Mitch Gibson, Health & Safety Manager at FCC Environment, asks whether striving for ‘zero accidents’ in the workplace is creating a culture of silence and actually damaging health and safety efforts.
For decades, ‘zero accidents’ or ‘zero harm’ has been viewed as the gold standard of workplace safety. The ambition is understandable – no one wants to see anyone injured at work – but as organisations continue striving towards perfect safety records, an important question is emerging: does the pursuit of zero incidents always make workplaces safer, or can it sometimes have unintended consequences?
There isn’t an issue with the goal itself; every organisation should aim to prevent harm wherever possible. The challenge arises when a safety target becomes a safety culture.
When success is measured primarily through the absence of reported incidents, there is a risk that organisations begin focusing on the metric rather than the behaviours that genuinely keep people safe.
In the resources and waste sector, where employees face varying levels of risk on a daily basis, genuine safety cannot be reduced to a number on a dashboard. Safety is ultimately about people, decisions, and behaviours; it is about creating a culture where everyone feels empowered to speak up, report concerns, and learn from mistakes.
A perfect safety record can look impressive, but when organisations place excessive emphasis on maintaining that record, employees could start to worry about possible consequences of reporting incidents, near misses or unsafe conditions.
People don’t deliberately set out to create this environment, but the pressure can develop unintentionally. Employees may fear being blamed for incidents, and managers may become concerned about how safety statistics reflect on their teams.
Near misses might go unreported simply because ‘nothing actually happened’, while minor incidents can be viewed as something best forgotten rather than examined. The result of these being ignored creates a culture where valuable learning opportunities are missed.
The reality is that every organisation experiences near misses, unsafe behaviours and unexpected events. The difference between a strong and weak safety culture is not whether these things occur, but whether people feel confident enough to report them when they do and then subsequently learn from them.
Higher levels of reporting often mean that employees are engaged, vigilant and willing to raise concerns before more serious incidents occur.
A lot of major incidents are preceded by warning signs. A vehicle reversing issue, a slip that almost occurred, damaged equipment or a breakdown in communication can all provide valuable insight into potential risks.
When these events are reported, organisations gain an opportunity to intervene to prevent somebody from getting hurt in the future. Near misses shouldn’t be viewed as failures but as evidence that people are paying attention.
Traditional safety management has often relied heavily on rules, procedures, and compliance requirements. While rules remain essential, they cannot account for every situation an employee may encounter.
Modern workplaces are increasingly complex; employees frequently face circumstances where they must make decisions based on judgement, experience, and situational awareness rather than simply following a checklist.
This is where values become increasingly important; rules tell people what they need to do, values help people understand why they need to do it.
When safety is built around shared values rather than compliance alone, employees are more likely to take ownership of outcomes. Instead of asking if they have followed the rules, they start asking if it is the safest way to do something.
That shift in thinking creates a stronger foundation for safe behaviours, particularly in environments such as our sector, where risks are constantly changing.
When managers focus solely on incident numbers, employees can naturally become focused on protecting those numbers instead of themselves.
When leaders instead ask about, for example, the concerns people are raising, what near misses have happened, and whether they highlight any potential risks, they signal that learning is valued as much as performance.
The conversations become less about maintaining appearances and more about improving outcomes. Safety professionals have long recognised the limitations of relying exclusively on lagging indicators, such as lost-time injuries or reportable incidents.
While these measures remain important, they only tell organisations what has already happened. Forward-thinking organisations increasingly supplement these figures with leading indicators, such as near miss reporting rates, hazard reporting, corrective action completion, and employee engagement in safety initiatives.
These metrics provide a broader picture of cultural health and organisational learning. They focus attention on the activities that prevent incidents occurring in the first place, rather than simply recording failures after the event.
One of the biggest risks of a ‘zero accidents’ mindset is that it can unintentionally frame incidents as something to hide rather than something to learn from.
Avoiding issues is unfortunately not always possible; how an organisation responds when they do is what will help them to lower the frequency of them happening.
A learning culture recognises that transparency drives improvement; it understands that identifying weaknesses is not a sign of failure but a necessary step towards stronger safety in the workplace.
Employees who feel comfortable raising concerns become an organisation’s most effective early warning system. Being on the ground, they often spot hazards before leaders do and are able to identify practical solutions and provide insights that no audit or procedure can uncover on its own.
The ambition of achieving zero harm should never be abandoned. Preventing injury remains the ultimate goal of every safety programme, but organisations should be careful not to confuse the absence of reported incidents with the presence of a strong safety culture.
The most successful organisations are not those pretending problems do not exist; they are the ones creating cultures where problems can be identified without fear or hesitation, discussed, and ultimately be resolved before they lead to any harm.
In the end, the goal should not simply be zero accidents; it should be zero barriers to speaking up about safety in the first place.
