Interview Published with HSE DAYS Project Ambassador Serik Mazhkenov

In his recent interview, Serik Abzalovich Mazhkenov, an ambassador for the HSE DAYS project, spoke about the need to update key concepts and terms in the field of occupational safety.

Today, the occupational health and safety management system is developing rapidly, the legislative and regulatory framework is being improved, and new tools for developing a safety culture at enterprises are being developed and implemented. What else do you think needs to be done to strengthen work in this direction?

First of all, I believe there is an urgent need today to update key concepts, terms, and their definitions in the field of occupational safety. These primarily include "occupational health and safety" (labor protection) and "accident," which emerged about a hundred years ago, as well as the more recent "policy" and "safety culture." This is important for further progress because, as René Descartes, the famous 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician, said, "People would get rid of half their troubles if they agreed on the meaning of words.".

The fact is that the aforementioned concepts and terms have lost their relevance today, in light of the significant progress in the development of occupational safety management systems over recent decades.

The definition of any concept or term endows it with a semantic space in which a certain activity will take place and sets the vector for finding effective solutions. Therefore, it is obvious that if the semantic space is defined inaccurately or has lost its relevance, all further decisions or actions based on this definition will be, to put it mildly, ineffective.

LABOR PROTECTION OR OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY?

This primarily concerns the term "labor protection," which was originally introduced by the Labor Code of 1918 and meant the protection of the life, health, and labor of persons engaged in any economic activity, entrusted to the labor inspectorate, technical inspectors, and representatives of sanitary supervision (Art. 127 of the Labor Code of 1918).

Today, according to Article 209 of the Labor Code of the Russian Federation, "Labor protection" is defined as a system for preserving the life and health of workers during their labor activity, which includes legal, socio-economic, organizational and technical, sanitary and hygienic, therapeutic and preventive, rehabilitation, and other measures.

Ozhegov's dictionary defines the word "to protect" as "to shield from any hostile actions, unfavorable, harmful impact, or influence; to defend, to guard." In other words, this means protecting and preserving the integrity of an object from external and internal threats. Within the framework of this interpretation, any object is a passive entity subject to protection.

Also, according to Ozhegov, "labor" means the purposeful activity of a person aimed at creating material and spiritual values using the tools of production.

From the above, it follows that "labor protection" represents the protection of a person's purposeful activity to create material and intangible values from external threats, unfavorable, or harmful impacts — i.e., essentially creating a favorable environment (working conditions) for carrying out human labor activity. At the same time, a person, in the course of carrying out such activity, acts as a passive object of management for whom it is necessary to create safe working conditions.

Such an approach to labor protection, as a system of taboos and restrictions, naturally found broad reflection in the regulatory acts in this area. The main goal of these prohibitions and restrictions was to create safe working conditions within a narrow range of parameters, forming a harmless environment at the workplace.

Obviously, one of the reasons for this position was that in those days, a fairly limited number of dangerous and harmful factors that could lead to human injury existed and were considered. Taking protective measures for a limited number of hazard sources and organizing control over their implementation provided the necessary level of human protection during the era of the formation of industrial production.

Today, with the growth of production intensity, the increase in the variety and volume of products, the use of new technologies and materials, and the emergence of new types of labor activity, the number of dangerous and harmful factors and their negative impact on humans has significantly increased. The economy is developing more dynamically than new rules, norms, and requirements are created or existing ones are updated. This leads to the fact that situations increasingly arise at enterprises where, on the one hand, there are no established requirements for the safe conduct of a particular job, and on the other hand, dangerous situations and new hazards and risks appear that must be controlled and managed in "real time," without relying on state-established requirements.

Obviously, the time has come to replace the outdated term "labor protection" with a more progressive one, for example, "occupational safety."

Ozhegov's dictionary interprets the word "safe" as "not threatening with danger, protecting from danger." Then, in our context, safety should be understood as the result of a person's active identification of external and internal hazards to take timely measures to neutralize them.

Then the phrase "occupational safety" will mean the safe (free from external threats or the impact of unfavorable and/or harmful dangerous factors) implementation by a person of purposeful activity to create material and intangible values. Such a definition implements the key concept of a modern occupational safety management system: a risk-oriented approach in the process of a person carrying out labor activity.

This allows moving to a fundamentally new paradigm of the employee's attitude towards hazardous factors and risks, within which the employee acts as an active participant in the labor process and views safety as a principle of thinking aimed at the continuous and conscious identification and neutralization of hazards and risks during their labor activity.

POLICY OR PRINCIPLES?

One of the reasons for the low effectiveness of corporate company policies is the unsuccessful application of the concept of "policy." In its essence, this document reflects the views and value orientations of the company in a specific area of activity. One of the rare interpretations of this word, used in colloquial speech, is given in Ozhegov's dictionary and means "a course of action aimed at achieving something, determining relationships with people (colloq.)."

Despite this, for many people, this word is still primarily associated with the activities of authorities in the field of public administration and international relations, which leads to a certain distortion in the perception of this document in the context of a company, and is also associated with a certain official (formal) status of this document.

