Policies must be voluntarily obeyed to be effective

When a policy doesn't work you have to fix the policy. Some of us care about the real world, not your internal emotional state except in so far as that has consequences in the real world.

The pretence that "We have a policy forbidding X, so X doesn't happen" is a terrible sort of delusion because those too far from the action to see X continue anyway might believe you and act as though it's true.

For example, the current _policy_ here says that track workers will all interrupt what they're doing, stand up and walk off the tracks into a place of safety before any train passes. No doubt in the imagination of whoever wrote this rule there was only one "road" and it was mere "common sense" that track workers would want to get out of the way. But in reality a lot of work happens at complex multi-road sites. The workers can see (or think they can see, or even just guess from experience) that a particular train won't pass near to them, and they wave it through but remain on the railway and thus in danger. Approaching trains are loud and (at night) heavily lit, masking any danger from other trains nearby so that even when they're correct about the train they can see, they may be wrong about whether they're actually safe.

People who don't understand why policies don't work usually insist that workers who disobey the policy should be disciplined. That ought to work, right? But it won't, it just creates the impression that management are capricious, arbitrarily punishing some workers whose behaviour was fine, for a merely technical violation of a rule that makes no sense. Even showing the workers why their current practices are dangerous through the video reconstruction of accidents (including fatal accidents) turns out not to make a dent. Humans are largely oblivious to their mortality and will take small temporary gains for a significant risk of death without qualms. The only way to fix the problem is to come up with a policy that the workers are _willing_ to obey but which is also safe.