It’s a kind of magic

Developing, promoting and keeping alive a robust safety culture is not easy – but that is no excuse not to try, at least. Tim Marsh accepts there are no ‘magic bullets’ but argues there are various tricks and techniques available that, when pulled out of a top hat marked ‘genuine management commitment’, can have a spellbinding effect.

Some time ago, I was asked by the head of training for a large and very well-known company if it would be possible to put together a one-day ‘inoculation’ session that he could run at the end of his courses and which would help his young apprentices resist the temptations they faced when working with engineers out in the field. “Well,” I said, “if we can set up the courses well, keep the numbers manageable, lead off with a senior manager showing passion – and these apprentices have a strong character to start with – then we can certainly do something. In fact, if all goes well, we might even prevent them picking up the bad habits for a full day!”

The bad news is that there really isn’t any sort of magic bullet.

The good news is that there are several techniques that look to be working like magic, are based on common sense, and are easy to describe, too. Of course, all of these require a degree of effort and follow-up that many organisations find very difficult. Really, the training providers have the easy job – they run the training then jump into their cars and head home. All the hard work is left behind.

So, what are those straightforward-to-describe but hard-to-do-well commercial techniques that companies can employ to ensure their efforts to improve safety live well and prosper?

1 The “curious why?”
If a company can double the number of times managers ask the question “why?” curiously then the safety culture will be transformed. I guarantee it. Reason’s model of ‘just culture’1 shows that in the vast majority of cases, an individual will have at least a semi-sensible reason for the unsafe act they’ve performed. (By ‘semi-sensible’ I mean that the “equivalence test” of what a reasonable person would do in the same situation produces the answer that we’d have probably done it, too). Ideally, we should investigate the root cause of these unsafe acts calmly, rationally and pro-actively rather than reactively, when someone has been hurt and everything can get desperately subjective.
My own experience suggests that it’s maybe only one time in ten in a typical company that the person is an out-and-out “law unto themselves”.

Importantly, the “why?” question must be asked in a curious tone. Asked aggressively, the person will very likely get defensive and clam up. The trick thereafter is to do something with this learning – and, of course, many organisations find this very difficult.

Even if the answer is that it is the person in question, you still learn something (in this case, that the person you’re talking to is bang to rights, and a more robust response is appropriate. Perhaps that would be the justice in “just culture”!) The good news is that by being systematically analytical first, any “justice” is both less frequent and transparently fairer when it does happen. This, in itself, helps move the whole company culture forward.

Quick audit: Simply ask a cross-section of the workforce how many times they have been asked a “curious why?” question about anything that has gone wrong in the last three months. If you think the section above makes good sense but get “hardly ever” as an answer, then you really should look to roll out some “five whys” analysis training.2

2 The hypothetical “Anything slow or uncomfortable?” question
It’s even easier to transform a safety culture by doubling the number of times a manager asks the hypothetical “anything slow or uncomfortable?” question because, in most companies, it’s simply not happening at all.

In the recent ministerial expenses scandal more then half the Westminster MPs had to pay back money, having given in to the temptation of over-egging expense claims. (Interestingly, many new MPs who resisted initially testified that they had come under pressure from the old hands not to “make them look bad” – a classic example of the pervasiveness of existing culture. But that’s another article!)

What the MPs’ behaviour demonstrates (yet again) is that, faced with temptation, very many people will give in to it. Stephen Fry says that when faced with temptation he “gives in to it straight away, to save on the faffing about”.
ABC analysis shows us that the short-term consequences of a given behaviour are a greater determinant of its occurring than the long-term consequences – even where those long-term consequences can be very important. (ABC stands for antecedents, behaviours and consequences – with antecedents meaning all triggers, such as training and signage, and anything contextual that is relevant, such as the fact that the person is tired.)

So, for example, we smoke and drink and eat rich food and skip the gym and hope for the best regarding the likes of heart disease and cancer, and we speed in our cars to save time even though we know driving is by far the most dangerous thing we’ll ever do.

This principle is also important in the workplace because when the safe way is slow, uncomfortable, or inconvenient we are tempted to cut the corner and “crack on”. And, of course, we nearly always get away with it, which is nice and rewarding and validates our “dynamic risk assessment”. However, the laws of Heinrich’s Triangle3 tell us that, inevitably, one of the corner cutters will cop for it.

Therefore, I’d argue that where there is a temptation to cut a corner because the safe way is slow, or inconvenient in some way it’s as systemic a risk as an unguarded drop, or piece of machinery. Because people are people, unsafe behaviour in these circumstances is almost inevitable for many, and it’s not a question of if but how soon someone gets hurt.

So, we can wait until an incident occurs and find out about these temptations via a (good) accident investigation (and then we can exhort our workers not to give in to such temptations – a thankless task), or we can pro-actively get out and about and discover these temptations and, wherever practicable, design them out.

As with the “why” analysis, where a suggestion is high-impact and low-cost it should be invested in as soon as possible, and the people who came up with the analysis lavished with praise personally and through such as newsletters. Praising safe behaviour is often argued to be a magic bullet in itself but I’m assuming that is something readers will already know all about.

However, I’d argue that even more motivating than praise is listening to someone and then acting on anything sensible they say. If imitation is sincere flattery then actually putting someone’s knowledge and experience into action is as sincere as praise can get.

Quick audit: Ask the workforce if they’ve been asked: “Is there anything slow or inconvenient about doing the job safely?” Usually, you’ll find the answer is “never”, so, obviously, some ABC analysis training should be rolled out. Another interesting question is: “Could you make doing this job safely more convenient, or comfortable?” If the answer is yes, then it’s vital to determine whether that knowledge can be turned into a cost-effective solution. At a more basic level, you might also ask them when they were last praised for a safe behaviour. If they respond with laughter, you might like to roll out some “how to give feedback” training.

