Creating a Culture of Accountability

An organisation survives and evolves mostly through gradual shifts in leadership, strategies, systems, processes and other circumstances.

What people feel, think and believe is reflected and shaped by the way they go about their business and it is important that you understand the culture that is created. In understanding it, it is important to look at behaviour as this is what determines real change.

Get it wrong and it can have a serious impact on your reputation and the potential future of the business.

A culture of accountability is an organization of accountable employees. Results are communicated and understood by everybody. Accountability is determined proactively, before the fact, not reactively, after the fact.

When a mistake is made, the response is not finger pointing and excuses – it is about solving the problem and learning from mistakes. Every employee feels a sense of ownership for organisational results and will do what it takes to achieve those results.

• Now, who wouldn’t want to work in that kind of culture?
• Even more importantly, how do you create a culture of accountability?

It starts and ends with leadership: Leaders - starting at the top, and at all levels – will send a clear and consistent message (good or bad) about “how we do things around here”.

So, what can leaders do to encourage a culture of accountability?

Walk the Talk: Nowadays, organizations are so afraid of lawsuits that they won’t admit mistakes. That kind of excuse making and blaming others will cascade down and permeate throughout the organizations.

When a leader can stand before their employees and say, “I made a mistake – and this is what we’re going to do to fix it” it sets a positive example of accountable behaviour that employees won’t be afraid to emulate.

Define Results and Expectations: Don’t wait for a mistake to happen and then waste energy finding who is to blame. Instead, set clear standards and expectations before the work even starts.

Then, make sure all employees are aware of and understand what results the organization is trying to achieve and what the expectations are for all employees.

Every employee should have a “line of sight” to the organization’s desired results.

Gain Commitment: Without commitment, we get compliance or even resistance. “I’ll try” is not commitment. Ask: “Do I have your commitment?” and listen to any concerns. Work with the employee to overcome barriers and figure out what needs to do to obtain their commitment.

Be Open to Feedback & Problem Solving: In other words, never “shoot the messenger”. Have an open-door environment where any employee is empowered to bring any problem to anyone in the organization without fear of repercussion.

Hire Accountable Employees; Don’t just hire for technical skills and experience, “hire for culture fit”. Look for a track record of admitting mistakes and overcoming obstacles.

Coach Employees on How to Be Accountable: Many individuals come from backgrounds where they never had to be accountable. They may have to learn new skills and behaviours, like critical thinking and problem before they can begin to thrive in a culture of accountability.

Consequences and Reinforcement: Ultimately, there has to be consequences for consistently poor performance and reinforcing for positive results and behaviours. Without this, employees will soon catch on that accountability is all talk and no action.

Hold Each Other Accountable: In a culture of accountability, leaders don’t just hold employees accountable for results. Everyone holds everyone accountable!

• Every employee takes ownership of organisational results, not just their own little part of the world.
• Again, leaders can role model, teach, and reinforce this kind of ownership mentality.
• Culture will change in a positive way when leaders consistently practice these principles.
• If they won’t or can’t, then perhaps it’s time to find new leaders.

It’s no secret; companies with high levels of organizational accountability produce far superior results to those who struggle to take ownership. So, what exactly is organisational accountability and how can you create a culture that promotes it?

Organisational accountability occurs when all employees behave in a way, which promotes the successful and timely completion of their responsibilities. Creating a culture of organizational accountability doesn’t happen overnight though.

Attaining and maintaining this environment can be incredibly challenging. However, there are things you can do to address the problem. In this article, we explain how to identify poor organizational accountability and the steps you can take to build a culture of accountability.

Lack of organisational accountability: Like the flu, a lack of accountability throughout your organization can result in a number of symptoms that wear down your employees and ultimately affect your organization’s ability to perform. Fostering an environment that places little importance on accountability can lead to low morale in your employees, unclear priorities, a lack of trust, and ineffective execution.

Often, management won’t even realize their organisation has low levels of accountability until the symptoms are so prominent in their workforce that they can no longer ignore it. If you’re not sure whether your organization has a poor culture around accountability or not, look out for these tell-tale symptoms.

Low morale: When a lack of organisational accountability is present in a workforce, an employee’s sense of purpose can diminish. This, in turn, ruins morale.

