What’s your Strategy for achieving a Positive, High-Performing Safety Culture?

Maybe having one for a start!

There is an old saying, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there”. When it comes to getting the culture you want in your business, the thinking is no different. We are regularly amazed at the blank looks we get from senior management when we ask; what is the culture you want? We get even more blank looks when we ask; what system do you have in place to get you to this goal?

Any goal needs a system or process to achieve it. The more robust the process, the more predictable the outcome. Maybe the reason we get these ‘organic’ dysfunctional safety cultures within our business is, 1.) we don’t know what we want and, 2.) we don’t have a strategy to achieve it.

So, what would a practical Safety Culture Strategy look like and how would it work?

(And, if you would like a FREE SAFETY CULTURE STRATEGY TEMPLATE, read on!)

What is a Safety Culture Strategy?

Strategy in the simplest terms is all about making choices, deciding what to do and importantly, deciding what not to do, in pursuing your company’s vision.

If you think about it there is an enormous range of options you could take as a manager. But, many of these options are never even considered because we know they would be counterproductive or unrealistic (or perhaps illegal!) and would not support the overall vision of your company. But, from the significant number of feasible options that are available you only have the time and resources to commit to a very small number. Additionally, some choices you make may invalidate other options or commit you down a certain decision pathway. Deciding on what does and doesn’t make the cut is the act of developing your strategy.

That said, don’t let the thought of having to create the ‘perfect’ strategy put you off. I think most managers have at least a fair understanding of their safety culture strategy already in mind. Unfortunately, they shy away from putting their ideas on paper because they are working under the false assumptions that;

1. It must be perfect,
2. It must account for every conceivable future state, and,
3. It cannot change.

Rest assured these assumptions are simply not true.

The Value of a Safety Culture Strategy

Your safety culture strategy is a means of:

- Communicating your intent on a particular subject (in this case safety culture):

• At a particular point in time,
• With the information you have at hand, and
• In sufficient detail that it provides your subordinates with a guide to aid their decision-making when you’re not around. 

You are effectively empowering your staff to make certain decisions within parameters you have clearly set. By providing your staff with delegated authority you not only increase efficiency – because you’re no longer involved in all of the operational and tactical decision-making – you also significantly contribute to raising morale and ‘ownership’, by giving workers a certain level of autonomy. So often we assume that procedures perform this function, but as we know, there are a large number of situations that fall outside the scope of our safety systems and are not practical to include within them. We often find procedures, though written to help and support workers to work safely, are often disliked and seen as counterproductive. If this situation exists for long enough, you have the basis for a dis-empowered workforce that avoids ownership and responsibility.

A strategy ensures that the intentions of those within your organisation, in particular the leaders and decision makers, line up on a common path leading to a defined destination or end state. As a Safety Manager or Project Manager it is critical you spend the time to deliberately and explicitly define your safety culture strategy or you run the risk of your managers taking multiple divergent paths that may be inefficient and counterproductive.

The Content of your Safety Culture Strategy

Before we launch into the content of our strategy we need to recognise the fact that a strategy cannot exist in a vacuum. While there are numerous terms used to describe the various direction-setting documents within a company we prefer the four listed in Figure 1 below.

In brief:

• Sitting above the Strategies is the company’s ‘Vision’, this explains why the company exists.
• Next come the Strategies, which must line up with the intentions of the Vision, or at least contribute to the achievement of a particular part of the Vision.
• Below the Strategies are a multitude of Plans which give clear instructions and set tangible goals to be achieved within a define timeframe.
• Finally, we have the Directives, these are the orders or directions – both written and verbal – that frontline managers give to their teams numerous times every day.
• As we progress down the diagram we uncover the answer to the ‘how’ questions. For example, ‘how will we implement our Strategy?’ is answered by the multitude of Plans sitting below this Strategy. Likewise, the daily Directives you give should always provide an answer to the question of, ‘how will we complete this Plan?’.
• Finally, as we progress up the rungs of this diagram we should be able to answer the all important ‘why’ questions. For example, a worker may ask, ‘why the he!! am I digging this hole??’ which you should be able to easily answer by referring to the relevant Plan.

Figure 1: A company’s “Ladder of Control”

The Audience of your Safety Culture Strategy

Now that you’ve decided you need a safety strategy you’ve got to decide what goes in it and who you are writing it for.

