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What’s your Strategy for getting a Positive, High-Performing Safety Culture?

Good to have one for a start!

There is an old saying, “If you don’t know where your’e going, any road will get you there”. And when it comes to getting the culture you want in your business, the thinking is no different. I am regularly amazed at the blank looks I get from senior management when I ask “What is the culture that you want?”. And I get even more blank looks when I ask “What system have you got to get there?”

Any outcome needs a system or process to generate it. The more robust the process, the more predictable the outcome. So maybe the reason we get these “organic”, dysfunctional safety cultures within our business is one, we don’t know what we want and two, that we don’t have a strategy to achieve it.

So what would a practical Safety Culture Strategy look like and how would it work?

What is Safety Culture Strategy?

Strategy in the simplest terms is all about making choices, deciding what to do and importantly, deciding what not to do, in pursuing your company’s vision (or the company’s “Why”).

If you think about it, there is an enormous range of options you could take as a manager. But, many of these options are never even considered because we know they would be counterproductive or unrealistic (or perhaps illegal!) and would not support the overall vision of your company. But, from the significant number of feasible options that are available you only have the time and resources to commit to a very small number. Additionally, some choices you make may invalidate other options or commit you down a certain decision pathway. Deciding on what does and doesn’t make the cut is the act of developing your strategy.

That said, don’t let the thought of having to create the ‘perfect’ strategy put you off. I think most managers have at least a fair understanding of their safety culture strategy already in mind. Unfortunately, they shy away from putting their ideas on paper because they are working under the false assumptions that;

1.) it must be perfect,

2.) it must account for every conceivable future state, and,

3.) it cannot change.

Rest assured, there is a little more flexibility than we think.

The Value of a Safety Strategy

Your safety culture strategy is a means of:

• Communicating your intent on a particular subject (in this case safety culture),
  • At a particular point in time,
  • With the information you have at hand, and
  • In sufficient detail that it provides your subordinates (or the Workforce as a whole) with a guide to aid their decision-making when you’re not around.

You are effectively empowering your staff to make certain decisions within parameters you have clearly set. By providing your staff with delegated authority you not only increase efficiency – because you’re no longer involved in all of the operational and tactical decision-making – you also significantly contribute to raising morale and ‘ownership’, by giving workers a certain level of autonomy. Perhaps another way is you have a system of developing trust which is cornerstone for any positive culture.

So often we assume that procedures perform this function but as we know, there are a large number of situations that fall outside the scope of our safety systems and it is not practical to include all of them within the procedure scope. We often find procedures, though written to help and support workers to work safety, are disliked and seen as counterproductive. If this situation exists for long enough, you have the basis for a disempowered workforce that steers away from ownership and responsibility. A strategy aims to reverse this trend.

A strategy ensures that the intentions of those within your organisation, in particular the leaders and decision makers, line up on a common path leading to a defined destination or end state. As a senior manager, it is critical you spend the time to deliberately and explicitly define your safety strategy or you run the risk of your managers taking multiple divergent paths that may be inefficient and counterproductive.

The Content of your Safety Culture Strategy

Before we launch into the content of our strategy we need to recognise the fact that a strategy cannot exist in a vacuum. While there are numerous terms used to describe the various direction-setting documents within a company we prefer the four listed in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: A company’s “Ladder of Control”

In brief:

• Sitting above the Strategies is the company’s ‘Vision’, this explains why the company exists.
• Next come the Strategies, which must line up with the intentions of the Vision, or at least contribute to the achievement of a particular part of the Vision.
• Below the Strategies are a multitude of Plans which give clear instructions and set tangible goals to be achieved within a define timeframe.
• Finally, we have the Directives, these are the orders or directions – both written and verbal – that frontline managers give to their teams numerous times every day.
• As we progress down the diagram we uncover the answer to the ‘how’ questions. For example, ‘how will we implement our Strategy?’ is answered by the multitude of Plans sitting below this Strategy. Likewise, the daily Directives you give should always provide an answer to the question of, ‘how will we complete this Plan?’.
• Finally, as we progress up the rungs of this diagram we should be able to answer the all important ‘why’ questions. For example, a worker may ask, ‘why the he!! am I digging this hole??’ which you should be able to easily answer by referring to the relevant Plan.

The Audience of your Safety Culture Strategy

Now that you’ve decided you need a safety strategy you’ve got to decide what goes in it and who you are writing it for.

