A culture phenomenon
Humans are often their own worst enemies, which is why embedding a workplace safety culture can be so challenging. Dr Tim Marsh MIISRM discusss how what he calls “affective safety management” can be of benefit.Difficulty in estimating how contrary people can be is a key learning point.Telling them to adjust is almost the worst way to make change happen. However, if people decide themselves to adapt, the outcome can be vastly different.
Discovered learning techniques focus squarely on this phenomenon and underpin much of the people-focused training required for a move to a proactive safety culture. In a popular novel, English writer Nick Hornby describes a phenomenon about Scottish football fans. The question arises – why do Scottish fans behave so well abroad when they didn’t before (think Wembley!) and don’t necessarily behave as such in Glasgow now after a club game? At a World Cup some time ago, the Scottish team was knocked out by the odd goal in a great game against the favourites – Brazil. Honour was satisfied and the next day papers were full of pictures of men in kilts dancing good naturedly in fountains with pretty Brazilian women.The headlines were broadly, ‘Scots party after heroic exit … few arrests … what a contrast with the English!’ Ever since, Scottish football fans have made an effort to behave well while abroad in order to show up the English!
In my experience, that’s how a lot of companies react –specifically companies that need to focus on people because all the physical and system issues have already been tackled.
Safety Culture
Many organisations look to improve safety performance by addressing human factor issues and find they are squarely at the ‘calculative’ stage of safety culture, described by Parker and Hudson, academics who have written extensively on the subject.To simplify the middle three of five bands, they describe proactive, compliant/effective systems, and reactive.
That is, the companies have moved beyond ‘reactive’ and have good systems, procedures, training and inductions in place, and have a set of files guaranteed to deliver a certificate or two for the wall in reception. Despite this baseline achievement, they know the neat files can differ from the reality during a busy shift. Furthermore, they know the broader truth – their safety performance has hit a plateau. Headline scores are typically waving around slightly as if in a narrow horizontal corridor of best and worst performance – known widely as the infamous ‘safety wave’. My experience is that the companies in question can easily identify the need to ‘do something’ about the fact that 90 per cent or more of accidents have a key human element. It’s deciding how to push through the plateau that’s hard.
Sadly, there isn’t a magic bullet, and though inspirational talks certainly help, it’s usually only short term, because increased effort and attention only takes you so far. However, the willingness of people to change their attitude has to come into play – changing underlying attitudes and values is very difficult as anyone who has ever debated politics, sport or religion in the pub knows. Returning to Parker and Hudson, the good news is the behaviours that characterise proactive companies are all easy to do in theory at least.The behaviours are also the characteristic of companies which enjoy high levels of product quality, industrial relations, low stress and profitability.Therefore, though considerable effort is required, the ‘win-win’ sell to line management isn’t impossible.
A final story illustrates this. A manager asked me once if we could delay a site tour for an hour while a certain job was completed. He said: “The thing is,Tim, I know very well what they’re doing, but if I go out and see them, I’m really going to have to do something … and it’s already behind.”He managed to get through the day unscathed – as in the vast majority of cases – no one got hurt. But it’s not exactly world-class proactive safety, is it?
Because they’re human
The best companies are proactively addressing daily behavioural issues by training front-line supervisors in practical people skills and getting the workforce actively involved in the day-to-day management of safety.The training courses are not dryly addressing compliance issues, but are lively laughter-filled events covering analysis and communication skills seeking to win the hearts and minds of the proactive companies that understand people don’t put themselves at risk because they are inherently lazy or stupid – but because they are human.