Safety: A collective and embedded competency. An ethnographic study of safety practices at an industrial workplace in the Netherlands.

INTRODUCTION: Organizations place strong emphasis on the standardized occupational health and safety procedures to reduce work-related illnesses and workplace accidents. However, standardized procedures are not always followed up in daily work practices. Organizations must cope with the differences between standardized procedures and local adaptation by employees. METHODS: This ethnographic field study at an industrial workplace in the Netherlands provides insights into employees' everyday work practices, how these work practices are shaped, and how they relate to local occupational health and safety procedures. Acknowledging safety as a competency embedded in work practices, as introduced by Gherardi and Nicolini (2002), offers a theoretical point of view for looking beyond the dichotomy of standardization and local adaptations. RESULTS: The results show that a standardized and noncontextualized occupational health and safety management system that focuses on accident-free days and compliance actually leads to ignorance of practical and tacit competences of workers and no learning and improvement of safety procedures can take place. However, our findings also illustrate how employees in their informal everyday work practices reduce the risks produced by the safety system itself. CONCLUSION: Overall, the results indicate that social interactions among employees, leaders, and management within the organization play an important role in workplace safety. The analysis highlights the value of vulnerability and trust in relationships at work to be able to learn and develop safety procedures that align with local demands. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: This study emphasizes the need for participatory approaches in creating safer and healthier workplaces. The cocreation of occupational health and safety (OHS) rules and procedures, however, can only function if they are combined with a responsive leadership style.

(Un)belonging at work: an overlooked ingredient of workplace health.

Organizations offer activities and programmes to improve their employees' health. These workplace health promotion (WHP) activities usually have an individualized and top-down focus, a low uptake among employees, and are perceived to be out of line with employees' experiences and definitions of health. This paper follows up on studies that have broadened the focus of WHP by including social relations and delves deeper into how daily practices and experiences of (un)belonging at work relate to workplace health. Based on ethnographic research in two companies in the Netherlands, this paper analyses how (un)belonging is expressed and experienced by employees. The paper shows that employees define health at work as a social practice. It also demonstrates how dynamics at work shape different dimensions of (un)belonging that, in turn, affect employees' perceived health at work. These findings indicate the importance of including (un)belonging in the workplace as an ingredient of WHP.