When it comes to health and safety, getting people in your organisation – be they workers or senior managers – to listen to you, can be tough at the best of times. But if practitioners can spread the safety message through a few people who understand the importance of it, then the days of banging their head against a brick wall could become a thing of the past. Richard Byrne explains.
How many parents, on discovering that their teenage child has started smoking, have been confronted with the response: ‘But all my mates do it!’
Well, things aren’t necessarily that different in the workplace; indeed, there will be many a safety professional who has heard employees utter the following disheartening words, or similar: “I didn’t feel able to say it was unsafe because my mates were doing it that way.”
When it comes to health and safety, practitioners can get extremely frustrated when they come up against ‘inaction’. But using peer pressure in a positive way to help overcome acquiescence can be a really powerful approach. There is much that practitioners can learn from techniques used by colleagues in other areas of an organisation to help improve safety culture and performance. In my own career, I’ve often tried to learn lessons from the fields of learning and development, as well as communications, but I also think we can learn a lot from sales and marketing.
Simon Sinek, for example, discusses something called the ‘law of diffusion of innovation’.1 This is illustrated in figure 1 and is based on the notion that, for any given idea, or product there are five different types of people, or consumer in the target market. The first 2.5 per cent are known as the innovators; the second 13.5 per cent are considered to be early adopters; the next 34 per cent are the early majority; the fourth category – also 34 per cent – are described as the late majority; and the final straggling 16 per cent are the laggers.
In search of the tipping point
If you’re after mass-market commercial success, or acceptance of an idea, you need to get to the ‘critical mass’, or reach the tipping point. The law of diffusion of innovation suggests this is around 16 per cent of the ‘market’.
To explain how the law works and how each of the different types of consumer behave, Sinek uses the example of an iPhone. The ‘innovators’ are the people at Apple who came up with the idea for the device and the others around the globe in the early 2000s who were thinking there have to be more things we can do with a mobile phone than calling someone, texting them and playing games on it.
The ‘early adopters’ are the people that ‘get’ the possibilities that a new phone model offers and, consequently, will queue up for hours on the day of its release, just so they can be among the first to own it.
Reach the tipping point and that’s it – there is no stopping the product. The ‘early’ and ‘late majority’ get the phone and the technology because they are caught up in the whirlwind.
The laggers are the ones that are forced into getting the phone because there are no other alternatives. Nowadays, it’s near impossible to get a decent phone that isn’t either made by Apple, or operates on an Android system, or similar.
Relating all of this to safety and overcoming inaction is simple. Think of yourself, the safety and health practitioner, as the thought-leader or innovator – the one who comes up with the ideas. Instead of trying to sell them to the entire organisation, or a whole operations function, in one go, focus on one or two people that ‘get it’ – in other words, the early adopters; the people who will stand for hours in the rain to buy the latest gadget. Keep working with them so they spread the word, until the critical mass is reached, and watch the idea take off. Even the laggers come on board eventually. Why? Because their inaction will sideline them and make them stick out for all the wrong reasons.
Experience has shown this approach works and, to prove it, here are a few examples. The idea was discussed during a development programme with a group of safety professionals, in the context of helping them find different ways to get line managers to buy into some really good ideas they had to improve safety. The group was somewhat sceptical of the approach and was set a challenge to test out the theory at its team meeting the following day.
The experiment was based around the obsession society seems to have with checking e-mails. At the start of the meeting one of them put their BlackBerry in a box and passed it to the others who had been on the development programme the day before. They each put their BlackBerry in the box before handing it to the next person. After a minute everyone in the room had put their devices in the box and didn’t touch them again until a break in the meeting.
The actions of just three people were enough to entice the entire group of 12 to reach the ‘tipping point’. In the end, even their bosses – the laggers, in this instance – put their phones in the box, albeit reluctantly, because they felt compelled by the fact that it was seen as ‘the norm’.
Safety champions
A few years ago, an organisation decided it wanted to introduce safety champions into some of its larger sites to act as another pair of eyes and ears for the manager. It was a big outfit, which had a number of operating divisions. In the majority of cases, the programme fell on deaf ears, but one of the operations directors did take an interest.