Employees will begin to lack the motivation to do their job, which will eventually reflect in the quality of their work.

 If accountability is strong, people know what they’re working towards and why they’re expending time and effort, resulting in them feeling a sense of purpose.

This sense of purpose is what drives motivation and morale. If you notice low morale in your workforce, this may be a symptom of poor accountability.

Lack of trust: Poor organisational accountability can also breed distrust and skepticism in your workforce. When projects and goals fail to have someone taking charge of their completion, deadlines are often missed, and employees lose trust and faith in each other.

A lack of trust can really stifle a team’s ability to collaborate and communicate effectively. Once trust is lost, earning it back is incredibly challenging, and can have long-lasting impacts on the organization.

Unclear priorities: If you ask your employees what their departments’ main priorities are, and they can’t answer off the cuff, something’s gone wrong. More often than not, what’s gone wrong is the culture around organizational accountability. If your people aren’t clear on what they’re accountable for, it will cause a lot of confusion around their priorities.

How can you expect employees to achieve important results on time if they’re not sure what the priorities are?

Ineffective execution: Do you notice that projects and objectives in your organisation often fail? They either miss their deadline, or the outcome never eventuates? Ineffective execution of organizational strategy is a big problem across many businesses, but rarely is poor organizational accountability held responsible.

If no one feels responsible for an objective’s completion, the chances are, very little effort is going to be invested in the activities required to achieve it, if any is invested at all. If you find the execution of strategy in your organization is poor, you might need to take a closer look at your culture of accountability.

Promoting a culture of organisational accountability: Creating and promoting a culture of organisational accountability starts with the leaders in an organization. The actions and attitudes of an organization’s leaders are what guide other employees as to what is acceptable and appropriate behaviour.

They have to walk the talk: This alone, however, won’t build a positive culture of organisational accountability.

Organisations must create clear roles and responsibilities for their employees, empower their people to work autonomously, gain their people’s commitment to accountability, and improve their evaluation and feedback channels.

Create clear roles and responsibilities: When the roles and responsibilities of your employees are ambiguous, there’s very little chance they’ll feel accountable for their results. People need to understand the boundaries of their role, and what they’re responsible for achieving.

If they don’t, excuses will be made and fingers will be pointed when results aren’t achieved. In the planning phase of creating your organization’s strategy, roles and responsibilities should be made clear and communicated to all employees.

Each and every objective, project, and the task should have at least one ‘owner’.

Empower your people: Empowering your people to work independently and collaboratively is key to achieving a culture of organisational accountability.

Giving your employees power and freedom to make decisions, which impact their results, employees gain a stronger sense of accountability.

If you’ve told your employee they are responsible for the outcome of something, but you also tell them the actions they must follow to achieve that outcome, the employee will only feel accountable for following those actions, not the outcome.

When results aren’t achieved, an organization’s employees won’t take accountability for the deviation in their results.

Giving your employees the freedom to do things their way, will encourage them to take accountability for their results.

Gain commitment: It isn’t enough to just communicate to your employees what they’re responsible for; you need to gain commitment as well.

Without commitment, you just have compliance or perhaps even resistance. In order for your people to commit to their responsibilities, you need to include them in the planning process for the objectives, projects, and tasks that will achieve your organisation’s vision. Listen to their concerns and work with your employees through any barriers they perceive.

Improve evaluation and feedback in your organisation

Safety values: Companies with effective safety cultures always have well established and communicated company safety values, which are regularly and consistently promoted by senior management.

Engagement: Senior management leadership tours, visits, employee engagement conversations, and Behavioural Based Safety (BBS) programmes. BBS has long been recognised as a critical component of any safety management system.

These are programmes that monitor adherence to established safe methods of work (SOPs) and employee behaviour in the workplace.

Supervision by management is also a key component of Health & Safety legislation1and so integrating a BBS makes good sense from a legal perspective.

• Evidence of the management team performing safety interactions and observations of staff performing works is required. Some organisations will have a formal task/behaviour observation KPI for supervisors and managers to meet to assist with demonstrating adequate supervision, as required under legislation.
• A good task observation process, if properly implemented, is used as a positive reinforcement process rather than additional policing of the staff’s behaviour. It can be used to discuss concerns that employees have about the workplace, procedures, and hazards and for management to better understand the issues employees are facing. Positive reinforcement of employee behavior should be the goal of such a programme.
• Provision of regular and consistent positive affirmation and reinforcement of ‘good safety practices and attitudes’ is key.

