So Safety Is Paramount Is It?

Industry likes to say that safety is paramount. Wherever the nature of operations put people at risk there are companies saying essentially the same thing in slightly different ways:

The safety of our people is our first priority
Nothing is more important than doing the job safely
We believe that our workers have the right to be free of injury

You know the kind of thing we’re getting at. Excellent intentions, fine words that sound good in the Annual Report, the stuff to give the outside world confidence.

But what’s the reality?

Statistics published by the Health and Safety Executive at the end of last year show that the number of people being fatally injured in factories, construction sites and offices, increased by 4% to 235 in the 12 months to April 2004, up from 227 the year before.

There was also a 9% rise in non-fatal injuries and the number of ‘more than three day’ injuries to employees increased by 0.7% in 2003/4 to 129,143 of which two fifths were caused by handling, lifting and carrying.

So, despite improvements over the years that date back to the seminal legislation enshrined in the Health & Safety At Work Act 1974, the reality is that people are still getting hurt at work. And judging from the HSE figures it seems at best that the improvements in safety performance across the country have reached a plateau.

There seem to be two difficulties

getting people to believe in the fine words, at every level of the organisation,
getting people to behave in accordance with them.

Take belief first. Doubtless the people who write the words and the Board Members who sign up to them truly, honestly, really do believe what they say. After all the words express values that decent human beings want to believe in – wholeheartedly. They say that as responsible Directors of our organisation we’re interested in the well being of the people who work for us and we’re not concerned solely about turning in a profit at the end of each and every accounting period.

Very often, however, as you leave the Boardroom and travel around an organisation things seem different. Take a walk on the factory floor, visit a construction site, talk to people in a mess room and you find that the lads don’t believe the words. And worse they don’t believe that the Board Members and the Senior Managers truly, honestly, really believe in them either !! You hear opinions expressed along the lines of “They would say that wouldn’t they?” “When it comes to the crunch what counts is productivity.” “Safety only becomes important after an accident.”

So what goes wrong? How is it that the ideals that people at the top of the organisation sincerely believe are paramount become diluted the further you travel from the corporate centre in which they were honed?

In our view a large part of the answer lies in the measurement and reporting systems that organisations put in place. We subscribe to the school of thought that says what gets measured and reinforced gets done. Not quite the usual formulation – we’ve added in the important concept of reinforcement.

Put simply if an organisation measures its performance solely in terms of sales, productivity and profitability for example, and reinforces the delivery of good numbers against those metrics, then the people who work in the organisation will bend their backs to deliver those outcomes virtually to the exclusion of anything else.

There are two points to note here. First, it’s seldom that performance is measured solely in financial terms. Invariably organisations do measure aspects of safety performance alongside the financials. But it’s the lagging indicators such as accident frequency rate and near misses and so on that get measured – there’s no focus at all on the behaviours that lead to those outcomes. Secondly, it’s far too rarely the case that managers who deliver good results against the safety metrics actually get any recognition for doing so. Nine times out ten they are reinforced purely and simply on the basis of their financial results and that tells them, loud and clear, that safety isn’t in fact as paramount as those fine words would have them believe.

Getting people to behave as safely as possible in every situation is more of a challenge than it might first appear. Well crafted statements of intent are simply a starting point. Rules and procedures may make a contribution but appeals to reason and common sense are unlikely to make much impact. Unfortunately human beings don’t always behave rationally and few of us are naturally compliant with rules (you only have to think about behaviour on the roads to realise how few of us tow the line when we don’t perceive a high risk and we think we can get away with it).

At Quo Behavioural Systems we take the view that the key to managing human behaviour in the safety context is to treat the issue as you would any other major business issue. Start by developing a behavioural strategy, agree some action plans based on the strategy and take steps to implement them.

Sounds simple but beware. Everyone thinks they’re an expert when it comes to behaviour. It’s only common sense isn’t it? Well, not quite. So called common sense is often highly misleading. The genuinely responsible corporation will turn to behavioural science for guidance because managing behaviour requires:

some knowledge of behavioural theory,
the development of practices around reward and recognition that are aligned rather than at odds with the theory, and
an approach to behavioural measurement that is every bit as robust as a gold standard approach to financial control.

A final thought: once organisations begin to take the behaviour of their people seriously and begin to put in place effective strategies to manage behaviour then we’ll be convinced that they mean it when they say that safety is paramount.

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