Working safely in organisations is formally governed by rules, procedures, audits, and reporting mechanisms. These are intended to standardise behaviour and reduce risk. But real life on the work floor does not just follow formal rules. People rely on basic social skills like helpfulness, courtesy, loyalty, and informal problem-solving to get their daily work done. This type of behaviour acts as a social lubricant that keeps operations running smoothly.

 

However, when it comes to safety at work, such informal social mechanisms can have unintended consequences. They help prevent friction and discomfort, but can mask deeper dysfunctions. For example, courtesy can prevent employees from reporting unsafe behavior or criticising a supervisor's decision. Helpfulness can lead to shortcuts, with colleagues helping each other by making things easier and bypassing cumbersome but safety-critical procedures. Loyalty can discourage whistleblowing or the open reporting of incidents. Reciprocity ("you help me today, I'll help you tomorrow") can lead to concealing risks or near misses.

In this way, the social skills that make organisations function suppress learning from mistakes. When mutual harmony silences critical feedback, the system appears stable, but becomes increasingly fragile.

 

Improving safety, therefore, doesn't mean asking for even more helpfulness or communication, but understanding the function of this behaviour and finding formal equivalents that make it redundant. For example:

- If employees routinely violate rules to do their work safely, the problem lies not with their disobedience, but with formal structures that don't align with actual practice. The organisation must redesign the rules so that safe behaviour is also efficient and legitimate.

- If negotiation is constantly necessary to fill gaps in the safety system, the organisation must address those gaps and not rely on the tact or heroism of individuals to close them.

- If informal networks of trust are the only way safety information flows, formal communication channels must be strengthened.

 

Thankfully, we don't have to abandon human kindness or mutual aid. But we must prevent them from becoming the glue that holds a dysfunctional system together. Transparency, reporting, and learning must be built into the formal system so that helpfulness and gratitude are not necessary to operate safely. When working safely is built into the system as the easy way to work, helpfulness and gratitude no longer hold it together; they simply make it a better place to work.

 

(This is one of my short pieces inspired on Niklas Luhmann's 1964 classic 'Funktionen und Folgen formaler Organisation'.)