“Safety First”… Unless We’re Busy?

16 minutes ago

9 min read

Most workplaces would tell you that safety is a priority.

It's written on posters, included in orientation materials, discussed at safety meetings and reinforced through policies, procedures, training and personal protective equipment. In many industries, safety is woven into virtually every aspect of how work gets done. We conduct inspections, investigate incidents, identify hazards and train workers on everything from proper lifting techniques to emergency response.

So what is physical safety doing on a list of psychosocial factors?

At first glance, Protection of Physical Safety might seem like the odd one out in the context of psychological health and safety. What do machine guards, ergonomic workstations or slippery floors have to do with psychological wellbeing?

Quite a lot, actually.

Think about what it would feel like to come to work every day believing that something about your job could physically hurt you and that the people with the power to address it weren't particularly concerned. Maybe equipment isn't being properly maintained. Maybe staffing levels are so low that people are regularly working exhausted. Maybe aggressive behaviour from customers has become something employees are simply expected to tolerate. Maybe everyone knows that a particular process is unsafe, but production targets seem to matter more than fixing it.

Even if you are never physically injured, what does working in that environment do to your stress level? Your concentration? Your trust in leadership? Your willingness to speak up the next time you notice something that doesn't seem right?

That's why physical safety belongs in a conversation about psychological health.

Protection of Physical Safety is the 13th and final psychosocial factor identified in Canada's National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. It refers to a work environment where management takes appropriate action to protect employees' physical safety.

And we've officially reached the final bite of our elephant!

Throughout this How to Eat an Elephant series, we've been breaking psychological health and safety into manageable pieces by exploring each of the psychosocial factors individually. The idea behind the series is simple: building a psychologically healthy and safe workplace can feel like an enormous undertaking when you look at it as one big initiative. But when we break it down into smaller, practical components, it becomes much easier to see where an organization is already doing well and where there may be opportunities to improve.

So, let's look at why feeling physically safe at work is inseparable from feeling psychologically safe and what organizations can do to make sure "safety first" is something employees actually experience, not just something they read on the wall.

Being Safe and Feeling Safe Are Both Important

There is an important distinction between having safety measures in place and creating an environment where employees genuinely believe their physical wellbeing is protected.

An organization may technically have all the appropriate policies, procedures and equipment. But what happens in practice?

Imagine an employee notices that a piece of equipment isn't operating properly. They mention it to their supervisor and are told, "It's been doing that forever. It's fine." Or perhaps a worker raises concerns about driving in dangerous weather and is made to feel as though they're being difficult. Maybe someone reports increasingly aggressive behaviour from a client and hears, "That's just part of the job."

Those responses communicate something much bigger than whatever happened in that individual moment. They tell employees where safety actually sits on the organization's list of priorities.

Employees pay attention to the difference between what an organization says it values and what it rewards, tolerates and expects.

If the official message is "Safety comes first," but workers know that stopping production to address a hazard will earn them an eye roll, slow down the team or negatively affect their performance metrics, the real message is very different.

Over time, that disconnect can create anxiety, frustration and distrust. It can also teach people to stay quiet.

Physical Safety Depends on Psychological Safety

Here's where these two concepts become deeply intertwined. Think about how many workplace injuries could potentially be prevented if someone felt comfortable saying:

"I don't think this is safe."

"I haven't been trained to do this."

"I'm too tired to operate this equipment safely."

"I made a mistake."

"I noticed something unusual."

"I'm not comfortable working alone in this situation."

"I think we need to stop and figure this out before we continue."

Every one of those statements requires some degree of psychological safety. If employees believe they will be embarrassed, dismissed, punished or labelled as difficult for raising concerns, they may choose silence instead. That means psychological safety isn't simply a nice cultural benefit. In some workplaces, it can quite literally help prevent someone from getting hurt.

This is why reporting culture matters so much. Employees need to know not only how to report a hazard, incident or near miss, but also that doing so is genuinely encouraged.

