I didn’t like English and it didn’t like me. What I disliked most was outlining sentence structure. Take a sentence and place arrows to note the nouns and verbs and participles and adjectives and conjunctions and adverbs and so on. 

At one point I found words and sentences to be useful enough to begin to try to use them to communicate what was inside my head. After all, what good is it being opinionated if you keep it to yourself? 

With more experience traveling the real world seeing safety programs in action (or inaction) I realized that words matter. They not only communicate, but they can shape the very approach you take to your safety programming. They can get you stuck or they can liberate your safety culture.

Consider the term “safety”

Consider the term “Safety.” It’s a chameleon of a word used in so many different ways.

“Safety” is most often a NOUN when we decree “Safety first.” This traditional slogan is an “exhortation.” Exhortations, W. Edwards Deming said, give us the illusion that these outcomes are achievable and if employees simply tried harder, they will do better. As time passes the message becomes washed out. Without real change no worker seriously pays attention.

Safety is someone else’s job

“Safety” can also be a PROPER NOUN which is used to denote a particular person, place, or thing: “Let’s call in safety to take care of this.” As a safety professional you should hate this use of the word. It creates the assumption that safety is a role done by one person or department. It’s too easy for individuals, work teams, supervisors, professionals, managers, and leaders to see safety as someone else’s job. This is not the type of proactive safety culture you are trying to build. Performing your job safely, making decisions that impact safety, and looking out for the safety of others is everyone’s job.  

Don’t label people

“Safety” can be an ADJECTIVE used to describe a particular quality of another word. Consider the sentence: “You are an unsafe employee.” 

First, how can someone be un-something? A un-person is dead.  

Second, when you use adjectives you are labeling the subject of your sentence: “You are unsafe.”  We may as well say, “You are stupid.” 

Labels create the illusion you’ve arrived at a root cause of a problem. But all you’ve done is exonerate yourself of the responsibility to find the real risk and change real behaviors. 

Lagging indicators don’t manage risks

“Safety” can be an ADVERB where it modifies verbs by indicating a place, time, circumstance, degree, cause, or manner. “I’m going to have to write you up for not climbing that ladder safely.” Here safety is an outcome; safety is the lack of injury. This use of the word “safety” drives our measures and motivations to be outcome-based. Traditional outcome-based measures are a rate of injuries over labor hours, severity indexes, or other rates reported upwards and outwards. It’s good to have an familiar indicator to capture the CEO’s attention. But lagging indicators do not show you where risks are being taken -- only where they had been taken. You can’t manage safety through lagging indicator. You’ll lay awake at night waiting for that phone call.

The safest person is unemployed

“OK guys, let’s be safe in everything we do today.” This use of “safe” is a SUBJECT COMPLEMENT ADJECTIVE. Be safe is not a call to action; it’s a call for inaction. The best way to be safe is not to act at all, not to come into contact with hazards, and not work. But our actions are badly needed to create a safe outcome. We need to engage the guards, wear PPE, read instructions, talk to others; we need to act.

In none of these grammatical uses is our word “safety” actually doing anything. For action we need it to be a verb. “Safety” is not a verb. 

Don’t just stand there…

Behaviors contain real action verbs. Action verbs make them operational; when someone operates they are doing something.  That’s why in behavioral science we call behaviors “operants.”

So consider the following sentence structure when instructing someone how to operate:

• Do What?  (Action Verb)
• To What?  (Subject)
• When?   (Context)
• To Achieve What?  (Purpose)

For example:

“Lock out and tag ... the equipment energy source … after your task briefing … to remove the risk of energy being turned on while workers are engaging the equipment.”

Concise safety directions

This sentence has all the components. It gives you a clear operation. It tells you the context where the operation should be done. And it suggests the consequence of the action. In behavioral science we call this a discriminant stimulus because it helps the operator discriminate the course of action. When presented correctly, your safety directions can be discriminant stimuli that exert control over behavior in predictable ways. Otherwise, they can be ineffective exhortations.

So build a disciplined approach to using words to create action. Use this sentence structure when you train, write instructions, give prompts, provide feedback and when you record behaviors in incident reports, JSAs, and in BBS trend graphs.  

Don’t take short cuts -- communicate the action.