Safety and Security: The Intersection

Security and safety often go hand in hand, but sometimes they conflict. Here are ways to cooperate to achieve both departments' goals.

Finding Balance
However, it is easy to overshoot this business of integration. Departments have their logic, silos are not all bad and there are returns to specialization and autonomy. Curtis Shewchuk, CSO of Con-way Freight, points out that in recent years, safety has extended into wellness programs and sustainability or green issues, and security, into family and executive protection and participation in C-TPAT (Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism), the Customs and Border Protection initiative intended to secure the integrity of supply chains that pass in and out of the U.S.

At the same time, Shewchuk adds, even where responsibilities remain the same, expectations about the execution of both missions have changed. Increasingly, both security and safety are expected to think of threats proactively, before circumstances drop them in our laps. It takes real expertise to tell the difference between the potentialities that need to have resources thrown at them right now and those that are too unlikely to worry about. Second, supply chains are becoming more integrated, requiring companies to coordinate—and therefore be aware of—the safety and security protocols of clients and partners up and down the chain. Again, very demanding tasks. The professionals involved with them do not have time to wear two hats.

Pete Wilcox, large-account director of Travelers Construction (a unit of the big insurance company), sees safety professionals turning into full-fledged risk management experts. In the old days, he says, "safety meant enforcing the compliance of your own workers on your own site to OSHA regulations. In those days, the sole remedy for workplace injuries was workers' compensation. But liability exposure has expanded dramatically, and today we enforce a much broader standard of care. If we tear up a sidewalk, we have to know who had been walking on that sidewalk and where they were going and how they will be affected by our project. None of that is addressed anywhere in OSHA." Wilcox thinks that the financial implications of this broader standard are such that safety professionals are going to be involved from the very start in project design, including bid preparation. "We see ourselves as leading this change," he says, "but eventually it will affect everyone."

Clearly these issues are only going to grow more complex. Years ago I was having a casual conversation with Tim Overton, chief process safety engineer at Dow Chemical. I asked him to speculate as to the core mission of his profession over the next 10 years. He didn't hesitate: "Reconciling and integrating safety and security," he said. At the time, I didn't even know what he meant, but today, looking back, that turns out to be one of the better forecasts I've heard. ##