Professor Jop Groeneweg explains how just culture, effective safety controls and learning from incidents improve workplace safety in daily operations.
A warning sign can tell a driver that a bridge is too low. It cannot prevent a high vehicle from entering the route. Closing the route to high vehicles changes what can happen. Automatic height detection linked to a barrier offers another form of protection.
Professor Jop Groeneweg used this example at the Bizzmine Digital Summit to show why some safety measures are more effective than others. After his session and conversation with Sarah Van den Bossche, Professional Services Manager Bizzmine, we asked him to expand on the human side of the issue. How should organisations respond when people make mistakes, depart from procedures or work under conditions that expose them to risk?
His answers point to a clear direction. Workplace safety improves when organisations understand the circumstances behind behaviour, choose controls that address the hazard and check whether changes work in daily practice.
A just culture holds people accountable. It also examines what happened before deciding how to respond.
Groeneweg distinguishes between slips, lapses, mistakes and violations. A worker may overlook information or make an incorrect decision despite intending to work safely. These errors reflect the limits of human attention and judgement.
Violations require a closer look. Someone may knowingly depart from a procedure because following it is impractical in an exceptional situation, conflicts with production demands or differs from an established way of working. The departure itself does not tell an organisation whether the person acted recklessly.
Groeneweg suggests asking whether the worker recognised the risk, had a realistic alternative and could reasonably have acted differently. His substitution test puts that into practical terms: would someone else in the same situation have made the same choice?
That question can reveal a problem in the work environment that an investigation focused solely on individual behaviour would miss. As Groeneweg puts it, “people don’t take risks, they run risks.”
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More protection does not always produce greater caution. Groeneweg warns that communicating every layer of protection can create a false sense of security if people come to believe that little risk remains.
His suggestion is deliberately counterintuitive: leave a last line of defence out of the communication about safety measures, so people believe they are slightly less protected than they actually are. The safeguard remains in place. His point is that confidence in the system can influence how people perceive the hazard and make decisions around it.
For safety leaders, this adds another consideration to the choice of controls: how will people understand the protection those controls provide?
The low bridge example illustrates the hierarchy of controls. Driver instructions and warning signs depend on someone noticing the message and responding correctly every time. Closing the route to high vehicles removes the exposure. Height detection linked to a barrier changes the conditions under which a vehicle can proceed.
Organisations often respond to incidents with more procedures or training, even when they recognise that working conditions contributed to what happened. Those measures may help, but Groeneweg argues that teams should first examine whether they can eliminate the hazard, substitute a safer approach or introduce a stronger control.
The same discipline applies after an incident. Groeneweg observes that organisations often report lessons without acting on them. Even when they implement a measure, they rarely return to check whether it reduced the risk.
A lesson needs someone to own the change, a plan to put it into practice and an evaluation of its effect. Sharing it across sites requires another step. Colleagues elsewhere need to recognise why a local finding matters to their own operations, with leadership supporting that wider assessment.
This connects to a broader question about safety culture: can leaders see where daily practice differs from documented procedures and stated priorities? In Bizzmine’s on-demand webinar with Verdantix, April Choy and Alexander Werre discuss how organisations can recognise those differences and spot weakening controls across teams and sites.
Groeneweg’s perspective gives incident reviews a practical direction. Examine the conditions that shaped a decision. Choose a measure that changes those conditions. Then return to the workplace to find out whether the measure worked. That final check determines whether a lesson has become an improvement in safety.
Workplace safety improves when organisations address the conditions that expose people to hazards. That means choosing effective controls, understanding why people act as they do and checking whether changes work in daily practice.
A slip, lapse or mistake can occur even when someone intends to work safely. A deliberate departure from a procedure also needs context. Organisations should examine whether the person recognised the risk, had a realistic alternative and could reasonably have acted differently.
The substitution test asks whether another person in the same situation might have made the same choice. It helps investigators identify working conditions and operational pressures that may have influenced the behaviour.
Procedures and training depend on people remembering and applying them in every situation. Where possible, organisations should also consider controls that remove the hazard, prevent exposure or make the safer action easier to take.
Assign someone to own each change, implement it across the relevant teams and evaluate whether it reduced the risk. A lesson becomes useful beyond one site when other teams assess how it applies to their own work.
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