The safety team spent time with him to help him understand what the safety-champions programme entailed, what benefits it could bring to his business, etc – all the usual stuff you’d expect. After a few weeks of discussion with him and his team, the process of introducing safety champions into the division began. It had been running for a while when the safety manager happened to ‘let it slip’ at an operations board meeting that they had done this, and suggested the operations director could talk about the positive effects it was having – not only for safety but also on other issues, such as employee engagement.
By the time the safety manager got back to his desk, they had already received a text and an e-mail from the two other operations directors, asking for him to give them a call because they wanted to try it as well.
Line management taking ownership
A problem we all face from time to time – managers who think that just because we have safety in our job title, we should be the ones who talk about accidents that happen to the workforce – is another example of where this approach has been used to great effect.
In this case, try as they might, the health and safety professional couldn’t seem to get even a handful of senior managers to understand what they were trying to say. That is until, one day, during one of their regular catch-ups with a senior manager, when the safety practitioner expressed their frustrations.
The senior manager said something along the lines of: “I can see where you’re coming from, but I can’t say that in front of the others.” For the safety professional, that was effectively the green light and at the next business review meeting the senior manager (i.e. the early adopter) tried a different approach, taking it upon themselves to talk about accidents that had happened to their people and what they were doing about it; the safety team did none of the talking.
Thankfully, the managing director also bought into the health and safety ideas expressed (it helped that the safety professional had primed them) and asked for everyone else to follow that same approach. In truth, the boss’s request didn’t really have much of an effect on the other managers; once they’d heard about the benefits of the approach and witnessed the presenter receiving the ‘well done’ off the boss, they all wanted a piece of the action.
A different approach to training
Let’s look at a final example of how successful this approach can be: the case of a group of trainers, who were responsible for training an organisation’s front-line employees in certain technical issues. Traditionally, their approach to training had been based on a lecture-style, but this format probably isn’t particularly suitable when you are trying to train someone in a very practical task.
Sadly, these guys had been working like this for years and were a little wary of change. So the boss, instead of instructing each of the course owners to re-write their courses in line with his thoughts on training delivery and base these on the generic learning styles of delegates, asked to sit in on two separate course reviews.
The boss didn’t add anything to the technical content of the courses, as it wasn’t his area of expertise, but what he did do was help those carrying out the review realise there was a different way to deliver the training. After the first hour, or so of the session, the trainers saw that there was an alternative way to deliver the course, and by lunchtime they were flying.
Their boss then got them to present the finished article back to their peers, to whom they sold the message that their traditional approach wasn’t suitable in this learning context. The tipping point, in this case, was just two people, and once the other trainers were able to see the possibilities, the hardest job for their managers was trying to rein them in!
Conclusion
If you stop and think about it, the chances are we can all picture a handful of people who, no matter what safety idea you come up with, just get it – the so-called ‘early adopters’.
Instead of us spending lots of precious time and effort trying to get everyone to adopt things at once (and getting incredibly frustrated when they don’t), maybe we need to be more savvy in our approach and look beyond our traditional ways of getting people to buy into safety.
Having identified the ‘early adopters’, safety professionals should be working with them and harnessing their enthusiasm to make whatever it is you want to implement happen, and use the momentum these individuals create to get the rest of the organisation on side.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an advert for an iPod on the TV and yet, about a year after they came out, I was desperate to get my hands on one. Why is that? Probably because everyone else around me had one and I was left wondering what I was missing out on.
The really good thing about the law of diffusion of innovation is that you don’t just have to take my word for it, or even Sinek’s; you can try it right now and it will cost you absolutely nothing. The benefits for safety are massive. What have you got to lose?
Reference
1 www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html
Richard Byrne is route safety improvement manager at Network Rail.
The Safety Conversation with SHP (previously the Safety and Health Podcast) aims to bring you the latest news, insights and legislation updates in the form of interviews, discussions and panel debates from leading figures within the profession.
Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts, subscribe and join the conversation today!
