May 30, 2017Geoff is the founder and Managing Director of PCL, a business psychology consultancy that specialises in personality and human factor risk assessments. Geoff set up PCL in 1992 and has overseen its continuous growth to establish its current global presence. He is a Chartered Psychologist, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Prior to establishing PCL, he was Honorary Research Fellow at University College London (UCL) and European Manager for The Psychological Corporation (San Antonio, USA).
Despite decades of workplace safety regulation, we’re still struggling for solutions. Tension frequently arises between those who regulate and those who deliver – perhaps even a whiff of hostility. Risk managers often despair because employees are unable to stick to the regime demanded by regulators and legislators. Staff, on the other hand, feel tightly bound by inflexible policies. Frustration arises because they can’t use their own personal judgement to change procedures, even when their ideas seem to make more sense! The question is, given these ongoing tensions, can risk really be addressed
adequately through blanket policies and procedures?
Difficulties inevitably arise when the dispositions and risk appetites of the people who must deal with risk are not addressed. Behavioural safety management offers an alternative approach to enriching safety culture. It promotes a more people-centric focus, taking a broader perspective on risk that incorporates differences in individual risk dispositions. Viewing workplace safety at the individual level makes H&S personally relevant, encourages buy-in, employee engagement and promotes personal accountability.
Behavioural safety management is a bottom-up approach backed by strong top-down support. It offers an entry point for company-wide dialogue around personal, team and organisational risk and H&S culture and draws out the crucial managerial issues that impact front-line performance.
While risk itself defies succinct, consensual or useful definition (other than “the probability of an adverse outcome” or similar), the risk dispositions inherent in personality are eminently measurable. Although every individual has ‘free will’ to act as they choose, each also has an individual risk bias which leads them to perceive, respond to and take risk in different ways.
To further complicate things, the individuals willing to take on the most physically demanding and dangerous operational roles are, in personality terms, the polar opposite to most risk managers. Whether it’s because they are too carefree, spontaneous, fearless or imperturbable, those operating on the frontiers of risk are unlikely to be the most placid, vigilant or routine-orientated individuals.
Being able to assess these differences opens up a largely untapped seam of opportunity to understand human risk factors. It enables organisations to help individuals develop greater awareness of their risk tendencies and address potential blind-spots. It encourages personal responsibility as an alternative to reliance on regulatory systems that discourage discretionary judgement, innovation and initiative.
So how do we measure differences in risk disposition? There are two neurological systems that are recognised by the UK Government Chief Scientist as key to decision-making: the emotional and the cognitive. Taking these two as conceptually orthogonal axes, the Risk Type Compass generates a 360-degree spectrum of risk dispositions, segmented to define eight Risk Types. Each Risk Type reflects a natural disposition towards risk – the extent to which a person is, for example, naturally adventurous and optimistic as opposed to being cautious and anxious about uncertainty, or to what extent they plan things carefully, seek excitement or act on impulse. Temperament is deeply rooted and will influence how much risk an individual is able to take, how much uncertainty they can cope with and how they react when things go wrong.
Risk Type adds a crucial new component to the H&S risk management tool kit. It supports behavioural safety management by engaging individuals and provides a healthier balance to micromanagement and the ‘command and control’ approaches of regulation.
See Geoff Trickey speak a SHE 2017. Register here.
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I like the article and agree with needing to enrich safety culture, don’t agree that we’re still struggling for solutions. I would welcome the chance to explain why
I’m not convinced, and I’ll explain why.
We are not struggling for solutions, we already have them, they are just not being applied, more so internationally.
We also need more enforcement of existing regulations, however that costs money and governments have little will or money to enable this. Safety is a junior ministerial post in the UK, despite workplace accidents and ill health costing society £13 billion a year.
If any persons need their risk dispositions assessed it’s the most senior executive management, those in power. The people that deal with the risk can’t be ignored, and generally aren’t. They actually receive training and in most cases, understand the risks they take. Behavioural safety management can be useful, it can also be an excuse to put all the onus on the worker.
There are many reasons why a worker takes risks. Behavioural safety offers useful strategies. However, measuring differences in worker risk disposition is way beyond most organisations competence level. Many don’t have basics of health and safety management in place, and that includes legal compliance with often simple standards that can be easily and cost effectively implemented, and that’s in the UK!
The root cause of this situation is usually senior management commitment. They own and control the organisation and can, if they have the appetite for it, create an extremely safe (but not totally risk free) work environment.
Unfortunately, the big obstacle, amongst many other things is production and services delivery. These two big hurdles still take precedence over workplace health and safety and risk reduction. This results in the omission of basic safety standards based on law, guidance and best practice. While management focus on quality, production, service delivery and making money, basic health and safety practices decline creating a negative safety culture.
Workers take risks when the culture allows them to take those risks. I work with companies worldwide and my experience tells me workers are mostly taking risks due to:
Inadequate policies and procedures – often not well founded or fully implemented, or unused, unmeasurable and ambiguous. Many of the policies I encounter are worryingly ISO accredited. Workers that aren’t informed will develop their own working methods off the hoof. It’s a fact that management can make a company policy work, if they really want to.
A lack of leadership shown by senior management – often due to no training, a lack of training or poor training, which means they don’t understand the risks, realise their significance or how to control them.
A lack of, or no consultation processes and inadequate communications.
A lack of motivational factors such as discipline and positive rewards.
It’s also a fact that one of the best worker motivational factors was removed from industry many years ago, that being supervision (that required money). The average front line supervisor is often just a worker with the title. They must undertake the work task as well as supervise, so workers go unsupervised, as doing both isn’t possible. An unsupervised worker is more likely to take risks, as they know they will get away with it, unchecked. They will also develop bad habits that will become automated.
In summary, unless you are an organisation that has a massively advanced safety culture, with all the basics covered (find me one!). It’s a waste of time trying to measure worker personalities with a psychological compass.
People don’t resist change – they resist being changed. It’s likely that most workers will fall in line and exhibit positive safe behaviour if the environment around them changes, particularly their leaders.
I can’t see the average worker being interested or giving any credence to the methods suggested in your article. They will resist this attempt to assess or change their behaviour. In fact, it’s likely to be seen negatively and a cynical attempt by management to control their behaviour.
What will really help the safety effort is organisational management applying the same effort to health and safety as they do to production or service delivery. Despite our knowledge and advances in risk reduction, people are taking risks because they can, and know they will get away with the unsafe behaviour. Management will often allow this, if it doesn’t affect the goal of making money.
All of what I have written above is written into safety law and best practice. How many senior management have bothered to read or understand it? A tool to encourage them to do so, would be something I’d like to see!
Also, don’t forget all the other individual factors that can cause accidents, a few being:
Personal susceptibility.
Lifestyle choices.
Attitude.
Aptitude.
Motivation.
Perception.
Fatigue.
Physical health.
Mental health.
Age.
Gender.
Sense organs.
Experience.
Knowledge.
How much can an organisation influence the above individual factors?
The tools to address risks are already available, it’s called good text book, bread and butter safety management, and it’s not being applied well enough.
We don’t need psychological tools. We just need management to follow, resource, apply and measure the existing law, guidance and best practices, that alone will take a company a long way in improving safety behaviour.
I feel a bit more moral compass, rather than a risk compass is required to adequately address workplace risks.