If you’re going to go to the trouble of writing a strategy don’t make the mistake of writing it for your boss. Your safety strategy must be written for those at and below your level. After all, these are the people that will actually put your strategy into action. Your safety strategy must therefore be clear enough that your subordinate managers can use it when confronted with situations and decisions that require them to apply their judgement without the opportunity to check with their immediate supervisor. That said, while the primary audience is at and below your level, the strategy must also reassure your superiors that the direction you are taking is in line with their ultimate Vision for the company.

In terms of what goes in your strategy, the most important aspect is that it answers the ‘why’ question. Why do we need a strategy? Why are we focussed on XYZ product? Or, why are we interested in keeping our workers safe?

When people understand why you are asking them to do something they are more likely to do it and more likely to want to do it because it gives them ‘meaning’.

Despite what we may think, people consistently value meaningful work, with a degree of autonomy, and for a leader they trust and respect much higher than simple financial reward. This ‘motivational’ effect of a strategy is one of its primary benefits and should never be underestimated.

So, if the strategy answers the why, it’s the plans, procedures and briefings that answer the how. Such things provide personnel with clear instruction on how they should complete a particular job or task, and hereby contribute to the achievement of an objective. As a leader it is critical that you ensure all such plans, procedures and briefings ultimately contribute to the achievement of the objectives within your safety strategy.

How Strategy Contributes to a Positive Safety Culture

Having a great safety strategy is a brilliant first step and critical for effective operational and tactical control, but, if the progress achieved through your strategy is to actually endure you’re going to need to build a positive safety culture. Safety culture is about people’s values, beliefs and behaviours and the extent to which they are evident throughout the organisation, from the top executives to the operators on the tools.

But a safety culture is not tangible and we often struggle to identify exactly what it’s really made of. According to Dr. Dominic Cooper, a safety culture is made up of “the way that the organisation’s systems and sub systems are developed, aligned and synthesised to assist everybody in the organisation to think about and actively pursue the well-being and safety of people” (Cooper, 2001, pp.33-4)

Put simply, organisations with a positive safety culture prioritise safety against other organisational goals to allow business objectives to be undertaken without undue risk. Having a clear safety strategy provides boundaries within which your leaders and managers can make independent decisions that ultimately lead you to the safety culture you want.

Easily the biggest issue we come across when working with companies to develop their safety culture is that they simply do not know what ‘good’ looks like. They have never explicitly defined it and as such each worker’s implicit assumptions about the desired safety culture are often different. This is the reason why one of the very first activities we undertake on site is to define the ideal safety culture in simple, clear and explicit terms and communicate this to all personnel on site.

Once we have a clearly defined goal (or strategy!) we find people are much more comfortable in calling people out when they see inappropriate behaviour. Additionally, by defining our ideal safety culture we provide personnel with clear targets for their own behaviour. No one will ever be able to flawlessly exhibit all the traits outlined in the ideal safety culture all the time, but if we strive to achieve even a couple of the personal traits we’ll already have a stronger safety culture than that which came before.

What Now?

To give you a starting point for building your own safety strategy we have included a Safety Strategy Template. While it will never be completely suitable to all, it at least gives you a base upon which to build your own strategy. After all, it’s far easier to build on an existing foundation than start with a completely blank slate.

Please feel free to rip it to pieces and adapt as you see fit. In fact, we’d be keen to hear how the template does or doesn’t work for you so please get in touch with any feedback you may have.

So, when we are asked the question “What Safety Culture do you want and how will you get there?”, we not only have an answer, we have the strategy to achieve it.

References:

Cooper, D. (2001), Improving Safety Culture: A Practical Guide, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., UK.

Freedman, J. (2012), At the Heart of Leadership: How to get Results with Emotional Intelligence – 3^rd ed., Six Seconds, California, USA.

Mintzberg, H. & Waters, J. A. (1985), Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Jul. – Sep. 1985), pp. 257-272.

Simon, H. A. (1997), Administrative Behaviour: a study of decision-making processes in administrative organizations – 4^th ed., Simon & Schuster, New York, USA.

Risk Management and the Mind: Why Safe Workers still take Shortcuts

Complacency kills. Right? And if we could just make sure that every worker is switched on and vigilant at every moment, we would have a lot less complacency, and incidents to deal with. Sounds easy but there is one small hurdle, it’s in our nature, or in the nature of our mind in any case, to want to take the shortest route possible.

Science tells us that constant vigilance is a biological impossibility. Ultimately we have a finite number of ‘attention credits’ to spend before we bankrupt (or fatigue…) our brains. Depending on your mental fitness you may have a healthy balance in your ‘attention account’ or, you may be constantly teetering on the brink of financial collapse. But, no matter how mentally fit you are, maintaining an uninterrupted state of heightened awareness 12 hours a day, 8 days in a row (or even 14 in some FIFO arrangements that I’ve seen) is almost impossible and definitely not healthy. But the real question is how do we get the balance right that delivers the best safety result for our workforce?

