Could a deeper cultural understanding make you a better safety leader?

Back in 1991, Geert Hofstede published a ground-breaking book called ‘Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind’.?I remember studying it when I did my MBA in 1998, and loving his work, without really knowing why, or how important to me it would become.

In it he describes six main dimensions along which national cultures can be described and understood, enabling the reader to gain insights into both individuals and groups.?And whilst the temptation to stereotype can be substantial, if you keep this in mind, you will undoubtedly find a practical use for Hofstede’s work somewhere in your life, at some time.

For me, that ‘somewhere, sometime’ was when I inadvertently began a career as a specialist in Communications and Engagement for Health and Safety.?Already coming from a communications background – I’d completed my MBA with a marketing pathway and later went on first to run my own communications agency and then to retrain as a simultaneous interpreter for the United Nations – I was well equipped to bring a new lens to health and safety and offer the communications expertise I had gained so far.

As I progressed along my health and safety path, I discovered that the profession was fraught with challenges from a communication perspective, but that the opportunity was huge, because if we could get communication right, then we could save lives in the process.?Getting the basics right was mission critical i.e., remembering who needed to know what, and when.?As was simplicity, because these messages really did need to be understood.?And what surprised me the most as I delved more into the health and safety profession within organisations, was the lack of time allocated to two-way communication, offering a massive opportunity for involvement and ownership.

Assuming we get all this right, however, where is the next step change in safety, and could it come from the communications field??I believe it can, because we are all chasing the holy grail of a speak up culture for health and safety, but the very premise of it requires not just the ‘challenger’ level of psychological safety advocated by Tim Clarke, but also a level of safety permitted by own national culture.

One of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions is individualism versus collectivism, and when we attempt to empower individuals to speak up, we are really only talking to those cultures (like UK and US for example) who feel comfortable speaking out as individuals, and potentially ignoring those (like the Philippines for example) who prefer, with a collectivist preference, to speak up as a group.

A second dimension is power distance, meaning the acceptable hierarchical distance between the top and bottom layers of a culture, and again, there are implications from a safety perspective.?If a culture has a high power-distance, like India for example, then individuals are less inclined to ‘cross’ the hierarchy and challenge someone above them, which may put a blocker on them challenging for anything, let alone safety.

And then there is indulgence versus restraint, where some cultures, like New Zealand, are more likely to savour the best things in life rather than hold back, and I wonder what impact this might have when we are telling people to follow certain safety rules for their own good.?Could this cultural trait have an influence on risk-taking, I wonder, if we do not find a way to recognise and work with it?

Some cultures are also predominantly masculine, rather than feminine, meaning there is a strong tendency towards competition, as opposed to collaboration.?Great if we can harness this for safety purposes, but dangerous if it becomes competition among teams based on production goals, to the detriment of everyone else.

The fifth element is long-term versus short-term orientation, and this might be interesting when we are telling people they must think about the future, for example in calculating risk.?Think about the events we know about that are high severity but low frequency. Because they are low frequency i.e., unlikely to happen to you, but will happen to someone, one day, then we have to find a way to get people thinking about what could happen over the long-term.

Finally, Hofstede talks about the degree to which a country culture avoids or embraces uncertainty. When it comes to calculating and mitigating health and safety risks at work, our whole approach is built around reducing uncertainty, but are we flying in the face of a cultural perspective that is more comfortable with the uncertainty than we are.

When we start to consider our health and safety communication from a cultural perspective, not only can we see where our messages might fall on deaf ears, but also where the opportunity exists to leverage certain cultural approaches to get the end result we all want – for everyone we work with to go home safe and well every day.

Is it time to add cultural understanding to your safety leader communications toolkit?