What is safety

In order to improve these metrics, employers and safety officials must also conduct investigations following any incident to ensure that all safety protocols and measures are being followed or to implement new ones if needed. Ensuring the safety of workers is both necessary and beneficial for any organization.

Regulatory bodies such as OSHA and the NFPA mandate a variety of safety measures employers must take and have the authority to impose fines if their investigations reveal a violation of these standards. Safety is also beneficial for all organizations since, in addition to avoiding costly fines, it ensures increased productivity, better morale, and fewer lost work days. Subscribe to the Safeopedia newsletter to stay on top of current industry trends and up-to-date know-how from subject matter authorities.

Our comprehensive online resources are dedicated to safety professionals and decision makers like you. By: Daniel Clark. By: Tamara Parris CD. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day.

The car has been redesigned for improved safety. They were led to safety by the rescuers. Recent Examples on the Web: Noun The issue stems from the fact that the vehicle's front suspension lateral link fasteners may loosen, causing the steering wheel to loosen and impacting the safety of driving the vehicle.

First Known Use of safety Noun 14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1 Verb , in the meaning defined above. Learn More About safety. Time Traveler for safety The first known use of safety was in the 14th century See more words from the same century.

Style: MLA. Kids Definition of safety. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Test your knowledge - and maybe learn something along the way.

We need to understand that risk and safety is a wicked problem. Risk and safety is complex because we are dealing with humans.

Humans, by design, are very complex and are averse to being told what to do. We are not motivated by this. We are not motivated by bullies who just want us to comply, like the lion. We are not motivated by pushing or shoving or bouncing for that matter. If we want to understand how people are motivated firstly we need to understand the psychology of goals, we need to understand human beings.

In this way, safety is not something that is done to the organisation, but comes out of it. Is there a shared understanding of what the concept means and how it is played out across various levels in a business? Is this concept reinforced or sabotaged by the systems, structures and procedures that are in place?

Understanding that each thinks of safety differently becomes vitally important when we try to create a culture of safety excellence. It demonstrates the importance of involving every person in the organisation — from the ground up — in the conversation.

We need to shift our mindsets from only accepting top-down safety communication to supporting bottom-up ownership of it. Been lots of heated discussions and chest beating and on this site and Safety Forums lately which is really healthy but I thought that, just for a moment, we should all step back, take a deep breath, let the dust settle and take a moment to reconsider what safety is really all about. It is so simple and raw yet sends a very powerful message. Made me remember how and why I got into this game.

Please take a moment to watch and enjoy this short video and share it with anyone who you think may need a good dose of compassion and empathy. Unfortunately, Safety is infused with simplistic binary and emotive justifications for self existence that have very little to do with safety. The industry of safety has become a political ideology that rejects questioning and has globally attached itself to zero, no way back now. Safety is not number 1 and never can be, to speak like this disconnects from living and comodifies the industry.

Similarly this fixation with heroes, salvation and zero is really incredibly cultic. Professional Rob Long meaning my level of training and expertise on the subject has afforded me the opportunity to be employed in the field of safety and be paid for my services. And, in all that time and training, I still struggle with the concept and definition of safety.

I work in construction and in trying to develop a training for our workers on the subject so they can fully grasp the concepts and realities of what safety is, I find myself struggling with something I have devoted most of my career to. The definitions in the dictionary are simple enough, but when you really sit down and give it thought in the establishment of the prevention of injury, it can make your brain hurt.

Why is safety so hard to achieve? Is safety conceptual and if so, can the concept be moved to a set of plans to be implemented and eventually to a final product called safety? Is safety relative, a condition or state? We use the word so freely and flippantly sometimes, but fail to fully understand what it means. We humans are complicated beings and in trying to make a workplace safe we sometimes fail to remember that humans have a lot of different motivating factors that cause us to make decisions that derail everything we put together to make the conditions safe.

I am in full agreement that safety can never be 1. In construction we have a slew of competing factors such as schedule, budget, quality, production, equipment, subcontractors and the list goes on. Why should safety be in competition with all these factors? I believe it can. We humans, as adults, are said to make about 35, decisions a day.

I believe each decision is made at some level with an element of risk involved in it in order to make the decision. A great deal of that money of theirs, for safety's sake has to be in fixed interest securities, which nowadays bring in a low return. We decided to go ahead anyway, for safety's sake.

They have paid for these assets themselves, with their own money, and for safety's sake have deposited these properties in this country. In cases of doubt it is often the practice of authorities to register the item for safety's sake. Should not the council have the authority at least to fence them in for safety's sake and charge the cost to the freeholder?

He may be put to additional expenditure through feeling that, for safety's sake, he should stop the development as soon as the enforcement notice is served. They should go to the homes of people who have been told that, for safety's sake, they must leave the home in which they have lived all their lives.

They are quite right in trying to do what they can for safety's sake, but there is an equally strong argument for doing it with larger motorcycles for safety's sake. We can only give priority of safeties. See all examples of safety. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web.

Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors. Collocations with safety. Click on a collocation to see more examples of it. From the Cambridge English Corpus. See all collocations with safety. Translations of safety in Chinese Traditional. See more. Need a translator? Translator tool. What is the pronunciation of safety?