Safe to Start vs Stop Work when Dangerous: Can we do Better than Stop Work?

Foreword Weber et all (2018) considered that although employees have a legal obligation not to perform unsafe work, and that most organizations support this through explicit authority to stop work if the conditions are unsafe, that the act of stopping work is challenging. Their research indicated that the decision to halt an unsafe task is not solely dependent on individual employees’ willingness to stop but is also influenced by contextual factors or conditions that impact this decision. The aim of this research is to review if an expansion of Stop Work authority to a ‘Start Work Safely Authority’ and applying this to all functions in the organization not just frontline workers would result in a reduction of events and improve learning opportunities through clearer channels to discuss, review and clarify arrangements before they were started. This expansion of risk management to a holistic risk level, where the approach includes the lifecycle of a job and re-defines what success, failure and how barrier identification is determined. This model should then result in each functional department determining their risk factors and preventative methods to prevent ‘passing risk along the line’.