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Hi, and welcome to the Safety Groom. This is your host, Eric Michrowski. Very excited to have with me Dr. Nektarios Karanikas. He’s a Associate Professor in Health, Safety, and Environment at Queensland University of Technology, but has quite the impressive career from starting out in the Hellenic Air Force into teaching safety and human factors, and also teaching at Emory Riddel. Dr. Nektarios, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me today.

Thank you, Eric. Good to be here with you.

Yeah. So, let’s get started maybe with how you got into safety and quite this impressive career that gets you into many different spaces, from aviation to really the regular safety in an office environment to in a physical environment.

I’m actually an engineer by trade. I graduated as aeronautical engineer from the Greek Air Force Academy. I stayed in the military aviation sector for about 18 years. The first half of my career there was very, very maintenance, engineering, managing tasks, quite deductive procedures and reliability, and any related aspect has to do with engineering. Then I was I was trained as a safety investigator, and I did some small investigations back then. I was also a ground safety officer, but not, to be honest, very heavily involved into safety management and human factors. But those were like the seeds planted in my head. Then I had the opportunity to study. I was sponsored by the Greek Air Force to study my human factors and safety assessment master’s at Cranker University in the UK. This, to be honest, changed the whole thing. I started viewing things from another perspective. It was a challenge for me because when you’re an engineer and you have a very limited understanding of social interaction, about human-machine interaction, about environmental influences, because I was not educated to look at those. You start a master that really opens the horizon for you. It was actually the point that shifted my attention.

I didn’t leave behind my engineering background, but I completed that with more human-centred approaches. After that, I got back to the Air Force, and I was heavily involved with regulations and handbooks in different programs and just culture and safety management, risk assessments. I was investigating also major accidents. I was an advisor for human I was teaching, as you said before. I started my doctorate with Middle East University. I didn’t have any plans to be an academic. I just love the topic. So, I did my doctorate in Safety and Quality Management. After a I graduated, actually, I realized why not switch in careers. Then I resigned from the Great Falls. I became a full-time academic in the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. After four years and a half, I moved to Brisbane. I’ve been living in Australia since 2019. My academic career started with aviation safety. That was my comfort zone, to be honest, because I had the aviation background. I had the health and safety knowledge and application when in the Air Force, but it was more towards aviation safety, operational safety. Now, the last six years or so, I’ve been quite busy with occupation health and safety.

That’s my journey.

That’s excellent. One of the things we’re going to talk about today is you recently published an article in Safety Science around redefining health, risk, and safety for occupational settings. One of the pieces that you really challenge is how do we really define health risk and safety in a business context or in an operational context? Maybe can you walk us through some of the key highlights and findings, but also some of the implications from a business standpoint?

Yes, sure. This actually article came out of a project we did here in Australia. When we started the project, we wanted to make sure we’re talking about the same thing because in communication theory, in elsewhere, it’s a disaster when you think you’re discussing about A, and in reality, people understand B, C, in the EFD. That was the trigger, actually. We did first a literature review to understand how many definitions exist out there. With a note here that none of the case we reviewed, and we reviewed a lot, was based on field research. Different academics, theories, professionals were defining health, safety, and risk, even dictionaries, in a specific way. Sure. Not any shared definition, actually. Nobody agreed with each other. Some of the definitions were, let’s say, emerging through engineering concepts, some of the definition is through management, or other definition is through social context. And disciplines. We started together with people in the company, and we say, Let’s see how we understand health and safety. To no surprise, the picture was the same. We have 53 people. They were quite different understandings of health, risk, and safety. The positive side of that is that we didn’t stop there.

We said, okay, can we please agree? Because we cannot proceed with the project. I cannot do a project with a company that people understand different things about health, risk, and safety. This actually are coming added to these three layers of definitions, first of all, for the first time in the literature, specific work of definitions, and visibly connecting the three concepts. Because in literature, health, risk, and safety, when we define them, we don’t connect them with each other that much. We see them as individual isolated concepts. The great contribution is first the definitions, and we have a very simplified definition that we can use for day-to-day discussions with patients with shop floor workers. Then we have a summarized definition that could be used with supervisors and managers. Then we have a comprehensive definition, more targeted for health and safety professionals, experts, to be a bit more focused on what we’re supposed to do. Now, by connecting health, risk, and safety in the way we define it, it has implications because every definition has implications. Yes. Yeah. The very first implication is not that safety is not an outcome, that is not an objective. It’s a positive duty.