Mental Load, Energy Management and Awareness

Our brains are constantly receiving, perceiving and interpreting sensory data from the world around us. Thankfully most of that data never reaches our conscious awareness because it would quickly overwhelm us if it did.

Your brain is the product of thousands of years of evolution. Over the course of its development it always kept one objective front and centre; your brain, indeed your entire body, is driven by an incredibly strong requirement to conserve energy. And this makes sense when you think about it because if the biological machine that is a human being was too inefficient it never would have survived.

This biological imperative to save energy is both superbly useful and potentially fatal. On the one hand this allows us to undertake tasks we’ve encountered many times before in an ‘autopilot’ fashion. While on the other hand, if we activate ‘autopilot’ without having the most up to date map of the terrain we run the risk of potential disaster.

This introduces a need for choice. Choosing when, where, how, and why we activate autopilot is the key to performing at our best and keeping you and your mates safe in high risk environments. Deciding what occasions are safe to operate autopilot requires us to pay attention to our situation and regularly reassess the hazards in our environment. Introducing this conscious choice into more parts of our day allows us a moment to pause and decide where the autopilot pattern fits the environment and where it doesn’t. I think if we were to reflect on what a pre-task risk assessment is, it does exactly that. By applying the fundamentals of risk management, we not only find and manage the hazards, we recruit the right mind to complete the task. But, for the moment let’s get back to the mind and how it likes to function.

Mental Rules for Efficiency

We can think about the way we consciously pay attention to things in the same way that the news cycle works. The world provides our brain with a huge and unrelenting data feed, but we cannot hope to pay attention to even a fraction of it. We therefore construct ‘rules’ that decide what information becomes ‘newsworthy’ and is subsequently ‘broadcast’ on one of several ‘news channels’ in our conscious mind. We then have to decide which ‘news channel’ we switch to, because unlike ‘picture-in-picture’ technology humans cannot multitask, we can only pay attention to one ‘channel’ at a time.

We all have two main types of rules, factory fitted and aftermarket. Our aftermarket ‘rules’ are the product of our prior experience, preferences, biases and habits. The factory fitted rules are those that come as standard in basically all functional brain models around the world, they are the fundamental ‘rules’ that exist to protect us from potential threats to our physical or mental wellbeing.

When our brain receives information that fits a factory fitted ‘threat rule’ our amygdala hits the alarm button which sends a distress signal to our hypothalamus, a part of your brain that you can think of as like the brain’s command centre (Harvard Health Publishing, 2018). Once the alarm has been activated our adrenal glands (which you’ll find on top of your kidneys) start pumping adrenalin into our blood stream which turns on those all-too-familiar physical and mental stress responses.

Stress and the Mind

Adrenalin is great stuff! It increases your heart and breathing rates, raises your blood pressure, sharpens your focus on the threat, sends blood to your muscles, increases sensory processing and makes more energy available. I think most of what we find exciting on a weekend has a fair dose of adrenalin attached.

But adrenalin is only designed to get us out of immediate danger, if we perceive the threat (or stress) is ongoing, our body responds accordingly and instructs the adrenal glands to pump cortisol into the bloodstream [American Psychological Association (APA), 2019]. Cortisol increases the amount of sugar floating around in your blood, makes your brain better able to burn the sugar for energy and counters the body’s natural inflammatory response.

Now, don’t get me wrong stress chemicals such as adrenalin and cortisol are critical for survival. But moderation is the key. When stress chemicals – and particularly cortisol – are regularly found in excessive amounts floating around in your body they start to do more harm than good. The chronic excess of cortisol in your body actually starts shrinking your hippocampus (the region of the brain responsible for memory processing and storage), weakens your immune system and leaves you vulnerable to infection and disease (APA, 2019).

A chronic state of vigilance therefore begins to break down systems and structures in your body and brain which could ultimately lead to more accidents, injuries and fatalities – both in the short-term and long-term. Some safety terminology that I’ve seen recently mentions terms such as “Chronic Unease” which doesn’t sit well with me as it appears to be inconsistent with good mental health practices. Given the prevalence of mental health issues in society, and especially in the FIFO workforce, having a firm understanding of mental load and stress will be paramount for good safety outcomes.

