There is a sentence I have heard more times than I care to remember during investigations, audits and reviews:
“I thought someone else was looking after that.”
Sometimes it relates to something relatively minor. An action that has sat untouched for a few weeks. A risk assessment that should have been reviewed. A piece of training that nobody realised had expired.
Sometimes the consequences are considerably more serious.
But what is interesting is how often the people involved aren’t incompetent, careless or deliberately ignoring their responsibilities.
Quite often, everybody thought they were doing the right thing.
One person thought Operations owned it. Operations thought Health & Safety were dealing with it. Health & Safety thought the manager had been briefed. The manager assumed the supervisor had told the team. The supervisor thought it had already been covered at the toolbox talk.
And somewhere between all of those assumptions, nothing actually happened.
After nearly three decades working in Health & Safety, poor communication is probably one of the most consistent problems I have seen.
I’ve seen it on shop floors, in offices, across multiple sites and right around boardroom tables.
Which raises an interesting question.
We all know how to communicate. So why are organisations still so bad at it?
Sending something isn’t the same as communicating it
Most businesses communicate constantly.
There are emails. Teams messages. Meetings. Briefings. Toolbox talks. Policies. Procedures. Minutes. Action plans. WhatsApp groups. SharePoint folders.
If anything, many organisations probably communicate too much.
The problem is that volume isn’t the same as effectiveness.
Uploading a revised safe system of work to SharePoint doesn’t mean the people carrying out the work know it has changed.
Emailing managers doesn’t mean the message reached their teams.
Discussing an action in a management meeting doesn’t mean somebody has actually taken ownership of it.
And putting somebody’s name against something doesn’t necessarily mean they know what they’re responsible for, when it needs completing or what “complete” actually looks like.
That distinction matters.
Communication isn’t complete when something has been sent. Certainly, in the world of safety, it is complete when it has been received, understood and acted upon.
And even then, from a leadership perspective, there is another stage.
Can you demonstrate that it happened?
Because that is where communication becomes part of a management system rather than just a conversation.
Where accountability disappears
One of the easiest ways for risk to develop inside an organisation is between functions.
Consider this fairly ordinary scenario.
An employee has been struggling with a task and reports discomfort to their manager.
Is that Health & Safety?
HR?
Occupational Health?
Their line manager?
Operations?
Potentially, it involves all of them.
But unless the organisation has established who does what, who initiates the process, who owns the action and who checks it has been completed, the involvement of several functions can actually make the situation less controlled rather than more.
Everyone is involved. Nobody owns it.
The same happens with fire safety actions, maintenance issues, training, contractor management, employee capability, insurance recommendations, audit findings and countless other areas.
This is why I am increasingly wary when I hear the words:
“That’s dealt with by HR.”
Or:
“Health & Safety look after that.”
What does look after actually mean?
Who specifically is responsible?
What are they required to do?
By when?
Who needs to know?
What happens if it isn’t done?
And crucially:
How does leadership know that it has happened?
If those questions can’t be answered, you don’t really have accountability.
You have an assumption.
The action tracker barely anyone looks at, let alone owns
I am a huge advocate of action trackers.
Not because spreadsheets are particularly exciting; they aren’t. In fact, they can be a fairly effective cure for insomnia. I jest, but a good action management system closes one of the biggest gaps I repeatedly see in organisations.
Something is identified.
An action is agreed.
Then everybody moves on.
Three months later, when something has happened that serves as a reminder, somebody asks what happened to it.
Cue the search through meeting minutes and email chains. How exhausting!
A functioning action tracker should make ownership visible. It should identify the action, the person responsible, the timescale, the level of risk or priority, progress and evidence of closure.
More importantly, somebody should actually be monitoring it.
Because an action tracker that nobody reviews is just another document, and a pointless one at that.
A management system isn’t defined by the documents you have. It is defined by what happens because of them.
That applies equally to policies, risk assessments, safe systems of work, training matrices, audit programmes and emergency plans.
They are mechanisms for making things happen.
If they don’t change behaviour, trigger action or provide assurance, we need to question what purpose they are serving.
“But we told them…”
This is another phrase that makes me wince, a very uncomfortable wince.
“But we told them.”
