Safety Rules vs Values

Most businesses have a large number of safety rules, and most are serious about encouraging compliance with them. This is both good and desirable.

Safety Rules

Good safety rules generally provide instructions on required action and clear boundaries eg proceed Yes or No?

However, what do your staff do when something unusual comes up, or your rules don’t seem to cover the situation, or worse, your team find some rules contradict each other.

Corporate Values

Leading businesses also have clear values which are widely shared and commitment to them demonstrated on a regular basis by senior managers and supervisors.

Values guide all our decisions and actions, and are particularly helpful when circumstances don’t match your intended safety rules, even despite your best efforts.

Therefore, promoting values appropriate to your business can provide guidance for staff in busy, confusing and uncertain times and circumstances.

“Values guide all our decisions and actions”

 “Our policy is to do the right thing”

This type of corporate value is important because we cannot predict every possible circumstance for a rule, but we do know some things are not right and emphasise this priority.

Maybe a good over-arching safety value could be something like:

“Pause frequently and ask are there any risks in what we are about to do?”