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Writer's pictureDavid Nichol

Can you make your business one percent safer?

One Percent Safer is described as an ‘anthology of the world’s best thought leaders, all in one place’. It contains 142 chapters, written by 142 different contributors, each one giving their best nugget of wisdom to make your organisation one percent safer. It’s out now, with all proceeds going to the One Percent Safer Foundation.


2.78 million people died last year due to accidents at work or work-related ill health. No doubt that’s an unacceptable number, but it’s also hard to get our heads around, so let’s break it down. It’s 7,616 people dead every day. It’s 317 every hour. 10 seconds, and another person dead. Another person just like you. A husband, wife, partner, mother, father, brother, sister, son, daughter, friend, colleague. Yet organisations rarely discuss safety in this way – it’s usually only ever about accident frequencies and lost time injury rates. Real people suddenly fade out to become mere numbers.


Professor Dr Andrew Sharman, the brains behind the One Percent Safer book, said: “At this point you have a couple of options. You can accept this, as unfortunate as it is, that this is just what happens in the world of work and carry on doing things the way you always have.


Or you can join us and imagine a world where all organisations commit to being one percent safer every day. You can be a change maker and game-changer in your organisation and be part of the One Percent Safer Movement. It’s this simple: if we all do just one thing, just improve things by one percent, then that’s 28,000 husbands, wives, partners, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, friends and co-workers. 28,000 humans. Wouldn’t that be incredible to be part of a movement that helps save 28,000 lives?”


In a recent interview for the Safety & Health Podcast (set to be released later this month), Andrew Sharman told SHP: “I’m dead against the idea of zero injuries as a target. As a vision, no one ever getting hurt at work is brilliant. But as a metric? I think it’s terrible metric, it’s binary. As soon as you have one accident you’ve failed your target and knowing that we failed our target and we can never win against that target is really demotivating demoralising.


“So, I’ve been pushing for leaders to think differently about how we measure safety, not by the absence of accidents. but by the safety that we create. What if we use the power of marginal gains? This has worked well for the British Olympic Cycling Team under Sir Dave Brailsford. Matthew Syed talks about the same thing in his book Black Box Thinking, and we’ve been talking about it in business for year’s anyway, we just called a continuous improvement. So, the idea of One Percent Safer is, if we can just make our businesses one percent safer every day, the power of that collective gain is extraordinary.”


Source – SHP September 15, 2020

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