Leaders play an enormous role here. A supervisor who responds to a concern with curiosity sends a very different message from one who responds with irritation. "Thanks for flagging that. Let's take a look" encourages people to keep speaking up. "We've always done it this way" teaches them not to bother next time.

And unfortunately, next time may be when that information really matters.

A Near Miss Isn't “Nothing Happened”

One of the clearest indicators of a strong safety culture is how an organization responds when something almost goes wrong.

Imagine a worker slips on a wet floor but catches themselves before falling. Nobody is injured, so it would be easy to shrug it off and move on.

But the absence of an injury doesn't mean the absence of a hazard.

A psychologically and physically healthy workplace treats near misses as valuable information. Instead of asking, "Did anyone get hurt?" and closing the file when the answer is no, it asks, "Why did this happen, and what can we change before someone does get hurt?"

The same principle applies to equipment malfunctions, aggressive interactions, medication errors, vehicle incidents, procedural mistakes and countless other situations. Near misses give organizations an opportunity to learn without having paid the much higher price of an actual injury.

That requires moving away from a culture of blame and toward a culture of learning. If employees think reporting a mistake or close call will result in embarrassment or punishment, organizations lose access to incredibly valuable information about where their systems may be vulnerable.

Physical Safety Looks Different in Different Workplaces

It's easy to associate physical safety with hard hats, steel-toed boots, heavy machinery and construction sites. Those are certainly important examples, but physical safety applies to every workplace.

For an office worker, protection of physical safety might involve ergonomics, indoor air quality, emergency procedures or preventing repetitive strain injuries. For a healthcare worker, it could involve safe patient handling, exposure to infectious illness, needlestick injuries, fatigue or violence from patients or family members. For someone working in retail or hospitality, it might involve harassment or aggression from members of the public, working alone at night or safely handling cash.

For a truck driver, it could mean realistic scheduling that doesn't encourage driving while fatigued. For a home-care worker, it may involve entering unfamiliar environments alone. For a teacher, social worker, first responder or correctional employee, the potential for violence or exposure to traumatic events may be an inherent part of the work that requires thoughtful safeguards.

The specific hazards vary, but the principle doesn't: employees should have reasonable confidence that their organization is actively identifying physical risks and taking appropriate steps to reduce them.

And that can't be a one-time exercise. Work changes. Equipment changes. Staffing changes. Technology changes. Clients change. Environments change. A risk assessment completed years ago may not accurately reflect the realities employees are facing today.

When Productivity Quietly Becomes More Important Than Safety

One of the fastest ways to undermine Protection of Physical Safety is to tell employees safety comes first while creating conditions that reward them for ignoring it.

This can happen unintentionally.

Maybe workloads have increased, deadlines have tightened or staffing levels have dropped. Employees begin skipping breaks because there is too much to do. Someone takes a shortcut because the proper procedure takes longer. A worker comes in exhausted because they don't want to leave their team short-staffed. Another doesn't report an injury because they don't want to affect the team's safety record.

Nobody necessarily announced, "Productivity matters more than your safety." But the system may be communicating exactly that.

This is why organizations need to look beyond individual behaviour when examining safety incidents. Asking why an employee didn't follow a procedure is important, but we also need to ask what conditions surrounded that decision.

Were they properly trained? Did they have enough time? Was the right equipment available? Were they exhausted? Had shortcuts become normalized? Were they trying to meet an unrealistic target? Had they seen other people do the same thing without intervention?

Healthy safety cultures don't stop at "Who made the mistake?" They ask, "What made this mistake more likely?"

Don't Overlook Fatigue

Fatigue is a perfect example of where physical and psychological health collide.

A tired worker may have slower reaction times, reduced concentration, poorer judgement and a greater likelihood of making mistakes. Depending on the work being performed, those consequences can be serious.

But fatigue isn't always an individual problem solved by telling employees to get more sleep.

Long shifts, excessive overtime, unpredictable scheduling, insufficient staffing, high workload and inadequate recovery time can all contribute to fatigue. Several of those issues also connect directly to other psychosocial factors we've discussed throughout this series, particularly Workload Management, Balance and Psychological Demands.