It represents the actions to control risks. As simple as that in the simplified version. Now, where is the problem here? Because if you name something as an objective, as an outcome, means that you produce something tangible, and safety is not anything that you see.

All right. I think that’s an interesting point because some define safety as a recordable rate, which is an outcome indicator, as opposed to really what you’re proposing is it’s not a rear-view indicator, it’s a present sense of safety?

It is actions to control risks. It’s not just present in a very abstract way. You’re very right. We also argue in the paper that when we say about injuries or any harm, those, first of all, are health outcomes. When I’m injured, I have a health problem. There’s no safety problem, first of all. Second, those are outcomes generated through systems by the systems and individuals or teams or business units or whatever. They’re not safety outcomes at all, and there is no safety outcome actually in that sense. When you name safety as an outcome, wrongly, as we argue, then you start putting numbers and you try to make an objective to achieve safety, and you forget that safety is not an objective. It’s not something optional. It’s not something you say, We target for this number of whatever. It’s a duty. It’s different. It’s a duty because somebody has a right. Workers have a right to health and safety. That’s why it’s a duty. Objectives, yes, you You can put objectives around safety, like how many activities you’re going to do to support safety, how many audits or investigation, how deep they’re going to go and how broad they will be and what impact they have.

All those things are great. Could be your objectives, but not safety itself. That’s a very important shift in the way we understand safety. That’s one of the implications. As I say, to finish with this part, to some colleagues that they have the discussion about the way we define safety. I’m not aware around my connections and I’m watching the news and around the world. There’s any financial officer, director, manager that goes to the senior manager or the board and ask them, should we pay the wages this month? Or should we just delay it for a couple of months? Because paying wages or paying taxes or protecting the environment are not negotiable. It’s the same with health and safety. It’s just the duties. How are we going to do that? How are we going to achieve? How are we going to exercise the duty? It’s another story, which safety management comes into place or financial management comes into place or whatever discipline we’re talking about. I hope this makes sense.

Yeah, no, it does. We touch a little bit on safety and the element of safety as a duty. Can you touch on risk and health? Because I think there’s also some interesting elements that surface and some divergence when you were interviewing people around what’s the definition of risk?

Getting back to the simplest Fine. Risk is potential for harm. Where is the potential for harm to health? There is risk. As simple as that. Of course, once more, the paper has more details when it comes to the comprehensive and the Samara definition. Risk exists as a construct because health matters. If changes to health will not matter, we will not talk about risks. Safety exists because we’re talking about risks. The three constructs are very connected with each other. If there’s no concern about risks, we don’t need to talk about safety. If there’s no concern about health, there’s no need to talk about risks. That’s the very same connection between those three. The difference here that we make in the definition is the more summarized definition is that you can actually have a risk because you interact with or you’re exposed to something harmful, like the silica, or some that’s abusing patients, psychosocial hazards. But also, you can have a risk because you do not interact, and you are not exposed to something beneficial. If I need for my health and wellbeing, something that the organization does not provide, then this is a risk, and this can harm my health, which is an element we have not touched a lot when we’re talking about risks.

Sometimes in the business literature, we’re talking about opportunity risks. But here it’s a bit different because it’s just not a missed opportunity to improve, to achieve a gain. We’re talking about the needs of the workers, the needs, not the desires, something they need to do the work that we don’t provide. This is, again, a situation which creates risks.

You touched on it briefly, and one of the things you’re also challenging is how do you measure safety in organization? Tell me a little bit more. It’s not the main salient point of your article, but you do touch on this element around rethinking what we measure?

