - David Provan

"We want an environment that promotes productive conversations, and that environment is more about when and how we speak up ourselves." - Drew Rae

 

Resources:

Resource Link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6451

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The conversation explores how humor serves psychological purposes beyond entertainment, often functioning to establish power hierarchies and devalue professional contributions. Through survey data and qualitative interviews, the research demonstrates that passive coping strategies prevent organizations from understanding the true extent of harm. David and Drew argue that the "just joking" defense creates ambiguity that makes harassment difficult to report, particularly when supervisors are the perpetrators, emphasizing that effective psychosocial safety policies must explicitly address humor-based discrimination.
 
Discussion Points:
(00:00) Defining psychosocial safety versus psychological safety
(03:07) Introduction to workplace humor research in construction
(06:44) Research aims and the construction industry gender gap
(11:31) Research methodology using surveys and interviews
(15:07) Theoretical framework on humor as communication
(20:10) Survey findings on sexual harassment experiences
(26:24) How humor is weaponized as cover for harassment
(35:36) Conclusions on devaluing professional contributions
(40:08) Key takeaways and practical implications for organizations
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Quotes:
"The harms are real. When we talk about expanding safety into the psychosocial space, however you might feel about that framing and whether safety people are the right people to be managing it, when we're talking about people getting hurt at work, gender based humour is a hazard." - Drew Rae
"I think this is the ultimate, you know, safety is not the absence of incident reports. This is clearly something that's happening to 50, 60, 70% of participants in this study and obviously representative of the broader population. If you're getting no insight into this through any of your systems, then you need to go looking." - David Provan
"The fact that something's a joke is being used almost like weaponised to mask or shield what's actually going on, we need to just like get totally away from the idea that humour is an excuse. The question isn't, is this a joke or not a joke? Question is, what was the underlying purpose of that joke?" - Drew Rae
"If no one's complaining, get worried. We know it's happening. We know that people don't complain. If you're not getting any complaints in your work site, that's not an indication that there's no problem or no harm. That's an indication that people are not feeling safe to complain." - Drew Rae
"Jokes are fine, but not these jokes. And I think this paper really helps us understand where we might be able to draw a less fuzzy boundary around what people can and can't joke about in the workplace." - David Provan

Resources:

Resource Link: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/JMENEA.MEENG-7109
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