Ep. 126: Is it time to stop talking about safety culture?

Injury rates tell an incomplete story. David Provan and Drew Rae explore how adding an injury severity metric transforms safety performance conversations. They examine the 2026 Journal of Safety Research paper "Injury Rates Tell an Incomplete Story, but a More Complete Measurement Narrative May Be Possible" by Kevin Geddert, Sidney Dekker, and Drew Rae. Across three large organizational case studies, the researchers presented senior executives with their own injury data calculated three ways: total recordable injury frequency (TRIF), average injury severity, and a weighted combination called the Severity Adjusted Injury Frequency (SAIF). The results reshaped which periods, business units, and countries looked safest.

Returning after a summer break, David Provan and Drew Rae ask an uncomfortable question: are we lying about our safety performance? They examine Jan Hayes, Sarah Maslen, and Paul Schulman's 2024 Safety Science paper, "A Case of Collective Lying: How Deceit Becomes Entrenched in Organisational Safety Behaviour," a case study of Pacific Gas and Electric's decade-long falsification of pipeline locate-and-mark records — a scandal that produced $110 million in fines after a 2009 whistleblower complaint. The hosts unpack how routine, high-consequence safety work quietly became a numbers game.

In this episode, David Provan and Drew Rae examine a 2025 paper published in the Journal of Safety Research — "Signs of safety: An investigation of how OHS professionals interpret injury metrics," authored by James Pomeroy and Colin Pilbeam. Drawing on twenty interviews with experienced safety professionals and analyzed through a semiotic lens, the research explores how metrics such as lost time injury frequency rates and total recordable injury rates are used and interpreted within organizations. Despite well-documented statistical and conceptual limitations, these metrics remain dominant indicators of safety performance. The paper asks not whether they work as measures, but what symbolic work they are actually doing inside organizations.

In this episode, Drew and David examine workplace communication dynamics through Amy Edmondson and Anita Williams Woolley's 2021 paper "Reflections, Voice and Silence in Workplace Conversations," published in the Journal of Change Management. The discussion challenges the simplistic assumption that speaking up is always beneficial for safety, introducing a four-quadrant framework that distinguishes between productive and unproductive forms of both voice and silence. The hosts explore how withholding, disrupting, contributing, and processing behaviors shape meeting effectiveness and organizational safety outcomes.

In this episode, David Provan and Drew Rae examine workplace humor through the lens of psychosocial safety, discussing Helen Lingard, Rita Zhang, and Katie Chan's 2025 paper "Not Just a Joke: Women's Experiences of Workplace Humour in the Australian Construction Industry" published in the Journal of Management in Engineering. The research reveals that 65% of women in construction experience sexual harassment, with humor frequently weaponized to mask discrimination and maintain male dominance in a workforce that is 97% male.