Yes. Thanks for asking that part. It is a very debate topic about safety performance. We suggest, let’s forget the term safety performance because it actually leads to the wrong thinking, not because the term is bad. Safety does not perform. It’s performed because once more, it represents the actions to control risks. It’s something you do. It’s not something that performs, first of all. So conceptually is wrong to talk about safety performance. Secondly, whatever we now mostly discuss around safety performance is about leading and lagging indicators. But if we go to see what the leading indicators are, most They have an activity indicator. What I do about safety. They don’t talk about safety itself. It’s what I do about safety. Whether that’s the audits, it’s the certifications, it’s the training, the inspections, take fives, whatever you want to do.

Sure.

On the other extreme, the lagging indicator, they’re talking about, once more as we discussed in the beginning of our discussion, the health outcomes of the system. Neither the leading nor the lagging indicators say anything about safety. Say before safety or for safety, the leading indicators, and it’s about health outcomes. We say, what can we do? We went back to the definition, plus, to be honest, to go back to the legislation around health and safety. What are we supposed to us came with two metrics, suggested metrics to be tested and validated, but conceptually at this point. One is the safety level. How we define that is what you have done about safety, very simplified, were divided by what you could have done about safety. We talk about what you provide, what actions, how you control the risks there, and what is the maximum reasonable protection you can provide in the specific context. We don’t say that’s a uniform safety level metric that can apply across all contexts because the maximum reasonable protection within a specific section, business unit, site, work site, function, process differs from each other. But what I do based on what’s the best I can do with the resources I have in specific context is the safety level.

Then we also say the safety effectiveness, which is actually the change to the risk level before and after implementing Actioning, actually against risk, implementing controls or doing whatever we have to do. If I reduce the risk level, the degree to which I reduce the risk level actually response to the safety effectiveness.

Really measuring it, if I’m understanding correctly, more from a risk standpoint, and am I buying down risk? Moving away from the safety outcomes or performance as I suppose, lagging indicators would not be in the picture. How does one get to a reasonable definition of what, I forget the exact term you had, but essentially, the There would be a reasonable amount of risk or actions that you could do because I can understand how you could quantify what you did, but what you could do in theory could be everything.

Not in the specific We’re talking about the reason we’re practicable, not the maximum idea in an ideal world. We say the maximum practicable protection of the specific context. This is what’s happening. If we see the arguments, when things go wrong and we go to the court, unfortunately, there’s no blanket approach from the courts that, Because Eric company did A, Dr. Nektarios company should do the same. They say, within your context, what you could know, what you knew, what available means exist there to actions to control risks, whether those could be reasonable for your context, money-wise, technology, know how Maintenance cost, whatever. And what you did. If, for example, I could have done 10 things in a very high level now approach, 10 things. I’m doing nine Knowing that at this point, I’m planning to do the 10th, but it is the reason, but for some reason, I, for example, prefer to give money to something else. I can do it, but there are other things in the business. Trade-offs, you got to do. Trade-offs, then you provide 90% safety level for the specific… She trades the specific risk. If then buy You are implementing anything, any action to control those risks, you have an argument you can quantify, maybe that you change this by 10%, or by 20%, so you lower the risk by 10%, or you lower the risk by 30%.

That’s at this time point, your safety effectiveness for this specific point. So, the safety effectiveness metric is related to specific actions.

Sure, that you’re driving down.

That you’re driving, yeah. It is a risk because the regulations and the modern law we have is risk-based. It’s not compliance-based, and we love that. And risk exists once more at the heart. I said before, we talk about risk because health matters. We talk about safety because risk matters.

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The businesses typically do look at lacking indicators, whether it’s recordable rates, serious injuries. Should that still not be looked at in terms of indicators so that you still see where you’re at?

No, I don’t say we should abandon-Eliminate. Being in lag. Got you. We need to understand what they represent. Okay. Okay. With all limitations, do we report everything? Do we record everything, what is major and minor? All those limitations. Still, it’s exciting whether from an epidemiological perspective, actually, so the disease, the health outcome of the system, the disease, the problem, the issue we have, it’s important. For example, to measure how many health problems we have, just counting them, it’s a measure of burden. It’s a measure of burden to the whole system. Of course, we should monitor those. But they don’t say anything about safety. Sure. They can be a trigger. Yes, do. To say, Do, we do safety. The same with the activity indicators. Yes, we should, from a programmatic perspective, managerial perspective, plan and do activities that we can support safety. But then, do they really support safety? I will give you an example. We do, for example, investigations. Sure. So, if an investigation does not lead to safety means actions to control risks, then it does not serve safety. If an investigation is more about, let’s be better people, and let’s study again this, and let’s do a survey, which is important.

