Stop counting accident-free days!
Stop counting accident-free days!
“Safety shouldn’t be your top priority – money should.” That provocative statement opened a keynote address challenging South Africa’s health and safety professionals to stop counting accidents and start embedding safety as a core business value.
On 15 August, professionals from across the country gathered at the Century City Conference Centre in Cape Town for the South African Institute of Occupational Safety and Health’s (Saiosh’s) 13th annual Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Conference. The event brought together what CEO and founding member Neels Nortjé described as “an estimated 3,000 years of practical experience” in OHS.
“This year would have been our 15th conference if not for past Covid disruptions, and we remain committed to providing the industry’s most comprehensive platform for knowledge exchange and professional development,” Nortjé said in his opening address.
The “safety first” fallacy
Professor Andrew Sharman, chief executive of the International Institute of Leadership and Safety Culture (IILSC), opened the event with a compelling keynote. Drawing on insights from his book Just Right: What Your MBA Should Have Taught You About Workplace Health and Safety, as well as decades of hands-on experience, he shared practical strategies and timeless principles for achieving safety excellence.
Sharman’s first point challenged the common “safety first” mantra. “Safety should not be your top priority in business,” he declared. “What should be your top priority? Money. Running the business. Money makes the world go round.”
He contextualised this provocative statement: “There’s a financial crisis (that has been) rolling around for the last few years, and it’s about to go boom. Thanks to what’s happening in the States, every other nation on the planet is scrambling – every organisation, everywhere. So, why on earth would you say safety first?”
Rather than positioning safety as a competing priority, Sharman urged a complete reframe: “I’m encouraging you to stop talking about safety first, especially in these challenging times. Instead, talk about embedding safety as a core value; how things are done in your business. Make it part of your DNA.”
The weight of this was underscored when Sharman asked the delegates to count with him. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. “What just happened in those 10 seconds?” he asked. “Somebody died at work. One every 10 seconds.”
But the figures have worsened significantly. In 2023-24, when the UN and the International Labour Organization released new figures, the number changed for the first time in 42 years. “It’s no longer 2.78 million people killed by their work every year; it’s now 2.93 million. It’s going up,” stressed Sharman.
He had delegates count again, this time from eight to one: “Every eight seconds of every day this year, last year, next year, and into the foreseeable future, we lose a life. That means the way we’re working isn’t working. We need to do things differently in safety.”
Having spent nearly three decades shaping safety cultures in 130 countries, he argued that the profession faces “a crisis between intention and impact”. Good intentions, he emphasised, are no longer enough. “It’s about your impact,” he told delegates. “Do you feel like you’re having a significant impact day in, day out in your role every day?”
Measuring success, not just avoiding failure
For Sharman, the profession’s obsession with accident rates and injury-free days is fundamentally misguided. Pointing to a typical downward-trending incident chart, he asked delegates what they were measuring. When someone responded “consequences”, he simplified it further: “We’re measuring failure. Every time we have an accident, we have failed.”
Drawing on the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, Sharman highlighted a critical flaw in conventional safety thinking. “Seven years without an injury,” he noted. “The rig explodes, killing 11 men and sending 17 more to the hospital with disabling injuries. Seven years without an accident and suddenly, boom. Something’s fundamentally wrong here, isn’t it?”
His point was plain: “The absence of accidents doesn’t mean the existence of safety.” He urged professionals to shift their measurement approach entirely. “Let’s not count the number of days without an accident, because that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily working safely. We’ve got to measure the work that we do by the quantity, the volume, and the frequency of success, not by the number of times we fail or failed less.”
He added that organisations need to look at the behaviours they want to see more of and then target those with metrics that are meaningful.
The language we use matters
Sharman also challenged safety professionals to reconsider how they describe their work. He recounted a story from his flight to South Africa: “A guy was sitting next to me and asked, ‘Are you travelling for work?’ I replied, ‘Yeah, I am’. ‘What do you do?’ followed. ‘I work in health and safety,’ was my reply. He then looked down and continued to read his newspaper. That was the end of our conversation. We kill conversations.”