This is an important reminder that the 13 psychosocial factors don't exist in separate little boxes. They overlap constantly.

If an organization is struggling with workload management, for example, the consequences may eventually show up as a physical safety problem. If employees don't feel psychologically safe enough to admit that they're exhausted or overwhelmed, that risk may increase further.

What Happens After Something Goes Wrong Matters, Too

Protection of Physical Safety isn't only about preventing incidents. It is also reflected in how an organization responds when an incident does occur.

Imagine two employees experience frightening workplace incidents.

The first employee's organization responds immediately. Their manager checks in, ensures they receive appropriate medical attention, explains what will happen next, investigates the incident, keeps them informed and asks what support they need to feel comfortable returning to work.

The second employee is expected to finish their shift. Nobody follows up. They hear very little about whether anything will change and return to the same environment where the incident happened.

The physical event might be similar, but the psychological impact of the organizational response can be dramatically different.

After an injury, violent incident, serious near miss or other frightening event, employees may understandably feel anxious about returning to the environment where it happened. Communication, support and visible corrective action can help rebuild their sense of safety. Silence, minimization or pressure to "move on" can do the opposite.

Coworkers are watching too. How an organization treats one employee following an incident sends a message to everyone else about what they could expect if something happened to them.

So, What Can Organizations Do to Move the Needle?

Protection of Physical Safety begins with the fundamentals: identify hazards, assess risks, implement appropriate controls, provide proper training and equipment and comply with occupational health and safety requirements. But a psychologically healthy approach goes further by examining the culture surrounding those systems.

Ask employees what makes them feel physically unsafe at work. Their answers may identify risks that aren't obvious from an inspection checklist. Pay particular attention to workers who may be more hesitant to speak up, including new employees, young workers, temporary employees and anyone who may perceive themselves as having less power within the organization.

Look closely at how supervisors respond when concerns are raised. Make sure employees understand their reporting options and reinforce that reporting hazards, near misses and mistakes is expected and valued. Examine whether workloads, staffing, scheduling or performance expectations are unintentionally encouraging unsafe behaviour.

Most importantly, close the loop.

If an employee raises a concern, tell them what happened with it. Even when the solution isn't immediate, acknowledging the concern and explaining the next steps demonstrates that speaking up actually leads somewhere. Few things discourage future reporting faster than repeatedly raising concerns and hearing nothing back.

The Final Bite of the Elephant

Protection of Physical Safety is a fitting place to end our journey through the 13 psychosocial factors because it demonstrates something that has been woven throughout this entire series: we cannot neatly separate physical health from psychological health.

A worker who fears being injured is experiencing psychological stress. A worker who doesn't trust their supervisor enough to report a hazard is facing both a psychological and physical safety risk. An exhausted employee struggling under an unreasonable workload may eventually experience a physical injury. And an employee who sees their organization respond thoughtfully and compassionately after an incident learns that their wellbeing genuinely matters.

Psychological health and safety isn't about replacing traditional occupational health and safety. It's about broadening our understanding of what keeping people safe at work really means.

For decades, workplaces have developed systems for identifying physical hazards, reducing risk, investigating incidents and preventing injuries. Psychological health and safety asks us to bring that same intentionality to the conditions that affect people's psychological wellbeing.

And perhaps that's the biggest lesson from our elephant.

You don't build a psychologically healthy and safe workplace with one wellness initiative, one training session or one new policy. You build it by looking carefully at the conditions in which people work, one factor at a time, and asking where thoughtful, practical changes could make that experience healthier and safer.

Thirteen factors. Thirteen manageable bites. And a much clearer place to start!

Elizabeth Eldridge is a Psychological Health & Safety Consultant based in southern New Brunswick, Canada. In addition to keynote speaking, event emceeing, consulting services and corporate training on mental health in the workplace, she supports organizations across the country on the adoption of Canada’s best practice guidelines on psychological health and safety management. She is also the Founder & President of Arpeggio Health Services which provides standardized education programs like Mental Health First Aid, The Working Mind, QPR Suicide Prevention and more.