If you’re going to go to the trouble of writing a strategy don’t make the mistake of writing it for your boss. Your safety strategy must be written for those at and below your level. After all, these are the people that will actually put your strategy into action. Your safety strategy must therefore be clear enough that your subordinate managers can use it when confronted with situations and decisions that require them to apply their judgement without the opportunity to check with their immediate supervisor. That said, while the primary audience is at and below your level, the strategy must also reassure your superiors that the direction you are taking is in line with their ultimate Vision for the company.

In terms of what goes in your strategy, the most important aspect is that it answers the ‘why’ question. Why do we need a strategy? Why are we focussed on XYZ product? Or, why are we interested in keeping our workers safe?

When people understand why you are asking them to do something they are more likely to do it and more likely to want to do it because it gives them ‘meaning’.

Despite what we may think, people consistently value meaningful work, with a degree of autonomy, and for a leader they trust and respect much higher than simple financial reward. This ‘motivational’ effect of a strategy is one of its primary benefits and should never be underestimated.

So, if the strategy answers the why, it’s the plans, procedures and briefings that answer the how. Such things provide personnel with clear instruction on how they should complete a particular job or task, and hereby contribute to the achievement of an objective. As a leader it is critical that you ensure all such plans, procedures and briefings ultimately contribute to the achievement of the objectives within your safety strategy.

How Strategy Contributes to a Positive Safety Culture

Having a great safety strategy is a brilliant first step and critical for effective operational and tactical control, but, if the progress achieved through your strategy is to actually endure you’re going to need to build a positive safety culture. Safety culture is about people’s values, beliefs and behaviours and the extent to which they are evident throughout the organisation, from the top executives to the operators on the tools.

But a safety culture is not tangible and we often struggle to identify exactly what it’s really made of. According to Dr. Dominic Cooper, a safety culture is made up of “the way that the organisation’s systems and sub systems are developed, aligned and synthesised to assist everybody in the organisation to think about and actively pursue the well-being and safety of people” (Cooper, 2001, pp.33-4)

Put simply, organisations with a positive safety culture prioritise safety against other organisational goals to allow business objectives to be undertaken without undue risk. Having a clear safety strategy provides boundaries within which your leaders and managers can make independent decisions that ultimately lead you to the safety culture you want.

Easily the biggest issue we come across when working with companies to develop their safety culture is that they simply do not know what ‘good’ looks like. They have never explicitly defined it and as such each worker’s implicit assumptions about the desired safety culture are often different. This is the reason why one of the very first activities we undertake on site is to define the ideal safety culture in simple, clear and explicit terms and communicate this to all personnel on site.

Once we have a clearly defined goal (or strategy!) we find people are much more comfortable in calling people out when they see inappropriate behaviour. Additionally, by defining our ideal safety culture we provide personnel with clear targets for their own behaviour. No one will ever be able to flawlessly exhibit all the traits outlined in the ideal safety culture all the time, but if we strive to achieve even a couple of the personal traits we’ll already have a stronger safety culture than that which came before.

What Now?

To give you a starting point for building your own safety culture strategy we’ve drafted a Safety Culture Strategy Template. While it will never be completely suitable to all, it at least gives you a base upon which to build your own strategy. After all, it’s far easier to build on an existing foundation than start with a completely blank slate.

Please email Aframes directly on, [email protected] if you would like us to send you a FREE Safety Culture Strategy Template.

Feel free to rip it to pieces and adapt as you see fit. In fact, we’d be keen to hear how the template does or doesn’t work for you so please get in touch with any feedback you may have.

So, when we are asked the question “what Safety Culture do you want and how will you get there?”, we not only have an answer, we have the strategy to achieve it.

References:

Cooper, D. (2001), Improving Safety Culture: A Practical Guide, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., UK.

Freedman, J. (2012), At the Heart of Leadership: How to get Results with Emotional Intelligence – 3rd ed., Six Seconds, California, USA.

Mintzberg, H. & Waters, J. A. (1985), Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep. 1985), pp. 257-272.

Simon, H. A. (1997), Administrative Behaviour: a study of decision-making processes in administrative organizations – 4th ed., Simon & Schuster, New York, USA.