On his next flight, he changed his tactics: “I said, I work in human dynamics. I work with business leaders and large organisations and get them to think about how their behaviour impacts the culture of the organisation and how that makes the culture stronger, which makes the business better, more successful.”
The response was dramatically different: “The guy looked at me and said, ‘I’m the CEO of company X. Here’s my business card. Would you give me a call?”
Leadership, visibility, and tone
True cultural change, Sharman insisted, comes from visible, caring leadership. “The lowest standard that you demonstrate as a leader is the highest standard we can expect of our people,” he said – a principle he described as “one of the most important things that we need to be aware of”.
He also criticised the superficial nature of many safety walks, describing typical exchanges where executives ask, “Is everything safe?” Workers inevitably respond, “Yes, boss,” and leaders reply, “Good job,” before moving on.
Drawing on former US Secretary of State Paul O’Neill’s transformation of the Aluminum Corporation of America, Sharman introduced a powerful alternative: “He asked employees, ‘What one small thing could you do today to improve safety around here?’” He went on to explain the psychology behind this approach: “When you ask this question, what you’re really saying is, ‘I believe that you’ve got skills and experience that can make this a better business. And I want to listen to you tell me what that is. I trust you, I have faith in you.’ This is a tremendously powerful question.”
To support this shift, Sharman introduced the IILSC’s Care Cards – a deck of 60 cards containing over 150 meaningful questions across 10 different themes of safety culture. “We’ve got to ask better questions,” he emphasised. The cards are designed to help leaders conduct better safety conversations by moving beyond superficial exchanges.
When Sharman was urged to wrap up as the coffee break approached, he asked the delegates if they wanted to continue or break. As one, the crowd answered that they wanted to continue. “In my 30 years of speaking at conferences, I’ve never asked that question, and I’ve never had that answer,” Sharman said. The spontaneous decision underscored the hunger for meaningful change in safety culture – precisely the shift he had been challenging delegates to embrace.
Yaseen Francis (left), last year’s Person of the Year Award winner, hands the accolade over to Jeffrey Molefe.
A call to transformation
Sharman’s final message was clear: “You have the biggest imperative that you have ever had in your career as a professional right now, and you have got to engage the leadership in your business if we’re going to make it happen.”
The safety profession in South Africa must evolve from technical compliance to cultural leadership, from measuring failure to celebrating success, and from good intentions to measurable impact. As Sharman put it: “We’re still killing and hurting people every day around the world. And so, our roles become increasingly important as we move into a future that’s not just turbulent — I’d go as far as suggesting it’s in chaos.”
Awards recognise industry excellence
After a day packed with ideas and inspiration, the conference concluded with the annual Dinner Awards Function, during which outstanding contributions to OHS were recognised.
Jeffrey Molefe, SHE compliance officer at the South African Parliament, was named Person of the Year 2025, while Warren Malgas, occupational health and safety specialist at Isuzu Motors South Africa, received the Student of the Year Award.
“This year’s Student of the Year Award was very special, because this person’s name was on the trophy in 2021, when he started his studies. He submitted his results and was the best again,” Nortjé explained.
The Student of the Year Award is presented to the individual who has achieved the most distinctions for either their first, second, or third year, or for postgraduate results.
In addition to winning a floating trophy, the Student and Person of the Year received R5,000 from Saiosh and a one-year subscription to Data Dynamics, a leading digital law publisher in South Africa, worth another R5,000.
The prestigious Wall of Fame welcomed two new inductees: Advocate Raynard Looch and Professor John Smallwood. The Wall of Fame is Saiosh’s most prestigious honour, recognising a lifetime of commitment to worker safety and health, as well as unique professional achievements and leadership in the OHS community. The rest of the speakers at the Saiosh Conference also delivered insightful presentations, which we’ll cover in future editions.
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