Whose safety culture is it anyway?

Safety culture can be described as the constellation of shared values, attitudes and beliefs that influence health and safety practice in a workplace. But definitions and perspectives on safety culture abound to the point of creating hopeless confusion. The worst, in my opinion, are of the cheerleader variety – aimed at selling a system or a survey that purports to revolutionize your workplace. My own perspective is rather more cynical – there are no magic bullets or quick fixes that work for everyone. Often caught in the middle of management and workers, health and safety professionals must discover what works within the social environment of a specific organization.

Many prescriptions for achieving a good safety culture presume that top management is committed to and understands the concept. This is far from reality in many workplaces. Too often, management thinks that the responsibility for health and safety success rests with the OHS professionals themselves, who are expected to influence worker behavior in a milieu that places low priority on health and safety.

The Australian researcher Andrew Hopkins has consistently pointed out the contradictory views of safety culture that can lead to confusion and fruitless or, worse, harmful, interventions. He cautions against the “formulation …that … sees culture as a matter of individual attitudes - attitudes which can be cultivated at work, but which in the final analysis are characteristics of individuals, not the organisations to which they belong”. Hopkins warns that such views “ignore the latent conditions which underlie every workplace accident, highlighting instead workers’ attitudes as the cause of accidents.” As Hopkins point out,

“…, creating the right mindset among frontline workers is not a strategy which can be effective in dealing with hazards about which those workers have no knowledge and which can only be identified and controlled by management, using systematic hazard identification procedures. It is management culture rather than the culture of the workforce in general which is most relevant here. If culture is understood as mindset, what is required is a management mindset that very major hazard will be identified and controlled and a management commitment to make available whatever resources are necessary to ensure that the workplace is safe.”

(Andrew Hopkins, Safety Culture, Mindfulness and Safe Behaviour: Converging ideas?, National Research Centre for OHS Regulation, Working Paper 7, December 2002)

In a provocative case study published last March, Greg Walker of Lock Haven University describes a workplace where such management commitment was decidedly absent. In the face of management abdication of responsibility, Walker concludes, workers will go ahead and create their own safety “counterculture”– in this case, one that is likely to give OHS professionals nightmares (Walker, G.W., A safety counterculture challenge to a “safety climate”, Safety Science, Volume 48, Issue 3, March 2010, pages 333-341). In a “pathological organization,” Walker says, “ workers as a group will socially construct danger, injury and safety for themselves”.

Walker also provides a compelling, if repellent, portrayal of worker attitudes to “Lonnie the Safety Man” – a figure we should all take to heart as the antithesis of a role model:

“At least once a month ‘Lonnie the safety man’ visits from the company headquarters to review what the blue-collar employees know about working around heavy machinery, in confined spaces with little oxygen and in dusty, explosive environments. But the blue-collar audience ridicules him and contradicts his messages at each opportunity."

Most articles and talks on health and safety motivation direct us toward motivating the workforce. But if we focus solely on worker behaviour in the absence of management comitment, we risk becoming “Lonnie the Safety Man” -- a mouthpiece for a hypocritical organization. What can OHS professionals do when they work in real-life organizations where the management mindset on health and safety is less than ideal? These are questions I’d like to explore further and get ideas from people who grapple with this dilemma every day. I would start by suggesting that our approach to motivating and influencing must be bi-directional – aimed at both management and the workforce. And the tactics we use may be different for these different audiences. In previous posts (here and here) I looked at some questions related to motivating management. More to come, I hope.

Foot in the door for health and safety commitment

In my last post, I wrote about the idea that commitment of senior management is viewed as the most important determinant of success in health and safety. How does commitment to a principle develop? Are there degrees of commitment? What can health and safety professionals do to encourage such commitment?

The realms of social marketing and psychology may provide some ideas. Robert Cialdini, a well-known popularizer of psychological research on influence, writes about the importance of commitment and consistency in behavior change. He points out that people want to be consistent – if they make an initial small commitment, they will tend to follow that with greater commitment and more profound behavior change in line with that commitment. This is the principle behind a well-know social science phenomenon known as “foot in the door”, used widely by people in sales and marketing. It is also easily discovered by children, which perhaps you have learned as a parent (often phrased as “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile”.)

One of the first social science experiments to demonstrate this concept involved asking people to put a big ugly sign on their lawns promoting automobile safety. According to Cialdini, only 17% of the general study population agreed. However, another group had been asked previously if they would put a small sign in their windows. As this was a relatively minor request, a large number agreed. Among those who agreed to the small sign, 76% subsequently agreed to put the large sign on their lawns. Cialdini attributes this willingness to the influence of peoples’ desire for a consistent self-image – after their initial small commitment shapes their self-view, they will want to affirm it through subsequent, even escalating, actions along the same lines.

