Safety culture – Covert operation

When endeavouring to develop a better safety culture, many organisations neglect to dig deep into the DNA of the business and so end up only effecting change at a superficial level. Richard Byrne considers a couple of generic management models that could assist in addressing some of those deep-seated, but often hidden, problems.

As every discerning practitioner will know, building a good safety culture is essential to getting health and safety right in any organisation.

There are many models that describe what a good safety culture might look like, and often, when you drill down, many of these theories contain the same component parts. Take, for example, the Bradley Curve, which outlines three phases in the evolution of safety culture — one that is driven by management; one where the individual takes ownership; and one where the team takes ownership — yet there is only ever a vague description of how you make the transition from one phase to another. For the health and safety professional trying to develop a strategy to effect change, the model’s lack of descriptive detail isn’t particularly helpful.

Part of the reason for this, of course, is that all organisations are different and, consequently, no one thing will work everywhere. That said, a lot can be learnt from generic models of organisational change, such as the one shown below.¹

According to the model, most organisations, in their quest to change culture, tend to focus on issues above the ‘water line’, or the overt organisation. Addressing these matters will probably have an effect on the culture, but it is only when you dive in and deal with some of the issues below the water line — the so-called covert organisation — that you begin to make some sustainable and lasting change.

Strained relationships

To illustrate, let’s use a non-safety example. Business restructures are commonplace, generally happening about once every three to five years. When a reorganisation takes place, most firms might change people’s job titles, their job descriptions, and create a new mission statement for the organisation, etc. However, as none of these things tends to address the underlying reasons why a change was necessary in the first place (i.e. the issues below the water line), there comes a point when another change is needed — generally, in another three to five years time!

Now, let’s apply this model to a common safety issue, a ‘tense’ relationship within a manufacturing company between production and engineering — two functions that are critical to both the safety and overall success of the other.

As is often the case, it is not only safety that is adversely affected by the departments’ unhealthy relationship. The more traditional way to deal with this would be to mix the teams up somehow, or even have both groups reporting to the same person in the management tree.

As the health and safety professional, you could help the teams develop a new, inspirational safety mission statement relating to how they can, and should, work together. You could arrange for the teams to have some training on their health and safety responsibilities, and their new boss could encourage everyone to work more closely. However, unless the organisation addresses the fundamental issues as to why there is tension between the engineering and production teams, then it will not achieve a long-lasting change in the culture. Eventually, you will find yourself tasked with coming up with yet another safety strategy.
Great, you might say, but how do you know what questions to ask to identify the type of problems that exist below the water line?

Untangling the cultural web

As a starting point, there is a simple tool called the ‘cultural web’², which is based on exploring the diagram in figure 2 (see overleaf).   
Starting with the first circle of ‘stories’, you could kick off a team meeting by asking: ‘What are the safety stories you always hear people talking about here?’ Some typical responses might be:

• ‘It was better years ago’;
• ‘Don’t own up to stuff because you get disciplined when you make a mistake’; and
• ‘I remember so-and-so reported a near-miss and his boss didn’t give him any overtime for weeks’.

For each response, you dig a little deeper in order to start diving below the ‘water line’. For example, for the first response, you might pose the following questions to explore the crux of the matter: ‘what was better?’ and ‘what changed?’  

Repeating this task for all the sub-sections in the cultural web, and asking for feedback from a number of teams, you soon start to build a picture of some of the real, underlying cultural issues that need to be addressed.

In many ways, identifying the problems is easy; the real challenge comes in solving them. Often, the solution depends on the people, the team and the organisation involved. To illustrate how this could be done, let’s continue with the idea of the tense relationship between the two imaginary production and engineering functions outlined above.

Through the cultural-web exercise, the safety advisor discovered a number of key issues that needed to be addressed:

• engineering thought that production didn’t understand the pressures they were under, while production had similar views of engineering;
• on the front line, the two functions did not, generally, work as a team; and
• both the engineering and production teams really looked up to, and respected, their local team leaders.

The site’s safety advisor, along with the engineering and production managers, developed a plan to transform the site’s safety culture based on changing some of the above-the-water-line issues. More fundamental, however, was to deal with the below-the-water-line issues of ‘role perception’ and ‘trust’, which were identified as areas to look at through the cultural-web conversations.

The safety development programme

While teams were encouraged to mix more — for example, by holding joint team briefings and undertaking joint safety inspections — their team leaders took part in a safety development programme, which was specifically designed to tackle the below-the-water-line issues and help them understand three things:

• their safety responsibilities as a line manager;
• the effect they, and their team, have on other people’s safety; and
• how they can all work together to deliver improvements in safety performance.

In the first session the team leaders were given a refresher on their safety responsibilities and received 360O feedback on how they met them. During the second session the production and engineering team-leaders were grouped together and went through various exercises aimed at getting them to see what life was like on the other side of the fence and to see the effect each had on the other.  

Between the second and final sessions the team-leaders were set the challenge of spending a day shadowing a ‘buddy’ from the other function, with whom they had the most dealings, to see, firsthand, the challenges they faced. In the final session, each pair was asked to consider how they were going to work together more effectively in the future, as well as how they could help their teams do the same.  

Between each session the safety advisor gave the team-leaders some coaching to challenge them to put into practice what they had learnt and to help keep them motivated when the day job started to ‘drag them down’.

Delivering the programme in a way that encouraged learning through participation, exercises and role-plays meant the audience was gripped from the start. A highlight of the programme was the 360-degree feedback, as it helped the team-leaders understand their strengths and blind spots. It also provided a non-confrontational way for their team to tell them what they liked, disliked, and what they would like to see them do more of when it came to safety.

Developing and running a 360O feedback programme might sound awfully expensive and difficult to carry out; however, this couldn’t be further from the truth. All you need is a handful of questions related to the things you learnt in your research and through your cultural-web conversations. Then, you can upload these to an online survey tool — of which there are many freely available — and ask the respondents to complete it.

In this case, the team-leader asked 15 people to complete it — typically, their boss and three or four peers, with the remainder coming from their team. This approach is really powerful because it gives people the chance to be precise in telling the person what effect they are having on safety. There are, however, two points of caution:

Both the delivery and interpretation of the feedback has to be done properly, particularly if there are comments that a person might not like. Time must be spent with the person receiving the feedback to help them digest and come to terms with it. It is quite a challenge, but it is certainly worth the effort;

Give individuals a clear steer not to simply pick their ‘mates’ to submit feedback because, while everyone needs to know their strengths, it is just as important to find out your blind spots and weaknesses in order to develop.

Summary

We all know that changing culture is not a quick fix and takes years. Therefore, this programme was always viewed as the start of a journey for these two particular functions, in order to deal with the trust and role-perception issues they had with each another.

The major difference with this approach, compared with many other ‘safety culture’ initiatives, is that the safety advisor and management team are laying a strong foundation, aimed at tackling some of the deep-seated issues, which, once solved, should enable sustainable cultural change. In other words, on account of the fact they haven’t simply addressed the more superficial issues affecting the business, it shouldn’t be necessary to go back and try something else in a few years’ time.

References
1    Based on a presentation at ATS Euromaster’s senior management team’s business-strategy development sessions (2010)
2    www.strategyexplorers.com/whitepapers/Culture-Web.pdf

Richard Byrne is route safety improvement manager at Network Rail.

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