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.