3 Workforce ownership can move mountains
To a busy manager, ownership and involvement can look very similar at a glance but in practice, they aren’t at all. Involvement is asking the usual suspects to ratify, or comment on a decision already provisionally taken by management. (A better version of involvement is having them as part of the team that takes the decision but it will almost certainly still involve the usual suspects).

Ownership is giving the workforce itself a blank piece of paper and asking: “What do you think?” The quality guru Deming said “a person most owns what they helped create”.4 Inevitably, where the workforce has a good level of ownership of safety, the safety culture will be strong. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single example that contradicts this.

Involvement is too often like the person at the wedding who stays silent when the vicar asks “if there is anyone here present…?” Ownership is introducing the couple and counselling them when things go wrong. There’s an investment of creative thought and effort. In addition, and to stretch the analogy to the limit, the matchmaking is apt to be more accurate in the first place!

I think it’s like the scrum in the middle of a rugby pitch. From the stands, whether the scrum is inching forwards or backwards it looks much the same – but if you’re the No.8 or scrum half on the pitch who has to do something with the ball it can make all the difference in the world.

Quick audit: Overlapping a little with the above section, we can simply ask a random sample of typical workers when they were last genuinely asked for their opinion and input regarding a safety issue. Then share those answers with senior management – illustrating, of course, with a graph that shows a strong correlation between levels of involvement and safety performance.

4 The magic show
Peers presenting key behavioural messages to peers in their own words and with passion is as good as behavioural safety gets. I’d argue that “break the chain” is perhaps the key behavioural message, and such sessions must always cover this.

Often, behaviours need to combine to cause a fatality. For example, about 50 people a year will be killed in the UK by being hit on the head by a falling object – perhaps from a scaffold with poor housekeeping and a missing toe board along which someone is rushing. Underneath, the person is standing in an area that should be cordoned off but isn’t, and they should be wearing a hard hat but they’re not.

Get one of these right and you break the chain and save the life. In the above example, the presence of the hard hat is the most obvious and alarming “save” – to which I can testify from personal experience – but any of the others will do equally well. However, in their case, you’ll often never know what you’ve prevented.

The most important thing is that peer-to-peer sessions should set the scene for something more long-term. For example, I’ve found that asking for volunteers to get involved in a full behavioural safety process at the end of the session will generate a 50 to 60-per-cent positive response. (Again, I must stress that any process must be focused on analysis as well as observation and challenge.)

This is something you either do or not, so no need for any audit question in this case.

5 Spoiling the magic
Let’s be honest: if the audience ever sees you shove a card up your sleeve, you’re done for! No matter what the banner headlines say, or what the “company vision” is, we all know it’s very easy to undermine the whole process in an instant. “Puff” and, like magic, all credibility vaporises into thin air. This could be because a front-line manager, or supervisor does one of the following:

• They say: “Let’s get the safety stuff out of the way first” (and everyone knows they mean “then we can crack on with the important stuff”);
• They say “OK, just this once, under the circumstances, but be careful”;
• They say: “Do it safely but get it done by Friday” when they meant to say “by Friday but safely” (at a subconscious level the word ‘but’ in the middle of a sentence means “ignore what I’ve just said – the important stuff is coming up”);
• They don’t practise what they preach and cut corners themselves;
• They turn a blind eye from time to time (what you walk past you condone).

And so on, and so on. Or, when we do embark on a culture-change process, we:

• train supervisors and managers in what we want them to do but don’t explain why, or don’t give them the skills to do it well (studies show that “what” without the “why” and “how” equals sending people off half-cocked!);
• cover the what, why and how but don’t follow up with praise when these new behaviours are seen, and do criticise when opportunities to use them are passed up (much as it pains me to say this as a trainer but studies show that in the medium to long-term, in-house follow-up accounts for 80-90 per cent of the effectiveness of a training course).

Vroom’s model of motivation5 explains this perfectly. It stresses that we multiply the “what and why” by the “how” and then by whether we “value the outcome”. It’s not an addition, it’s a multiplication so a low score anywhere means a low score overall. The readers of this magazine value safety quite naturally. The average front-line supervisor needs to be taught to do so by the organisation.

Quick audit: This is the stuff of a full cultural audit but you could always simply read a list of this type out to a typical cross-section of the workforce and count the number of knowing chuckles!

Conclusion
A colleague of mine likes to say: “You get exactly the safety standards you are prepared to accept – no more and no less”, so, while there are lots of “magic methodologies” out there, they all need to be fired from a six-shooter called “genuine management commitment”. All the magic bullets require time, effort, follow-up – and often a good degree of trust, too. Otherwise they’re just air-gun pellets that sting in the short-term.

Anyone who claims they can achieve what the techniques detailed here can achieve but quickly and easily is not so much a magician as a snake-oil salesman!    

References
1  Reason, J (1997): Managing the Risks of Organisational Accidents, Ashgate
2  The ‘five whys’ is that ability we all have to repeatedly challenge any answer we get until asking ‘why?’ finally provokes the response ‘because it is’ – in other words, the root cause
3    Heinrich, WW (1931): Industrial Accident Prevention, McGraw Hill, NY
4    Deming, WE (1986): Out of the Crisis, MIT Press
5    Vroom, V (1968): ‘A Model of Management…’, in Administrative Science Quarterly 13

Tim Marsh is managing director of Ryder-Marsh Safety (Ltd).