Engagement: The Key to Changing Your Safety Culture

Having said all that, watch out for people selling “safety snake oil” disguised as engagement; engaging employees is hard work and it takes true leaders to do it. Nobody is going to sell you a magic bullet that will suddenly engage your workforce, but plenty of the pundits will try.

But worker engagement is only one of three keys to sustained safety improvement. The other two, Just Culture and Problem Solving, can be just as difficult to achieve.

The idea of a “Just Culture” grew out of research that found that people make numerous mistakes per hour and that it seemed to be a function of the human brain (some researchers postulate that these errors are subconscious experiments that the brain makes to test adaptations necessary for survival). The research found that people make mistakes and that the number or seriousness of those mistakes didn’t seem to correlate between how careful a person was, or how smart a person was, or anything that could be addressed/modified by recognition, reward, or discipline.

The goal of a Just Culture was to create an environment where people felt comfortable making and reporting mistakes; the logic being that if one were comfortable making and reporting mistakes, the organization would be far better equipped to determine the root cause of the problem and implement counter measures to prevent recurrence.

Critics of Just Culture (and after the Texas City, Texas BP incident there are more than a few) contend that sometimes it is appropriate to blame an individual and that Just Culture does little to hold people accountable and the results can be catastrophic. These critics contend that there are circumstances where people should be held accountable and, legally, people most certainly will face criminal and/or civil penalties if their mistakes rise to the level of gross negligence or depraved indifference.

Unfortunately for the critics, research has shown that the clear majority of mistakes are either the result of workers who were never trained to do the job the correct way, workers who were unaware that they were working out of process, or workers who believed that what they were doing represented an improvement and innovation. In other words, very few people made errors because they were negligent, stupid, or malicious.

The final element in achieving lasting safety improvements lies in an organization’s success in creating a problem solving, or learning, culture. I have worked with scores of companies who enlist my help in improving some element of their organization and the common thread that I find in the companies that struggle the most is a deeply rooted belief that they already KNOW what the problem is, they just need me to fix it.