Talking about a work accident is talking about work. And work is a fundamental part of our lives, as it is where we spend more than half of our daily time. In this sense, it is noticeable that it exerts a very powerful influence on our lives, as it interferes with the multiple dimensions that make up our existence. To this extent, in an organizational context, safety and health at work, the well-being and emotional balance of workers are, at this moment, the touchstone for organizations that seek to find high levels of performance in more demanding and complex contexts. When we analyze the variables in this equation – 1, the workers and 2, the work – we understand the ambiguous relationship established between both, as well as the permanent imbalance of forces established between them.
That said, if work is or can be a source of satisfaction for workers, it can also manifest itself over them with all its fury, highlighting their darker side. This darker side of work manifests itself in increasingly complex and demanding contexts in the form of an accident at work.
The context of the accident at work
These accidents at work can be more or less serious, with severe consequences for workers and their families. For organizations, accidents at work are unwanted events, but their occurrence is expected according to systemic safety models (Reason, 1991).
To mitigate the occurrence of accidents at work, organizations must adopt as practice the investment and development of credible processes of investigation and analysis of work accidents (Hollnagel, 2004). These processes should promote organizational learning to avoid possible future accidents.
However, what happens in the vast majority of cases is that these processes of investigation and analysis of work accidents should not only aim at identifying the culprits, nor should they hide behind human error to remove responsibility from the various actors involved in accidents at work.
Security models
To allow true organizational learning, we must resort to the set of variables advocated by the various security models, selecting one or more security models and ensuring their suitability for each of the organizational contexts under analysis. In that sense, there are:
- More immersive models (epidemiological or systemic models) and
- Simpler models (sequential model) with completely different functions depending on the organization and the level of depth intended in these investigations and analyzes of Work Accidents (Hollnagel, 2004).
These systematic analyzes of accidents at work must be carried out by safety specialists, who are qualified and highly trained for this purpose and with the support of multidisciplinary teams that represent the organizational system. The correct use of safety models and techniques makes it possible to identify and act on the causes of accidents at work, through the adoption of a set of organizational practices that promote a culture of safety and the adoption of safe behaviors by workers.
The role of organizations in the event of an accident at work
In short, it is up to organizations to assume the commitment to embrace safety at work as a value for the organization and to develop the set of mechanisms necessary to act in a preventive logic, adopting the best practices in matters of safety at work. The multidisciplinarity makes it possible to identify and correct what is not going well in the process, through the correct use of work safety models and techniques that allow moving towards a solid safety culture.
However, contextual factors, cultural factors, psychosocial factors, personal factors, and education and training of security professionals, managers, and workers should not be neglected because they also have a very important weight in any this process of investigation and analysis of accidents at work.