In reality, a specific investigation does not serve safety directly. Sure. Maybe at a later time point. This is the other thing that we need the activity together, but then how much do they contribute to safety and how much maybe activities create psychosocial risks. Because when you build in a system with many must do in the name of safety, then you create psychosocial risks. You create pressure, you create stress, you create confusion. People start downplaying safety management. This, of course, goes back to the whole discussion about safety red tape and bureaucracy and paper safe and the like. We need to measure, and we need to be… Not because we need just to compare, did we do in 2024, what we planned for 2024 alone, but did we really make a change?

I think that’s where your indicators are showing, are we reducing risk within the business, and are we actually making the moves we could make?

Especially the outcome indicator, the health outcomes, if we apply basic epidemiological concepts from public health, we have the relative risk of the absolute risk and the odds ratios. We can check and we can see the risk level retrospectively.

Sure.

Okay. And we have not done that. We have not. We have not applied basic public health epidemiological concepts to health and safety. And we should do that. But once more, my message here is, I don’t say don’t measure what you measure but just be show that you interpret those outcomes or indicators and the calculations in the right way.

One of the things you also touch on is making sure the definitions of safety are adjusted to different levels in the organization from a language standpoint. Can you tell me more about that?

Yes. This came out from this research unexpectedly because we have many people in the room that have a different background and coming from engineering or management or business functions. We realized that some of the explanations we’re giving in the room when we are reflecting on the data we collected, we were like, People at the sub floor were not the distinguish. Or when we come around the table to design for safety, we should be more specific than, Safety is actions to control risks. This actually gave birth to those three levels. All those three levels are aligned with each other. Just to simplify, then you add a few things, and you have this summarized, and then you add a few more things and you have the copy-hands. This is where the need came from. However, what the discussion also showed during the research is that we ask people, okay, we understand the importance of health, safety, risk, everything. Why are people a bit negative when it comes to safety, when you’re talking about safety?

Since it’s so important- It shouldn’t be negative, but it often is, unfortunately.

It is. It often is, yeah. It’s like a burden sometimes. It’s anecdotal what I’m saying. It’s not in the paper. We ended up with the conclusion that they don’t care about safety, they care about the health. Maybe we need to shift the language and understand that safety serves health. Safety is not for safety. Maybe it’s the time to start talking to people about the health at work. Safety is the vehicle, the instrument to ensure health. We don’t always acknowledge that in our profession. We’re so passionate about safety that we forget that we serve health. For example, it’s like you go to a medical specialist, and instead of asking you what you need, where you feel it’s a problem with your health, let’s say a cardiologist. Sure. The specialist starts talking about cardiology. You don’t care about cardiology. This is what we do. We put our discipline up in front of there, and we say, safety first? No, it’s not. Health? Yes. That’s an idea that came out from this project. We didn’t really put that in a more concrete way, just discussing with you some insights that were not a part of this paper. The safety profession is an aligned health profession.

It is something that’s because it’s a duty to protect the workplace. There is a problem also here. It’s a challenge, not a problem, it’s a huge challenge. I’m not sure there’s any other context, any other setting, where to be healthy is imperative. In the public health concept, I can go to the doctor, and the doctor can prescribe something, can give me some exams. I can do them, or I will be a burden maybe for the system and my family and my friends if I do not and become ill, but I still have the choice. At the workplace, based on the framework, you don’t have the option. You don’t have the option. This is not clear, maybe, this expectation and the duty. Here, I don’t want to be, how to say, stop doing whatever you do and be proud. Be proud of safety. We need to advance safety as a discipline. But keep a lot of safety discussion within our safety gurus, place and our courses and training, and put safety in the context of health, because this is what we’re trying to do. Technically, just as a joke now, in in the workplace, based on the legislation we have today, if somebody has sacrificed their life at work when trying to save somebody else has breached law.

