Observations on safety

Launching a safety campaign is easy. You can order posters, organise a kickoff, publish a new policy on the intranet and send an email to the entire organisation. What’s much harder is changing how people actually think and act in their daily work. And in the end, that’s the only thing that truly matters.

Over the past year, we at Prohoc have launched a comprehensive safety campaign as part of our continuous safety development. At the core of the campaign is the STARR mindset: Stop, Think, Acknowledge, Report, Reflect. The idea is simple and intentionally provocative: pause and think before you act. The purpose of STARR is to engage our people in always important safety topics. But as with any campaign, its impact remains temporary without continuous effort.

In an ideal situation, no one needs to stop and think in the middle of a hectic worksite, and safe choices would come automatically from muscle memory. This is easier said than done. Researchers at University College London have shown that forming a new habit takes on average 66 days, with significant variation between individuals: for some, it takes 18 days, for others up to 254. When you have over 400 employees, you realise that this can be a long journey.

A true cultural shift requires patience, persistence and above all, collaboration. It happens through conversations and individual insights, not just posters, no matter how polished they may be.

That’s why at Prohoc we embed safety thinking through safety observations. Employees are the most important eyes and ears, for example in the production environment, and it’s essential that they recognise safety improvement opportunities in their everyday work. Observations reveal the reality of how people actually behave, not just how they intend to behave.

A recent example illustrates this well. We received a safety observation regarding the comfort of safety caps. They were found to be hot and uncomfortable. The observation was taken forward, and now several alternative models are being tested, allowing everyone to choose what works best for them.

The results of this groundwork speak for themselves: the number of safety observations has increased tenfold, and the accident frequency has decreased significantly. In a short time, we’ve taken meaningful steps in strengthening our safety culture, and that’s something we can all be proud of.

This journey has also made me reflect on a couple of safety observations of my own. First: an increase in safety observations does not mean the workplace has become more dangerous, quite the opposite. It reflects trust. People only take the time to report observations when they believe it truly makes a difference.

Second: practice what you preach. No one should skip a safety harness just to “get the job done quickly”, and building a stronger safety culture works the same way. It doesn’t happen by rushing or cutting corners, but step by step, one action at a time. And it applies to all of us, not just those working on site. We all need to be STARR players to build a safer workplace.

At Prohoc, we humbly continue this work together with a clear direction to be a model example of safety.