[crhulls]

Sure, in theory you are correct, but it misses the nuances of human reality.

Flipping back to my day job, a counter example is security people covering any edge case so that everything grinds to a halt or lawyers over processing everything and stifling creativity.

The same people that might grumble about something being a management issue sometimes also complain about bureaucracy and process when things go the other way.

There aren’t simple trade off free answers to this stuff.

[newaccount74]

Telling people to wear a harness is not "covering every edge case so that everything grinds to a halt". It's just ensuring that the bare minimum is being done to prevent workplace deaths.

[s1artibartfast]

I think the interesting part of the comparison was the following two sentences.

[newaccount74]

I think it's a misleading argument because it compares things that aren't alike.

On the one hand, we have management telling workers to use safety equipment that basically everyone agrees is necessary. That has nothing to do with bureaucracy, it's about preventing people from cutting corners.

On the other hand, we have clueless interns sending questionaires to vendors, who then tell their own clueless interns to fill them with some buzzwords, just to be filed away without anyone actually looking at the completed form, in order to check some compliance checkbox somewhere.

These two things are nothing alike.

[istjohn]

Yes, a top-down safety culture entails some level of bureaucracy and process overhead. That is the price that must be paid for jobsite safety. No one is saying there's a free lunch.

[solveit]

If safety is cheap but overcoming culture is expensive, at some point it becomes misleading (wrt ethics of participants, not correct course of action) to say the problem is that management doesn't care enough to spend money on safety, even if management is the only lever we have to fix the issue.