It is advisable, in order to eliminate misunderstandings about the importance of this document and increase the effectiveness of its use, to replace the word "policy" with the word "principles," which according to Ozhegov means "conviction, view of things." Such a substitution of concepts very accurately reflects the semantic content of such documents, which represent the key principles of an enterprise in a certain area of activity.

ACCIDENT OR INJURY?

The definition of the term "accident" states that it is an event as a result of which an insured person received an injury or other damage to health while performing their duties under an employment contract and in other cases, both on the territory of the policyholder and beyond it, or while traveling to or returning from the place of work on transport provided by the policyholder, and which entailed the need to transfer the insured to another job, temporary or permanent loss of professional working capacity, or their death (Article 3 of the Federal Law of July 24, 1998, No. 125-FZ "On Compulsory Social Insurance against Industrial Accidents and Occupational Diseases").

In Ozhegov's dictionary, an "accident" (literally "unhappy chance") is defined as a "misfortune, an unforeseen confluence of circumstances accompanied by human casualties, injury" or an "unpleasant coincidence" [1].

The combination of the words "unhappy" and "chance" (accident) allows many managers to look for random factors or erroneous actions by personnel that would plausibly explain the causes of the incident and divert attention from real shortcomings in the organization of occupational safety work.

However, numerous studies of the causes of industrial accidents lead to an unambiguous conclusion: the main cause of the vast majority of incidents is repeatedly performed incorrect human actions committed during labor activity. It follows from this that any accident is inherently not accidental; on the contrary, it is the logical result of systematic violations of established safety rules by the executor or organizer of the work.

And finally, it is clear to everyone that an accident is always damage to human health (more or less severe), including fatal.

Based on the above, it is proposed to replace the term "accident" with the term "injury," which implies any damage to the human body under the influence of dangerous or unfavorable external factors. No emotions (happiness, unhappiness), just the logical result of the incident — an "injury" — and its classification as related (occupational) or unrelated (domestic) to the victim's production activity.

We are confident that with this approach, every "occupational injury" will be considered as one of the logical, but undesirable, results of production activity. At the same time, all dangerous and unfavorable factors of this production activity are controllable and manageable by the executor and organizer of the work.

Obviously, to obtain a guaranteed result — work without injuries and accidents — it is necessary to always perform the right actions: comply with established safety rules and requirements.

SAFETY CULTURE

The concept of "safety culture" came to occupational safety from the nuclear industry and was first voiced by the IAEA in 1986 after the publication of the "Summary Report on the Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident" by the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group (INSAG-1). This report indicated that one of the causes of the accident was the lack of a safety culture, i.e., "that assembly of characteristics and attitudes in organizations and individuals which establishes that, as an overriding priority, nuclear plant safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance" (INSAG-4).

In addition to the classic definition of safety culture (INSAG-4), many other definitions have appeared in the literature, which attempt to describe the versatility of this concept with varying degrees of success. Some of the most common definitions from a practical point of view include the following:

1️⃣ Safety culture is the qualification and psychological preparedness of all persons, under which ensuring the safety of nuclear power plants is a priority goal and an internal need, leading to self-awareness of responsibility and self-control when performing all work affecting safety (OPB-88/97).

2️⃣ Safety culture means fostering in every person involved in nuclear energy a state in which they will simply be unable to take any step to the detriment of safety, even if the probability of a hazard materializing is extremely small.

But using these definitions to develop a safety culture is quite difficult, as they are rather vague and do not allow the corresponding management systems to focus on specific areas of human behavior that require real changes.

In a general sense, any corporate culture reflects the level of internal consistency of the actions of all members of the organization towards achieving a common goal.

Based on this, first of all, it is necessary to understand the mechanism of formation of certain human actions. The general scheme of human behavior formation is as follows: information coming from the external environment is transformed into human knowledge and, having passed through their filter of values, becomes human beliefs, which then manifest themselves in various forms of their behavior (actions, abilities, skills).

However, the behavior of such a system, which depends only on incoming information, is usually unstable and unpredictable. The stability and predictability of the system's behavior are possible only if it has a specific goal.

Hence, the following definition of safety culture can be formulated, which should be understood as a set of human values, goals, and beliefs regarding the safe conduct of work.

The proposed definition of safety culture allows focusing attention on the clear relationship and development of human values, goals, and beliefs as a fundamental basis providing the necessary change in human behavior, which ultimately forms the required level of the enterprise's safety culture.

Hence, the main task of the enterprise's responsible employees in the field of occupational safety and personnel management is the transformation of knowledge transferred to a person into their beliefs, which become the basis of their further actions and behavior.

CONCLUSION

The introduction of new concepts and their interpretations will allow focusing the efforts of government agencies, enterprises and organizations, and occupational safety specialists on finding and defining new goals and objectives that meet modern business challenges, developing fundamentally new approaches and tools to solve them, and reviewing and updating existing results.

Obviously, the work on revising terms and their definitions in the field of occupational safety requires further study and development.

The original interview is available in the "Occupational Safety Culture" magazine.