If you think outside the context, can you please process again what I’m saying? If it’s a fire in the building and there is a person inside the building, and somebody puts themselves in danger to save somebody else, technically has breached the law because you’re not supposed to put your health in harm.

To put yourself in harm. Correct. 

If we strip things from context, we become quite dry as a profession, and we need to be a bit more mindful of the context. Maybe once more, that’s my recommendation, put health at the upfront, not say use safety as the discipline, as the instrument, as the vehicle.

To get to health. Yeah. One of the things you touch on as well in your article is that your definitions of safety also potentially broaden our lens or viewpoint. You talked about the psychosocial risk; you talked about potentially bridging with HR on some of the elements on more the health side of the equation. Tell me a little bit more about what you mean by this and the positive impact this brings.

Yes, I’m trying to reconcile always. I’m not a patient that I can’t inject something that does not fit my frame. So indeed, when it comes to health, risk, and safety, the psychosocial hazards for example, that can give rise to risk, as I said before, and then we need to take actions. Play a role because we interact with people. At the same time, for example, I’m working from home today. Sure. If I have no option and they need to interact with somebody, it’s a psychosocial hazard. So, it’s something I need, and I don’t have the chance to get, for example. Sure. Second, if we go to all those new safety paradigms, safety two and safety differently, and hope, and We look really what they are about. We published an article a few months back about those. They are about indeed psychosocial aspects of work. They have a value in this the definition we have because there are some sources of psychosocial hazards. They are, for example, the way management deals with workers, whether we really consult with them or just we’re very superficial. Do we learn from them? So that’s psychosocial space. But there’s also another psychosocial space that those paradigms touch upon is the safety management activity you We have your leading activities and the indicators.

Do they possibly cause them some harm? Sure. Become a psychosocial hazard for people, like blaming people’s investigations or offending people during inspections and assessments or not respecting people’s expertise during these assessments. There is a connection, a very clear connection. But as we’re saying that paper a couple of months back is not the only That’s the part of safety that we should look at. It’s, of course, important to respect each other and hear that work and have the voice and be respected. But at the same time, because we have so many hazards around, we have to manage and not just forget about the physical interaction with the machinery, a process safety, or food safety, or fire safety or environmental impacts or whatever. We need to have a more holistic approach to health, safety, and risk once more.

To summarize, if there’s one wish you had for senior leaders to really understand really around safety, risk, health, what would be that one thing you’d really want senior leaders to capture based on your research?

I will get back to the main argument that leaders need to exercise due diligence and see safety as a duty, but not only from a legal perspective, from a humanistic and social and moral perspective. And engage with safety professionals into discussions about not what is perfect, nobody expects perfection, we cannot, but what is reasonably practicable and listening to the needs of the people we are actually assigned to protect in the workplace. Leaders Sometimes because very busy, and they’ll have numbers, they’ll have KPIs for everything. I tend to try to quantify in a way. Sometimes qualitative arguments and decisions can be the same variables The safety can have different forms in different settings, in different contexts, different workforce. Still is a tangible being actions to control the risks. Interventions, as what you say in the paper, programs, campaigns, good things, but not actions. They don’t control any risk directly. This is the last message for them. Please differentiate between what you do regarding What safety actions, what risk control actions you do, and what you do about safety, those two different things. When you design actions controls into your system, you do safety. When you ask me to put my PPE on, to follow procedures, to protect myself, then you do an intervention, and you rely very much on me to do safety.

That’s a fine line, I think.

Excellent. Before we close off, I love the way you connect safety, health, and risk. Can you share that again?

Yes. Because health matters, we’re discussing about risk. Because we’re discussing about risk, safety exists as a construct. Sure. All those are connected.  

Excellent. Thank you so much for joining me today. If anybody wants to read the article, it’s called Redefining Health, Risk, and Safety for Occupational settings: A Mixed Method Study, and it’s published in the Safety Science. Dr. Nektarios, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way they can do that?

They can find me at university page on LinkedIn. Let’s keep in touch. Eric, thanks very much for having me and giving me the opportunity to share our research and my thoughts.

Excellent. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.