SHP hears from Tony Roscoe, Director at Implexis Consulting, who discusses how work culture can be improved by empowering staff through behavioural safety…
People are sometimes surprised when, while running a behavioural safety programme, I introduce myself as a Behavioural Psychologist, Lean and Scrum Master. They react as though lean and behavioural safety were somehow at odds, when they absolutely go hand-in-hand. So you can imagine the response when I start talking about the link between lean and wellbeing, in particular mental health.
The problem is that we often see a culture of continual improvement as something that is exclusively for the organisation. It is for the organisation to improve, especially for the organisation to improve its bottom line and cut cost.
What we miss is the effect that is has on people’s mental health.
Tony Roscoe, Director at Implexis Consulting
Let me give you two scenarios:
1. You work in a company who says that it values you, sends you an employee engagement survey once a year and asks you to fill in a form to make improvements, which then promptly disappears. I’m sure you’ve never worked anywhere like that!
2. Or you work in an organisation that truly listens to you by asking you what needs to be improved and gets you involved in the improvement so that you feel a sense of achievement whenever you see that improvement. Overall, you feel valued, listened to and empowered.
Where do you think that you would be happier?
The other more obvious impact is that people are often motivated to remove the things that annoy them, that cause them stress in the workplace. One project I worked on removed a computer system that annoyed everyone, the person involved identified it, conducted observations in order to understand the financial impact of it (£3.6 million in salary annually) and helped to remove it. Less stressed and more productive staff, who loses?
Lean and mental health
There is a great deal of research that shows that staff who feel listened to at work, who feel valued and who feel empowered, have far better levels of mental health and are not only are not adversely impacted by work, but work can be a positive influence on their mental health.
This almost seems like a panacea, where work is good for us, but it can be good for us and it can also be good for the organisation. What is good for the organisation and what is good for the individual does not have to be in conflict!
It is not just the tool, it is how you use it!
Many years ago I sat in front of a senior management team feeding back the results of a survey (which were pretty damming) and the board responded by stating that they had since implemented 5S. My first question was “who determined what ‘good’ looks like?” (part of 5S is setting a standard and this should be set by the staff, so that they have ownership over it). The board looked at each other and I kid you not they giggled like children. I repeated the question louder and the answer, as I suspected was management i.e. this had been imposed on them and they were told what good looks like. The sad thing was that this board saw this as the silver bullet solution to all of their cultural problems, when in fact it was just another symptom of a command-and-control culture that was failing everyone.
Improvement and health and safety
At this point, I can almost hear health and safety professionals screaming that we can not just let them “improve” things, as they will take shortcuts. I agree, there has to be a formal process that sits behind this, I am not promoting anarchy, but if the only blocker is that we are too afraid to empower people, what does that say about our health and safety culture?
Three take aways
1. A culture of continual improvement can be great for people’s mental health as they feel valued and listened to.
2. Empowered staff remove the things that annoy and frustrate them and these are usually the things that cost time and money for the organisation.
3. I am not promoting anarchy, there has to be a formal process that supports this that involves health and safety, but let us not forget the “health” in health and safety. If this positively impacts peoples mental health, do we just ignore it?
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
Great piece. On the topic of short cuts. The staff may take ‘short cuts’ but this needs analysis in itself. What happens if the short cut is actually a better, more efficient and / or safer method. Engagement and empowerment means building trust, listening and looking into the advice or suggestions from staff. We don’t always have to implement suggestions but demonstrating a willingness to change goes a long way to people feeling valued.
Very good read 🙂