Every now and then I come across organisations and individuals who strongly believe that people need to be reminded to care more about safety. The mechanism of choice is often to get people to talk about, realise or simply remember what's waiting for them at home. Some ask employees to put a photo in their breast pocket: their family, a pet, perhaps a motorcycle. Something they care about. Something worth coming home for.
Whether this works is perhaps a research question. I find the approach questionable, but I suspect it tells us something about a bigger issue in organisations.
The underlying logic seems to be that:
People have forgotten to care.
If they care enough, they'll act safely.
We can make them care through the right reminder.
The practice suggests that people become absorbed in the task, distracted by production pressures, complacent or careless, and they lose sight of what's important. A reminder brings their attention back to it.
But can't a person care deeply about getting home to their family and still make a poor decision? They might misjudge a situation, face competing demands, lack the right equipment or believe that the way they're doing the job is reasonable. Reminding them to care doesn't necessarily help with any of those things.
And what if people already have strong reasons for working carefully? What if they have concerns about the way work is organised, the equipment available, the pressures they face or the compromises they're being asked to make? The family photo doesn't create much room for those things to be heard.
Why are we so comfortable telling people what should matter to them, but sometimes less comfortable asking what matters to them in the work?
For years, we’ve told people to follow instructions, comply with procedures, keep their heads down and do what they're told. We treat them like bad robots, in Indy Johar's phrase. We expect them to follow instructions and perform reliably, without bringing too much of their own thinking into the work.
Then we turn around and ask them to be fully human again. To take ownership, solve problems, exercise judgement and care. And we expect that to happen because we've asked.
But what if people never stopped caring? What if the issue is that we've built workplaces where their knowledge, judgement and care have relatively little room to influence what happens?
Care in the wild
I was talking to a scaffolder recently. He told me that if he dropped a piece of equipment and it hurt the scaffolder working below him, he'd find it very hard to forgive himself.
He was talking about someone else's safety and not about his own. Of course, people care about their families. But there's something different about the colleague working right there beside you. Or, in this case, directly below you. The possibility of hurting them is immediate and concrete. You can picture how it might happen. You can see the consequences of your actions. And you can do something right now to protect them. The relationship between care and action is much closer.
I've seen similar examples of this. Nurses who are deeply attentive to the safety and wellbeing of their patients, sometimes while accepting risks to their own health. And zookeepers who are meticulous about protecting the animals in their care, while being less attentive to their own safety.
Perhaps safety is experienced most powerfully as a shared responsibility in the work, rather than an individual obligation to people waiting outside it.
Giving care somewhere to go
I don't have a complete answer, but I've seen a few things that seem to make a difference.
Being asked something real. When I ask someone what they'd do with $10,000 to improve the work, I'm asking because I'd genuinely like to know. There's a difference between being consulted and being asked a question whose answer doesn't really matter. Giving people space to shape what matters in the organisation is a good place to start.
Seeing their thinking change something. I've helped set up quality circles and local site improvement teams in several organisations. People were given permission to act on their own ideas, and they could see those ideas becoming real changes. The yard was organised, tool store became a shared accountability, and the locker room moved to a place where they didn’t have to cross traffic on their way to the workshop. Their knowledge was making a difference. Their effort had consequences. And people cared about what they had created.
Having opportunities to look after one another. The scaffolder already had a strong sense of responsibility towards his colleague. What matters is whether the organisation makes room for that responsibility to be expressed. Can people coordinate, raise concerns, stop and reconsider, change the way work is organised? Are they supported when they intervene on behalf of someone else? Or are they expected to keep moving and leave those decisions to someone further up the chain?
People already have plenty of reasons to care. Perhaps we need to spend more time creating workplaces where they can do something with that care. Where looking after yourself and looking after one another are both possible. Where people can use their judgement, have a say and see their contributions make a difference.
We ask people to look after each other, to take responsibility, to notice when someone is struggling and to speak up when something doesn't seem right. But do they experience those same things from the organisation? Are their concerns noticed? Are they listened to? Does anyone take responsibility when the conditions they work in make things difficult?
Care is something we experience in relationships. It is also something we learn to expect, offer and reciprocate.
Perhaps before reminding people to care more about safety, we should look at how well the organisation demonstrates that care itself.
/Daniel
PS I’m running a 1-day Safety Conversations for Leaders in London on 8 December 2026. Read more about it here.