Google “foot in the door” and you will find hundreds of studies of this phenomenon. Has it been applied to workplace health and safety? Not very widely, though it has been discussed with respect to eliciting behavior change from employees. ( See Herbout, et al. and Geller.) Here I am more interested in influencing management commitment, and in this regard, I am reminded of a few initiatives based on getting employers to sign a charter or pledge of commitment to health and safety. One example is the CEO Health and Safety Leadership Charter, an initiative of the Conference Board of Canada. Although not explicitly conceived of as a “foot in the door” technique, this program should theoretically promote health and safety in workplaces even if the initial commitment is minimal. After all, signing a document does not by itself change health and safety conditions. Some believe that programs like this should set a high bar for companies who sign the charter: that the charter should only be available to those who have proven their commitment through actions. “Foot in the door” theory suggests to me that it is of value to get the initial commitment regardless of the current state of health and safety in the company, and use this as a foundation on which to build ever-growing commitment.

In fact, the charter seems rather a high bar for an initial step. For a large firm, a public declaration entails a big risk of damage to reputation if the commitment is not demonstrated. It would be interesting if even smaller “baby steps” could be offered to start the process. Health and safety professionals may be in a good position to encourage executives to take the initial pledge and start down the road. They can then help them in taking larger steps in an incremental manner that does not seem overwhelming. I’d be interested to know of any experiences out there using techniques of this kind.

Motivating Health and Safety: Is it all about money?

Back when I was a public employee working on promoting health and safety, a truth we took to be self-evident (and evidence-based nonetheless) was that success in workplace health and safety must start with the commitment of management at the top of the organization. Consequently, a major pre-occupation was how to motivate employers to demonstrate a sincere commitment to health and safety. (Talk of motivation in health and safety customarily focuses on motivation of employees; to my way of thinking, this puts the cart before the horse -- if management is motivated, the motivation of employees will follow.)

Hence, we did some research on what motivates employers to care about health and safety. Results showed that employer motivation falls into three general categories: social (also called moral), legal and financial. The prevailing wisdom was that financial motivation was paramount: if we could only demonstrate to employers the benefits of health and safety to the bottom line, the scales would fall from their eyes and their workplaces would be transformed. Lots of resources are available to help calculate the financial costs and benefits of health and safety, and many incentive programs are designed to enhance these economic rewards. (Email me at allbridgeohs@gmail.com if you want me to point you to some of these resources.)

Without denying the power of finances to motivate executives, I have long felt that social or moral motivation tends to be undervalued. So I take notice of those pundits who turn the prevailing economic wisdom on its head. Behavioral economics has lots to say on the topic of how our choices often fly in the face of conventional economic theory that posits humans to be strictly rational benefit-maximizers. (See work by Daniel Ariely and Richard Thaler.) Two popular speakers on the current circuit are Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink –both spoke recently at the RSA in London, and their complete talks are available as podcasts here.

Pink is focused on motivation, but largely of employees – Shirky comes at the topic tangentially as a corollary of cognitive surplus. But they both cited the same example that I think is relevant to my topic: the story of daycare centres in Israel that had a problem with parents picking up their kids late. To try to correct this problem, the centres imposed a fine for late pick-ups. The result? The rate of late pick-ups tripled! The reason, Pink and Shirky speculate, is that the parents’ concern for the daycare staff and the desire not to inconvenience them by making them stay late evaporated when the late pick-ups became a commodity that could be paid for.

This reminded me of interviews I conducted with high OHS-performing employers, in an effort to gather data on the financial benefits of good OHS performance. The employers maintained they did not track data that directly correlated health and safety with financial performance, because for them health and safety was a matter of concern for their employees and not motivated by cost-cutting.

The highlight of the daycare centre example is that the rate of late pick-ups stayed high even after the fine was removed. Hence this is not simply a story of contrasting motivators – it is also a cautionary tale of the danger of transforming social concern into an economic concern. Having done so, we may not be able to recover what we lose.

Catalyst: noun.
1. A substance, usually used in small amounts relative to the reactants, that modifies and increases the rate of a reaction
2. Someone or something that helps bring about a change.

As health and safety professionals, we often try to play this catalyst role – affecting the reaction among the managers and workers who ultimately determine the state of health and safety in a workplace. Many of us have found that, while our training has been in the technical aspects of industrial hygiene and workplace safety, our success is more dependent on the human dimension and the workplace relationships that affect the decisions and practices shaping the work environment.

I started this blog based largely on the premise that health and safety professionals can learn a lot from other disciplines – particularly those that examine how and why people make the choices they do.

I recently shared some of my ideas on this topic at the 2010 American Industrial Hygiene Conference (AIHce) in Denver -- you can see my slide deck here.

In future posts I plan to explore research and ideas along these lines. I also would love to hear from people who are struggling with these issues in their own work, and have found approaches that work or don’t work for them.