By Richard Byrne
Health and safety can often focus on the negative, but recognising the right behaviour is important for employee engagement.
Richard Byrne outlines simple steps to giving positive reinforcement at work.
Giving praise and recognising when someone has done a good job doesn’t come naturally to some people, and sadly when it comes to health and safety you’re far more likely to hear people saying: “where’s your high-vis vest?” or “keep your back straight when you’re lifting that” than you are: “what you’re doing there is great, thanks”.
This shouldn’t be a surprise though, after all many organisations gauge how good or bad their safety performance is by the number of accidents they have had compared to their competitors or against their performance last year. While there is a place for reactive measures of success or failure there are other levers we can pull to improve safety.
There is a body of research that suggests changing focus to being more positive can have an effect on people’s performance, and those organisations and safety professionals that have already embraced this are reaping the rewards through more sustainable advances to their safety performance and culture.
Figure 1: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
This isn’t anything new. In the 1940s, a psychologist called Abraham Maslow proposed that we are all motivated by a hierarchy of needs; the common day representation of his work is shown in figure 1.
Towards the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy (or the top of the triangle depending how you view it) is the need for ‘esteem’. This, according to Maslow, is the need for people to feel respected and recognised for the things they do.
The chances are you can relate to what has just been described about the esteem element of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Imagine yourself as a front line worker, you’ve been working hard for the last six hours of your shift and your boss has just come up to you and given you a reprimand for not wearing your safety glasses.
Whether they had a point or not, you’d probably feel like you weren’t treated with much respect and that all your efforts earlier in the shift had gone unrecognised too.
Some people disagree with Maslow’s hierarchy, yet it is interesting that more up to date research seems to back it up. Take for example work done by CEB. They found that there was a 39 per cent improvement in people’s performance where they received fair, accurate and informal feedback from their line manager. Imagine repeated exposure to that sort of feedback; done in the right way, your performance would improve. [1]
The idea of repeated positive reinforcement isn’t new either. In the early 1900s the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov conducted a famous experiment that conditioned dogs to salivate when a bell rang. This worked because previously whenever the bell had rung they received some meat, and after repeated exposure to this their mouths started to water in anticipation of the meat being given to them. Behavioural safety programmes are based on this concept: do something well and get some positive praise. This in turn encourages you do it again, or to do something else right, to get more reinforcement.
You don’t need a full blown behavioural safety programme to change from focusing on the negative to celebrating safety as well. Here are six simple things that are known to work:
Based on the findings of CEB’s research outlined above, it makes sense to encourage line managers and peers to give feedback on how people are working. This is more than just saying “thank you for working safely” as doing so might sound a little condescending.
If line managers are not used to giving feedback to their people, help them by providing a framework:
The power of recognition should not be underestimated. Some organisations have a system where someone’s good work is flagged up to their functional director and they then write them a letter recognising their contribution.
If such a process doesn’t exist setting one up is easy. You are the safety advisor supporting an area manager that looks after 25 food stores. Between you, you set up the process, starting with encouraging the store managers to drop their boss an email when they think someone at their store has gone out of their way to do something to really improve safety, or took a brave decision to ensure the safety of their colleagues.
Imagine you were a general assistant in one of the stores and a few weeks ago on your break you noticed some contractors working near the edge of the store’s roof. You weren’t too sure what they needed to do in order to do the job safely, but you knew what they were doing was wrong. You got them to come down off the roof and then alerted the duty manager. You then receive a letter from your area manager saying that what you did was absolutely the right thing to do, and they hope you’ll tell your story to everyone at the store because we could all learn a thing or two from what you did. Would you be more or less likely to challenge somebody or something that you thought was unsafe next time?
Most organisations have some form of newsletter, whether it is a hardcopy or an e-zine. These are the ideal publications to celebrate safety successes, although the type of piece you put in needs to be meatier than someone wearing the right PPE.
Imagine you work for a firm that provides on-site support to a customer. During one of the customer’s safety tours of their site they come across you working and start asking you questions about what you are doing and how you are doing it. As a result they write to your manager and your firm’s sales manager to say how impressed they were with you. For organisations which operate such business models (where their people work remotely on their customer’s sites) they have a higher level of risk from both a safety and brand reputation point of view.
If this story got in your newsletter, not only would it be a great way to celebrate the person working safely, but it would also remind others that they might be next and that they are ambassadors for the firm and to question whether they are working safely when they’re away from the depot.
Lots of people have ideas to improve safety; such ideas come from all directions, for example, from competitions, safety committees and safety tours. If you decide to take an idea forward, keep the person who came up with it involved throughout, and when ‘it’ is launched publicise that it was their idea.
All the ways to celebrate safety success outlined so far help to identify workforce heroes. These are people who are respected, recognised and trusted by the workforce.
The important thing is to say thank you and well done to your workforce heroes and use their position with their colleagues to encourage them to follow suit. For example, imagine you want to put a number of your key safe systems of work into a short film to help people understand them more. You could just film the work activity and get a voice over done, or you could do that and get some of your workforce heroes to do a brief introduction to each safe system of work and maybe star in it by doing the task at hand.
When you receive praise in general you feel like you’re walking just that little bit taller, and it is this feeling that you give to your workforce heroes by using them in your safety programme. After all, what you’re saying is: you have the respect of your colleagues and managers, you’re recognised for working safely and doing a good job and people trust you.
If you want to develop your own formalised safety awards programme, there are structures in place that many safety bodies use that are good to follow.
Decide on the criteria that you want to recognise, publicise it throughout your organisation, and get a judging panel together to review all the entries. The awards themselves might just be a certificate in a frame, but you can make it a ‘big thing’ by inviting the winners and their partners to an evening event where they have to dress up, go to a nice hotel or restaurant, have their picture taken by a professional photographer and have a meal with the other award winners before receiving their award from one of the organisation’s senior leaders.
While front line workers might be a little reluctant to go to these sorts of events at first, experience shows that when they get there, both they and their partners feel proud of their achievements. Many organisations have an awards evening or annual conference so adapt the idea and use these events as the celebration.
Conclusion
Every day people work safely and, in lots of cases, every day their efforts go unnoticed, yet recognising the right behaviour is really important. We (safety professionals and industry in general) don’t do it enough and we should. It doesn’t have to be expensive and often it is the little things that mean so much. Give it a try, what have you got to lose?
Richard Byrne is health and safety director for the contract merchanting division of Travis Perkins
Reference
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!
