The Safety Confidence Gap: Why Feeling Safe Isn’t the Same as Being Safe.

[Safety Roundtable on YouTube]

Most safety teams believe they are doing a good job. The safety confidence gap is the space between that belief and what the evidence actually shows, and closing it starts with measuring risk rather than assuming it is under control.

The reader’s reality

Ask most health and safety managers how their organisation is doing, and the answer is usually positive. Ask them to prove it with hard evidence, and the answer gets a lot quieter. That gap between confidence and proof is exactly what this Safety Roundtable session, hosted by Christian Harris, sets out to explore.

The session draws on early findings from the State of Safety Survey, along with a group of experienced practitioners including Shona, Steve and Richard, who each bring a different angle on why organisations feel safer than the evidence sometimes supports.

The numbers behind the confidence gap

Early results from the State of Safety Survey show that 94 percent of respondents rate their organisation’s safety performance as average or better. On its own, that looks like a strong picture. But when the same respondents were asked about measurement, only half said they were confident their risks are measured rather than assumed, and only one in three felt their safety data reflects real world risk.

Christian Harris put it plainly: there is lots of qualitative confidence, but far less quantitative evidence sitting behind it. That gap between how safe we feel and what we can actually prove is where organisations tend to get caught out, whether that is in an investigation, a civil claim or a criminal prosecution.

Confidence looks different depending on where you sit

The session referenced separate data from the Baker Panel Survey, which found that perceptions of safety shift sharply depending on someone’s role. Contractors, maintenance staff and operators rated agreement that process safety concerns were treated the same as production goals at 46 percent, 37 percent and 33 percent respectively. Operations management agreed at just 7 percent.

That is a striking gap within a single organisation. It suggests that confidence at the top does not always reflect the reality on the ground, and that the people closest to the risk often see it most clearly.

A clean record is not proof of safety

Two examples from the session make the same point from different industries. The first is a case from Christian’s book, where a 91 year old man fractured his hip after slipping in a Tesco store. The court found the failing to be systemic, and the organisation was fined nearly three quarters of a million pounds. As Christian put it, quoting from the book, “a sign is not a solution, absorbent matting is not a fix.”

The second is the BP Texas City incident, where the organisation was tracking injury rates diligently, yet reliance on that lagging data created a false sense of security about the underlying process risk. The incident resulted in 15 fatalities and more than 170 people injured. Christian’s takeaway applies well beyond oil and gas: time passing without a major incident is not necessarily proof that everything is well.

Even good intentions can miss the obvious

Not every gap in the session came from a serious incident. Christian shared a lighter but telling example from an industry colleague’s site visit to a manufacturing facility with a slip problem. The floor had good slip resistance and the right footwear was in place, but the floor was red, the same colour as the tomato ketchup being produced there. Spills were invisible until someone had already gone over. A white floor would have made the same contamination obvious in seconds.

The lesson is not that anyone was careless. It is that confidence in a control can exist alongside a risk nobody has actually looked for. This is the same thinking behind the Assess step in our Slipology Method: measure and observe the real conditions rather than trusting that a control is working as intended.

Culture decides whether the truth actually surfaces

Shona, who works across 306 social care locations, argued that culture is what determines whether problems get reported at all. “The culture for me is what we need to look at,” she said. “How do we get people to be honest so that they don’t think I’ll just hide this because I’ll get into trouble.”

Shona also drew a sharp distinction between a written risk assessment and a delivered one. Having a document is not the same as knowing whether the person doing the job understands it, has signed it, and knows exactly whose job it is to act when something like a spill happens. Steve made a related point from construction, arguing that the real question is not just what controls exist on paper, but how people feel about speaking up, and what happens to them if they do.

Richard added a structural angle. He argued that many managers are never actually trained in their legal responsibilities for health and safety, only in general governance, which sets them up to fail without anyone intending it. He compared it to promoting the best salesperson into management without checking whether the two skills are related at all, noting that, in his words, “the military don’t overpromote their best snipers.”

A better question than “are we safe”

Christian’s central challenge to the group was about the question itself. Asking “are we safe” in a board meeting is a qualitative question that is almost impossible to answer honestly with a simple no. He suggested replacing it with “what evidence have we got that we’re safe,” structured around three areas: outcomes, controls, and exposure.

When attendees scored themselves across these three areas, most gave themselves a strong grade on outcomes, but weaker grades on controls and exposure, echoing the survey’s own findings. Organisations that shift from assuming risk is managed to actually measuring it typically see incident reductions of 57 percent or more, which is a meaningful gap to close.

Pull quotes

“A sign is not a solution; absorbent matting is not a fix.” Christian Harris

“The culture for me is what we need to look at. How do we get people to be honest so that they don’t think I’ll just hide this because I’ll get into trouble.” Shona

“Time passing without a major incident is not necessarily proof that everything is well.” Christian Harris

Show notes

Episode summary: In this Safety Roundtable session, Christian Harris explores the safety confidence gap, using early results from the State of Safety Survey to show that most organisations rate themselves highly on safety while only half are confident their risks are actually measured. The discussion draws on a Tesco slip case from Christian’s book, the BP Texas City incident, and a ketchup factory example, before opening into a live discussion with attendees Shona, Steve and Richard on culture, process ownership and manager training.

Guest bio: This session features regular Safety Roundtable attendees Shona, Steve and Richard, safety and risk practitioners from social care, construction and process industries respectively, hosted by Christian Harris, founder of Slip Safety Services.

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Take the next step

If you are confident about your safety performance but have not measured the risk behind it, the Slip Risk Scorecard is a straightforward place to start closing that gap.

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