Behavioural Safety & Cultural Change

There are three ways to change behaviour; a traumatic event, a consistent message reinforcing required behaviour over a long period of time and the culture a person is acting in. None of these methods are fool proof and they don’t always work for everyone. For example, a leader can be defined as someone who isn’t affected by the culture of an organisation and instead will influence that culture, or someone whose behaviour has changed following a traumatic incident will gradually switch back to the original behaviour if the culture doesn’t change with him or her.

What drives behaviour? We used to think that behaviour was driven following a trigger or antecedent. Today our understanding is that behaviour is driven by the individual’s perception of the outcome of the behaviour. Moreover, the perception of an outcome is based on their beliefs. What happens, is that following a trigger we unconsciously begin to determine the possible outcomes of the different behaviours open to us. We place more emphasis on the outcomes we perceive as being positive for us, where we will achieve the outcome soonest and where the outcome is more likely to occur. Once we have weighed everything up, we unconsciously decide about our behaviour.

From the three options for changing behaviour, it is easy to see how the first two will change a person’s perception of outcome. The traumatic event, the least desirable, will give the person that experienced it a vivid perception of what happens when something goes wrong. They can relive the experience whilst weighing up the outcomes of behaviour which can give the person a good push away from repeating the behaviour which lead to the event in the first place.

The second option, a consistent message that reinforces required behaviour, changes a person’s perception of the behaviour by making it seem positive which will see people place more emphasis on the required behaviour over a different behaviour. This option will take a very long time to achieve change and runs the risk of being reversed through one inconsistent message. Often organisations who take this approach to behavioural change, never achieve what they set out to do.

We can achieve behavioural safety via a cultural change programme. People like to fit in to the social norm or the culture of an organisation. They could go from one organisation that had a poor safety culture to one that has a good safety culture, and they will up their game to fit in with others in their team, or vice-versa. If we can improve culture, we can achieve behavioural improvement in the organisation as a whole.

As mentioned earlier, behaviour is based on perception of possible outcomes, and that perception is based on beliefs but how does this fit into culture. In the Universal Model of Culture, shared beliefs are one of the four ways to describe any culture. The other three being language, rituals, and artifacts. In the context of a modern organisation, these are described as below:

Each area of the culture model is linked to the others, so if we change one it will generate change in the others. Whereas it might be a difficult and lengthy process to change someone’s beliefs, by changing how we communicate, our equipment, and our procedures we will change the beliefs and by default, the behaviour of people within the organisation.

A cultural change programme will seek to make positive changes to how the organisation communicates, to the equipment and environment, and to procedures that will improve behaviour. It will also establish ways to measure cultural change by placing more emphasis on leading indicators and monitoring cultural clues to identify where on the cultural evolution scale the organisation sits.

There is a myriad of tools available to us when progressing cultural change, some essential if we want a to achieve a positive and sustained output but whatever tools we use, we should always plan out the programme in advance, and measure our progress on the journey.