• Why is it important for employees to feel a sense of personal control over the safety of their workplace? “This workplace has gone 279 days without an accident.”

Signs such as this displayed in work environments are intended to remind employees about safety concerns and to motivate them to engage in good safety habits. But the unspoken message is that safety is measured not in terms of positive behaviors, such as following checklists, reporting close calls, or identifying hazards promptly, but rather in terms of failures—

the occurrence of actual, and perhaps preventable, accidents.

The problem with focusing on the accidents is that it’s a reactive strategy—the accident you want to prevent actually has to happen, and only then does someone investigate its cause and possibly its prevention.

This very act of investigating and determining a cause implies that someone is looking to place blame. This act also assumes that there is an identifi able cause.

This approach tends to create a punitive atmosphere that instills fear, stifl es conversations about safety practices, and discourages reporting of problems (Geller, 2001, 2011)