How do we improve attitudes towards safety within our teams?

Improving attitudes and behaviours all starts with leaders building trust within their teams. I bang on about this all the time, and I know there are others within the industry who do too. It's fundamental to the success of whatever strategy you're trying to implement.

Trying to force cultural change in teams you have no relationship with, or maybe you lead them from a distance, is always going to fall flat on its face – people don’t buy into whatever your next shiny campaign or strategy is, they buy into the person they’re working with.

So how do you build trust within your teams?

It happens one conversation at a time.

When I was promoted to Health & Safety Business Partner, I formed part of our Local Government operational leadership team. Initially, I felt so excited to be supporting a large, multidisciplinary, complex business that transforms local communities for our long-standing Local Authority clients. The nature of what we do means we work very closely with client organisations and other delivery partners – meaning influence often extends beyond our own staff. I remember the excitement quickly dissipated and it began to feel like an overwhelming task.

I recall speaking to our operations director, worried I might not be cut out for it (pesky imposter syndrome), who I remember said ‘Beth, you can’t boil the ocean, just take it one task at a time’

I planned out stand downs and office visits to meet some of the teams I work with. I recognise there may be pockets of out-dated views when it comes to safety within teams, and I really didn’t want to re-affirm this by only visiting ‘on the back of an incident’. I knew the only way to tackle the task was to be visible, promote clear and simple communication and offer my support and time to anyone that needed it.

Psychological safety is a real hot topic at the moment, it encompasses this idea of staff having the ability to feel comfortable to share things without reprimand.

How can this be achieved in practice?

• Show vulnerability as a leader, this is so important. Share your own experiences (personal stories, successes, failures etc) this opens opportunities for others to do the same. You can’t expect colleagues to share information if you're not willing to do the same.
• Accept you don't have all the answers. Asking the right questions will allow teams to feel safe and supported.
• Create opportunities for genuine connection. People want to feel valued and heard - Listening is such an underrated skill.
• Ask questions and empower others to use their voice good or bad. Often ‘groupthink’ can be prevalent in meetings, which can lead to poor quality decision making, limiting creativity, and forcing those within the room to push their own thoughts and suggestions to one side.

How do you get teams to be open and honest to share moments when things didn’t go to plan?

How we respond to ‘negative’ safety events in the workplace is so important too.

We all make mistakes; it doesn’t matter how well trained or motivated you are – they can happen to anyone – nobody comes to work to do a bad job.

It’s important that we contain our emotional response and are considerate in our use of language.

It’s easy to interpret behaviours incorrectly following an event, because of your own bias and assumptions. Decisions that led to an event may not make sense to you now, but they likely made sense to those involved at the time because of the circumstances they were met with.

These instances offer an opportunity to learn. Apportioning blame rather than looking at the context and conditions of the event can lead to incorrect understanding when investigating incidents.

I recently updated our approach to safety shares. Considering the importance of language, the title was changed from ‘Safety Share’ to ‘Learning Opportunity’. With participation form the colleague involved they provided their account of what happened, what made sense at the time and what learnings could be taken from this event. It also included comment from our operations director and discussion points to keep the conversation alive.

The feedback has been really positive, I really believe this a good example that even the small changes help; ultimately improving attitudes towards health and safety.

What else can you do?

• Spend time with your teams, build the relationships first. Everything you want to achieve will follow (so much easier) from this.
• As a leader in a business, you’re incredibly visible and influential to those around you. Be authentic and consider what you value, always act with integrity and consider your language, tonality and behaviours you exhibit when engaging with your teams.
• If you commit to deliver something, make sure you follow through with this, or at the very least explain why you might be unable to.
• Ask questions.

Consider:

• When was the last time a member of your team came to you with a problem?
• How did you respond to it?
• How do you as a leader create space for your staff?