Maybe you did. But did they understand it?
Did they know what they were expected to do differently?
Did supervisors reinforce it?
Did anyone check whether it was being followed?
Was the message still reaching people six months later when new employees had joined?
This is particularly important with safe systems of work.
I have seen beautifully written procedures sitting in folders or on SharePoint while the people doing the job have developed an entirely different way of doing it.
Sometimes their way is perfectly sensible.
Sometimes it isn’t.
But who’s checking?
Either way, there is now a gap between work as imagined and work as actually done.
That gap should matter enormously to leaders.
Because your assurance cannot come solely from knowing that the correct procedure exists.
You need confidence that the procedure reflects reality and that reality reflects the controls you believe are in place.
That means communication cannot be a one-off event.
It requires training, supervision, observation, feedback, monitoring and review.
In other words, it requires a management system.
But there is another question worth asking.
If a safe system of work has been communicated and the job is still being done in an entirely different way, why?
Did you involve the people who actually do the job when the safe system of work was written in the first place?
Because sometimes the gap isn’t that people haven’t followed the system. Sometimes the system hasn’t properly reflected the reality of the job.
Perhaps we do need teaching how to communicate
I said earlier that we all know how to communicate.
But do we know how to do so effectively?
We certainly know how to send information.
Modern organisations are exceptionally good at that.
And by the way, how many unread emails are currently sat in your inbox? See my point?
What we are perhaps less good at is communicating in a way that creates clarity and accountability for all, and not just a handful of people.
Effective organisational communication should answer some very simple questions:
- What needs to happen?
- Who owns it?
- When does it need to happen?
- Who else needs to know?
- What does successful completion look like?
- How will we know it has actually been done?
That’s not complicated. But it does require discipline.
And that discipline becomes increasingly important as organisations grow.
When there are ten people in a business, informal communication can work really quite well.
At 50, 100 or 500 people, relying on somebody remembering to mention something to somebody else becomes a fairly questionable risk control.
The organisation needs systems that support communication rather than depending entirely upon individuals.
This is bigger than Health & Safety
Although I encounter this constantly through health and safety work, the issue is much broader.
A failure to communicate an employee restriction identified by Occupational Health can quickly become a Health & Safety issue, an HR issue and, if that employee subsequently goes off sick, a productivity and commercial issue too.
An unresolved fire safety action isn’t confined to the Health & Safety team’s action list either. It can affect operational risk, insurance and ultimately governance.
A recurring operational problem can become a financial problem.
And a poorly managed performance concern can move rapidly between operational management, HR and Employment Law.
That’s the problem with the departmental boxes we create.
Risk doesn’t respect the organisational chart.
That is why senior leaders need visibility across the whole system rather than receiving isolated reassurance from individual functions.
The question isn’t simply:
“Has Health & Safety dealt with this?”
It is:
“What needs to happen across the business, who owns each part, and how do I know it has been completed?”
That is a much stronger leadership question.
So how do I know what’s really happening when I’m not there?
This is ultimately the challenge.
You cannot personally attend every meeting, observe every task, read every risk assessment or check every action.
Nor should you.
Good leadership isn’t about being everywhere.
It is about creating a system that gives you confidence in what happens when you aren’t there.
That means clear responsibilities.
Defined communication routes.
Active action tracking.
Escalation when deadlines are missed or risk increases.
Managers who understand what they are accountable for.
Employees who know what is expected of them.
And evidence that allows leadership to test whether all of that is actually working.
Because without those things, leaders are often relying on something far less robust:
Hope.
Hope is not assurance.
And “I thought someone else was looking after that” is usually a sign that the system relied upon it far too heavily.
One Question for Leaders
If I asked three people in different parts of your organisation who owns one of your most important operational risks, would they all give me the same answer?
If you’re not confident they would, that is probably worth exploring.
And that question of knowing what’s really happening in your organisation leads neatly into next week’s subject, because there is another area where assumptions about ownership and purpose are incredibly common:
Occupational Health Isn’t About Medical Referrals
Good occupational health protects people before problems develop while helping organisations reduce absence, improve productivity and retain experienced staff. We’ll explore why proactive support delivers far greater value than reactive intervention.