Mental Recovery vs. Constant Vigilance

The good news is, your body has a powerful inbuilt desire to want to return to a restful, calm state after a period of stress or heightened awareness, but, if we ignore this desire too long we risk doing irreparable damage to ourselves and others around us. Thankfully though, returning the body to this resting state and raising the balance of our ‘attention account’ is often as simple as taking a breath.

The body’s ‘relaxation response’, first described in 1975 by Harvard’s Dr Herbert Benson, is the natural opposing force to the stress response and can be turned on by a range of well-known activities such as deliberate breathing, meditation, yoga, massage and gentle exercise (Benson, 2011 & Sternberg, 2016). Actions such as the use of breath as an avenue to manage stress are excellent ways to access this relaxation response (more on that in another article).

But, most of us don’t have the luxury of practicing yoga partway through a 12-hour shift. So, how do we reconcile the need to pay attention and maintain situational awareness in risky environments with the downtime required to return our ‘attention account’ from debit to credit status and thus maintain a healthy mind?

Risk Management: A Conscious Choice Tool?

We pay conscious attention only when and where it matters by applying tools such as risk management to aid our decisions on when and where to spend our ‘attention credits’.

Risk management is an excellent tool for deciding what situations we really need to pay close attention to and what situations we can simply sit back and let our ‘autopilot’ take the wheel.

A risk is simply the effect of uncertainty on objectives (ISO Guide 73:2009). In every action you take there is a certain level of uncertainty. The risk management process is designed to either reduce the uncertainty or help us recognise it and take deliberate action with greater awareness of what might go right, what might go wrong and what could possibly go terribly wrong.

So perhaps we can see risk assessment as a very practical tool for managing your mind. And the best thing is that we already do it (or have to do it by legislation!).

The Subconscious Mind and Risk

In the simplest terms: the world, and our interactions with it, provide information inputs which are usually first processed subconsciously. If the input requires additional brain power to properly process it is shifted to our conscious mind, which requires much greater effort and energy to run (Kahneman, 2011). The vast majority of the time this is advantageous, however, there are some very important pitfalls in how our minds function, particularly when it comes to safety and decisions around risk.

It is incredibly important that we are aware of how our subconscious mind deals with risk assessment, particularly in estimations of probability (or ‘likelihood’, in risk management terminology) and in coming up with potential consequences. Humans are generally very bad at estimating probability without the assistance of sufficient, reliable data. Likewise, our ability to imagine potential consequences is heavily influenced by whether or not we have experienced such consequences and how easily these memories can be brought to mind (Kahneman, 2011).

The concepts of how fallible we naturally are when it comes to estimating likelihood and coming up with possible consequences are described in excellent detail in Kahneman’s work so we won’t go into further detail here (Kahneman, 2011). But, being aware of the potential pitfalls of our in-built mental processes and what it feels like when our mind shifts between conscious and subconscious (or as Kahneman puts it, ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’) decision making is an important factor when it comes to ensuring your safety at work.

The Verdict

From what we know of the mind and the way it works, our risk management tools are an excellent way to not only focus the mind, but also to filter out the distractions and additional mental load that ultimately work against our ability to think clearly and efficiently. It gives us a process to pause, assess, and deliberately observe our environment which then allows us to switch back to autopilot only once we have consciously determined it is safe to do so.

So just remember that when we get minds / workers being driven by their emotions and complaining about the efficiency of completing a thorough pre-task risk assessment, they are probably in auto-pilot, trying to increase mental efficiency and take the shortest route to get there (“The Shortcut”)!

There is a difference between violation and innovation, and it’s called risk management.

References:

American Psychological Association (APA), Stress effects on the body, accessed 13 Nov 2019, <https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/stress-body>

Benson, H. & Proctor, M. (2011), Relaxation Revolution: The Science and Genetics of Mind Body Healing, Scribner.

Cuda, G., (2010), Just Breathe: Body Has A Built-In Stress Reliever, accessed 13 November 2019, <https://www.npr.org/2010/12/06/131734718/just-breathe-body-has-a-built-in-stress-reliever>

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science, (2011), The Physiology of Stress: Cortisol and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis, accessed 13 November 2019,  <https://sites.dartmouth.edu/dujs/2011/02/03/the-physiology-of-stress-cortisol-and-the-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-axis/>

Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School (2018), Understanding the stress response, accessed 13 November 2019, <https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response>

ISO Guide 73:2009 – Risk management – Vocabulary

Kahneman, D. (2011), Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Sternberg, E. (2016), Good Stress/Bad Stress and Good Relaxation/Bad Relaxation, accessed 19 November 2019, <Mhttps://esthersternberg.com/good-stressbad-stress-good-relaxationbad-relaxation/>