The Outovator’s Guide to Building a Safety Culture - Part IV Seven tools for building a worldclass safety culture – Part A
The previous article introduced the seven tools that help us built a safety “house.”
TOOL #1 TRANSPARENT SELF ASSESSMENTS was covered in the previous article. In this article we cover three additional tools. These are Trust, Leading Indicators, and Learnings from Diffusion of Innovations.
TOOL #2 TRUST. A behavior-based safety culture is all about trust across every level of the organization. It’s about trusting your employees to do their job to the best of their ability. It’s about providing an environment to empower employees so they are confident to raise concerns with their manager without fear of retaliation. And it’s about positive reinforcement when making corrections. Consistency of approach between all levels of management from first line supervisor to CEO is critical. Trust is often built in difficult times, for example, immediately after an unfortunate safety incident or accident. By trusting employees, treating them empathically, not seeking to blame and yet tenaciously getting to root causes, extracting the learnings, and implementing the learnings all help build an unprecedented level of trust.
For some people, the only goal of implementing a behavior-based safety culture is to improve safety records. This couldn’t be further from the truth! Instead, think of it as an investment in building and maintaining a culture of trust. As formal training is rolled out, people will begin to see the investment the company is making in their health and well-being, by listening to their opinions. The result may be a reduction in accident and injury rates, and near-misses, addressing unsafe conditions and improving unsafe behavior statistics. But the real investment revolves around trust in one another.
TOOL # 3 RELENTLESS FOCUS ON LEADING INDICATORS
When identifying leading and lagging indicators, I think about the well-known iceberg model for safety. There is nothing anyone can do about an organization’s past, such as its history, number of accidents, and days worked without an accident. The major lesson here is that for each accident (lagging indicator) there are 1,200 “near misses” and unseen or hidden conditions. Leading indicators focus on items “below the surface” in the iceberg model (near misses, unsafe conditions and behaviors). Relentless focus on the leading indicators (near misses, unsafe conditions and behaviors) will steadily lead to a strengthening of the safety culture and an eventual improvement in the lagging indicators. For some employees, the iceberg model can be difficult to visualize, but providing posters of such visualizations can help the employees internalize the difference between lagging and leading indicators.
The iceberg theory of accidents explains that we can perform an unsafe behavior many times, even hundreds of times, before we experience an accident. It also explains that if we keep doing an unsafe behavior, we will experience an accident. Unfortunately, the human mind distorts this fact and reverses the logic to make us believe we will remain unharmed regardless of our behavior, even when we keep performing unsafe acts.
Iceberg theory teaches us to focus on leading indicators (near misses, unsafe behaviors, unsafe conditions) - which are often “below the surface” and can be overlooked.
Breaking this cycle of illogical thinking requires external help from a safety coach who can identify unsafe behaviors. Safety coaches can be fellow colleagues trained to notice unsafe behavior and direct an employee’s attention to the behavior. Not only does this approach allow someone familiar to call attention to unsafe behaviors, but it can also break the cycle of incorrect thinking, replacing it with a more logical set of safer behaviors in the future. Enforcing repetition about the new safety culture is key because it shifts behaviors, sometimes multiple times a day!
Specific examples of leading indicators include near misses, unsafe conditions, and unsafe behaviors (listed in increasing order of sophistication / difficulty of reporting). These can be examined in absolute numbers, per capita ratio, by department, by work area, and/or by business function (office, sales, manufacturing, customer service, etc.).
As the organization matures, the individuals on safety teams (responsible for the metrics) will dissect the data and develop bespoke metrics that help the specific operation. As trust grows and training deepens, the organization will naturally evolve from reporting near misses to unsafe conditions and eventually to unsafe behaviors.
Poster teaching the difference between a lagging indicator (accidents) and leading indicator (unsafe condition / near miss) for electrical safety situations.
The example pictures or poster may be helpful in visualizing leading and lagging indicators for electrical hazards and for slips and falls. One can similarly create posters for stored electrical energy or for sharps.
Poster teaching importance to leading indicator (oil slick - unsafe condition) - which if ignored repeatedly can lead to severe injuries / accidents (lagging indicator).
TOOL # 4 FOCUS ON INNOVATORS AND EARLY ADOPTERS - BORROWING LESSONS FROM DIFFUSION OF INNOVATIONS
In the early 2000s, I began testing a hypothesis based on the Theory of Diffusion of Innovations[1]. Originally introduced by Everett Rogers in 1962, this theory teaches that when something new is introduced to a set of people, the population rapidly segregates itself (mentally) into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The theory had been well established for new product introductions and new technology introductions. I wanted to test whether Rogers’ theory could be generalized for any cultural change, especially safety.
What I found was that systematic identification, encouragement, and championing of early adopters and innovators—while ignoring the laggards—was a dramatic change from the classical management approach. Most managers (including myself in the early decades of my career) focus on the laggards and expend significant energy trying to convince and “win over” that group with the underlying belief that, if obstacles are removed, the change will simply occur. Rogers’ theory teaches that one should ignore laggards and focus attention on the change wave, as once the tipping point is crossed, the laggards often are quick to “switch” and adopt the new change.
Everett Rodgers book “Diffusion of Innovations” (1962) teaches us that when any change event encounters a population - the populations segments itself. Rodgers teaches us to focus on identifying innovators and early adopters and to encourage their success and behaviors.
The culture change process then comes down to identifying the early adopters and innovators, publicly highlighting their efforts, putting a spotlight on the individuals, giving these individuals a high amount of attention – while systematically ignoring the “laggards.”[2]
I am often asked for advice on identifying the early adopters. They are often not the managers, first line supervisors or formal leaders. Rather, they are individuals who will volunteer first, who provide a multiplicity of suggestions, and who will engage deeply and passionately with the change process. As the organization begins collecting suggestions and ideas, you can simply examine the number of suggestions per person to immediately learn who on the team are your laggards and early adopters. A video explaining these concepts is found at https://youtu.be/zClAdLw4yRI.
Even if your organization is strapped for time to implement the program, you’ll see engaged employees who consistently go well above expectations. We’ll call these employees our “champions.” They are valuable advocates but must be protected from burnout as the journey goes on. Champions deserve special recognition and care from the leadership team to ensure their passion and commitment to the process is nurtured and sustained. Finding your champions may be difficult at first, as many are typically self-effacing and prefer not to call attention to themselves. However, behavior-based safety data is rich with information to provide leaders with clues on how to identify champions. Likewise, in the early stages of culture change, a disproportionate amount of work gets done by champions, who, according to some research, can typically perform eight to ten times the amount of work completed by the average individual. The resulting “lift” in overall program statistics is experienced because the champions’ efforts are not sustainable but do help to shift the culture. Once the safety culture change leader has identified these individuals, you can provide additional training, coaching and reinforcement to guide their efforts and begin the process of converting late adopters and laggards.
We are well on our way – having reviewed four of the seven tools. In the next article we will dive deeper into the final three tools for triggering safety culture change (positive reinforcements, PDCA and deep emotional engagements).
[1] Wikipedia article on “diffusion of innovations”
[2] The same individual can be an early adopter for one type of change (e.g. reversing cars into a parking space) and a laggard for another type of change (e.g. moving to a 4-day work week of 10-hour shifts). Each change event produces a different set of innovators. Hence one must be careful not to universally label individuals as “innovators” or “laggards”.