Leaders can then seek and use the feedback obtained from consultations, ‘walk around’, collaborative decision-making, and self-reflection to improve processes. 

Safety culture surveys are also regularly conducted with strategic management plans and actions identified following such surveys, aimed at improving the disconnect between staff and management and improving employee job satisfaction, are also a regular trait of organisations implementing effective safety cultures.

High levels of hazard reporting: This indicator alone stands out as one of the strongest indicators of an effective safety culture. High levels of hazard reporting indicate that employees believe in the safety system in place and that management will take appropriate action. 

It generally only occurs when employees are highly trained in OHS hazard identification and the importance of identifying them before an incident occurs.

ISO 45001 recognises this with the requirement for management to ‘remove any obstacles’ to an effective hazard reporting system, such as difficult IT systems, lack of feedback regarding the progress of associated corrective actions, etc.

A positive safety culture: is easier to build and maintain when employees feel comfortable reporting concerns, believe that the reporting process is positive & see improved outcomes.

Incident investigation and timely corrective action management

The best companies demonstrate a consistent approach to investigating incidents with a hunger for continual improvement. Employees are given adequate time and resources to complete investigations.

Work/life balance: Organisations that demonstrate they care for the welfare of their employees in addition to their safety tend to have better OHS performance.

• Leaders need to realize that taking care of their staff is important to an organisation’s culture.
• Employees forced to work long hours to achieve work outcomes is not sustainable and demonstrates to employees that management doesn’t really care about them.
• Living a balanced life and making sure their employees do too, is the best way for a leader to sustain growth.

Embrace openness: Every time a mistake or failure comes to light and lessons are drawn from whatever went wrong, a company is a step closer to improving the workplace.

Avoiding assigning blame: is crucial – even when a person does do the wrong thing, employers should attempt to understand why they made the error. This is the essence of true root cause analysis.

Embrace an open and fair workplace: Make the workplace work for women and people of different cultures and ensure that anti-bullying training campaigns are included.

Empathy and inclusivity should be a key focus and regular awareness campaigns of this should be evident.

Teamwork: It is imperative, at a time of accelerated change, to create cultures that value building teams as they build empathy, foster creativity and strengthen resilience.

A healthy company values and celebrates everyone’s contributions – which directly impacts retention and recruitment.

Occupational Health and Safety: responsibilities/ area ownership / Programmes aimed at clarifying employee responsibilities, empowering employees and improving employee ownership of their work areas is a critical component to improved workplace safety culture.

Some workplaces will ask employees to demonstrate their commitment to these philosophies by getting them to sign agreements to the “golden rules” (including the reporting of hazards and deviations away from SOPs).

At a safe workplace people will:

1. understand what they need to do and why they need to do it and think about what they are doing before they do it
2. look for hazards proactively and manage risks before they cause harm and take care of hazards themselves without needing policing
3. believe they are responsible and accountable for making sure that they and their workmates remain healthy and safe and follow workplace rules

Employers must provide and maintain, so far as is reasonably practicable, a working environment that is safe and without risks to health.

Effective communication: Effective communication is another regular indicator of a good culture and a great way to increase safety communication while building a positive culture is to hold weekly or monthly safety talks.

Increase worker buy-in by having them lead the talks: Make safety policies readily available electronically or on paper and use the intranet to communicate safe practices, expectations, and best practices when it comes to safety in the workplace.

Trained employees: Training demonstrates an organisation’s commitment to safety.

Trained employees also embrace safety culture more readily because they are aware of hazards and the effect that they can have on maintaining workplace safety and personalise the importance of employees’ role in preventing and eliminating risks and hazards. 

Involved workers: Building and maintaining safety culture starts from the ground up.

Another way to build strong employee buy-in is to involve them in the process.

Ask them what they would like the reporting process to look like, or get their feedback on current communication methods.

Companies that encourage managers, employees, and subcontractors to challenge unsafe behaviours and attitudes in others and to recognise and encourage those who have shown a positive attitude towards safety, will maximise the likelihood of positive attitudes and beliefs becoming shared values, resulting in positive safety culture.