Key takeaways:
When deadlines are tight and staffing is short, safety can start to feel like the thing slowing you down. Push through, hit the goal, deal with the rest later. It’s a common mindset – and according to workplace safety expert Shawn Galloway, it’s also a costly one.
Galloway is the CEO of ProAct Safety, a firm that works with organizations worldwide to align safety performance with business success. In this episode of the WorkSafe Podcast, he argued that safety and production aren’t competing priorities – and that treating them that way is itself a performance problem.
The assumption that holds businesses back
No business owner wants their employees to get injured. Intentions are almost always good. What’s missing, Galloway said, is the alignment between those intentions and how the work is actually set up.
“Your organizational systems are perfectly designed to give you the results you’re currently receiving,” Galloway said. “If people have to work around safety or work around quality in order to get the job done, then we have to look at fundamentally how we’ve set that job up.”
In other words, if safety is getting skipped on your job site, that’s not a people problem – it’s a design problem. And solving it starts with looking honestly at whether your systems make the safe choice the easy choice.
☑️ The bottom line: Businesses that treat safety as a barrier have often built that barrier themselves through the way work is scheduled, resourced, and measured.
How production pressure quietly erodes safety culture
Even leaders with good intentions can unintentionally send the wrong message. Think this isn’t happening in your organization? Ask yourself: How often does safety come up in conversation compared to production metrics, schedules, or customer demands?
“You set the priority for something based on how often you talk about it,” Galloway explained. “If I’m working on the front line and the boss mentions safety once a week but talks about production needs every day – I know what the real priority is.”
This isn’t just about what leaders say out loud. Employees read body language. They notice when someone glances at their watch after a safety concern is raised. They watch what happens when a shortcut gets taken, and no one says a word.
Galloway referenced the broken windows theory – the idea that one unaddressed broken window eventually invites graffiti, then larger problems. In a workplace, it works the same way. One overlooked shortcut becomes accepted practice. Ignored housekeeping signals that standards in general don’t matter much. Small tolerances add up to organization-wide apathy.
“What gets tolerated becomes the culture,” Galloway said.
What this looks like across your team
Safety culture aims to be unified, but in reality, it varies across teams. Galloway put it plainly: The number of subcultures you have is roughly equal to the number of frontline supervisors you have. Each one is either reinforcing safety as a value or quietly undermining it, based on what they model and what they let slide.
This means building a strong safety culture isn’t just a message from the top – it’s something that must be held and lived in every layer of management.
📍 Read next: Safety Culture: Building a Safer Workplace with Leadership Support >
The real cost of deprioritizing safety
Here’s where the “safety slows us down” argument really falls apart: The math.
According to MEM claims data, the average cost of a lost-time claim in 2025 was $39,495. That cost has a real impact on your experience modification factor and, therefore, your work comp premium. Then, there are the ripple effects of an incident. Suddenly, you’re one person down on production, training a replacement, and watching morale plummet.
Galloway framed it this way: “You’re either building the capacity for success or you’re building the capacity to injure people.”
Consider what happens when someone is hurt and out of work:
- Production quotas don’t disappear. The remaining team carries more load, which increases pressure and the likelihood of shortcuts.
- Hiring and training a replacement takes time and money. The indirect costs of turnover are significant, especially in skilled trades.
- Your work comp premium can climb. Your e-mod reflects your claims history. More claims mean higher costs at renewal.
- The human cost is real. An injury can be life-changing for an employee and their family.
☑️ The bottom line: The upfront cost of investing in safety is almost always less than the downstream cost of ignoring it. The question isn’t whether you can afford to prioritize safety – it’s whether you can afford not to.
How safety and production rise together
Galloway said one of the biggest mindset shifts businesses can make is to stop measuring safety success purely by the absence of injuries – and start looking at the presence of good systems.
“Success in safety is not just the absence of injuries,” Galloway said. “It’s the confidence in your system’s capacity to deal with how work is actually taking place.”
Organizations that run smoothly aren’t just lucky. They’ve built in redundancy. They’ve anticipated that mistakes happen in complex environments, and designed the work around that reality rather than against it. That same built-in capacity that prevents injuries also prevents missed deadlines, quality defects, and production disruptions.
💡 Pro tip: When you investigate incidents, also investigate what went right on your best-performing days. What does success look like in practice? Making that observable and measurable gives you something to coach toward – not just something to coach away from.
3 steps to integrate safety into daily operations
Where do you begin? Your first steps don’t require a major budget.
1. Start at the top – but don’t stop there
Leadership needs to align first on a clear answer to the question: What does success in safety actually look like for us? Not just fewer injuries, but what behaviors, practices, and conditions define it? Once that’s defined, cascade it down.
2. Bring employees into the conversation
The people closest to the work know what makes it hard to make the safe choice. Ask them. When employees are involved in defining and solving safety challenges, they move from compliance to buy-in – and eventually to what Galloway called “shared ownership.”
“When we take this conversation to employees, we’re engaging not just their hands and their feet, but their hearts and their minds,” Galloway said. “They too want to go home to the people they love.”
3. Work with what you have
Not every business has the budget for major infrastructure investments. But even without that, strong communication, peer accountability, and making sure experienced employees are actively involved in mentoring newer ones can go a long way.
The Franklin Covey framework “begin with the end in mind“ applies here. Imagine five years from now: Your business is being recognized for exceptional safety performance. What would someone observing your team see that explains why? Start working backward from that picture.
The mindset shift that changes everything
Galloway described it as “maturing safety thinking” – and it’s less about any single program or policy than it is about how leaders frame the question. Safety isn’t a cost center or a compliance checkbox. It’s part of how the work gets done well.
Unsafe work slows you down. Safe work doesn’t.
Take one step toward a safer workplace today. Download free posters, Toolbox Talks, sample policies and more in our free safety resource library. >
Frequently asked questions: Safety vs. production
Prioritizing safety improves productivity over time by reducing disruptions caused by injuries, turnover, and production gaps. Organizations that build safety into how work is designed – rather than layering it on top – tend to run more efficiently because they’ve also built in the redundancy and capacity that prevents all kinds of setbacks, not just injuries.
Workplace injuries affect your workers compensation premium through your experience modification factor (e-mod), a multiplier based on your claims history relative to similar businesses. More claims – or more severe claims – push your e-mod above 1.0, which increases your premium at renewal. Fewer claims over time bring it down.
Compliance means meeting the minimum requirements set by OSHA and state regulations. Safety culture goes further – it’s the shared beliefs and behaviors that govern how work actually gets done day to day, including what shortcuts get tolerated and what leaders model. An organization can be fully compliant and still have a weak safety culture.
Watch for signals like shortcuts that go unaddressed, housekeeping that slips during busy periods, or employees who hesitate to raise safety concerns. If safety topics come up far less often in leadership conversations than production metrics or deadlines, that imbalance is itself a signal worth taking seriously.
Small businesses can build a strong safety culture without major infrastructure investment by focusing on communication, peer accountability, and involving experienced employees in mentoring newer ones. The most important step is simply getting aligned on what safety success looks like – and having that conversation with employees, not just leadership.
Start by defining what success in safety actually looks like for your organization – not just fewer injuries, but the specific behaviors and conditions that would indicate your systems are working. Once leadership is aligned on that picture, involve employees closest to the work. They’re best positioned to identify what makes the safe choice hard and what would make it easier.
Frontline supervisors have an outsized influence on safety culture because they set the tone for their teams through what they model, what they correct, and what they let slide. The number of distinct safety subcultures in an organization is roughly equal to the number of frontline leaders – which means investing in supervisor training and accountability is one of the highest-leverage safety moves a business can make.
Zero injuries is a worthwhile goal, but it shouldn’t be the only measure of safety success. Mistakes happen in complex work environments – what distinguishes high-performing organizations is that they’ve built systems with enough redundancy and recovery capacity to handle errors before they become injuries. Measuring only outcomes rather than the quality of systems can create blind spots.