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Behavioural safety and culture, an expert review

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SPONSORED BY
BEHAVIOURAL SAFETY AND CULTURE,

AN EXPERT REVIEW
CONTENTS
P.4 Foreword - Ian Johannessen Managing Director, PeopleSafe
Safety Culture
P.5 Saving the soul of safety
P.10 Strengthening your safety culture: A tale of two leaders
P.12 Crocodile Dundee and safety culture
P.17 How leaders can create a respectful culture and boost workplace safety
P.20 Promoting a positive safety culture
Safety Differently
P.23 Is safety differently really all that different?
P.27 How safety became all about negatives - and how to do it differently
Behavioural Safety
P.29 Dispelling the myth – Positive people are not safer people
P.32 How Employers can improve behavioural safety in construction
P.34 How do we measure behavioural safety
P.36 Behavioural safety has lost its way
Zero Harm
P.38 Nothing smart about zero
P.42 Five reasons you'll never achieve zero harm

3
SPONSORED BY
FOREWORD
Welcome to the SHP book of Behavioural Safety
This resource has combined into one document some of the leading thinkers on
safety. The writers challenge us and support us to take the widest possible view of
safety, both the people we serve and the organisations we lead.
Safety is a primarily an issue of people! And there lies the challenge, since when
it comes to understanding how to communicate and influence people you find that
people are gloriously, wonderfully and quirkily unique. All different. Not the same.
Individuals.
Ian
Johannessen
When it comes to the working day then
most people reading this booklet will
Managing Director, be challenging themselves to translate
PeopleSafe the general principals and strategies
in the articles into specific actions and
initiatives that make a difference. And
what a difference! The idea that our
actions, communication and leadership
can be the difference between
ourselves or a colleague enjoying a full
and healthy life, or not.
In my world Peoplesafe is absolutely involved in the physical as well as the

behavioural. As a leading provider in lone worker safety our vast array of clients
engage us to provide a service that delivers the means for their staff to raise
alarms in a variety of circumstances and receive rapid and professional support
in the event of an incident; whether that be a safety or security event. Technically
we need to ensure that the devices we provide, the features they include, the
network connection, the data created, managed and made available all works to
the highest levels of reliability and quality.
But like all things safety related, the quality of our safety outcomes are mainly
founded on the level of positive engagement by our clients, both in the sense of
users and their supervisors. So our training, consultancy and on-going in-service
communications are vital.
So read on, and balance your pursuit of safer outcomes by considering both
physical safety as well as behavioural safety.

4
SAFETY CULTURE SPONSORED BY
"The behaviourist, in his efforts to get a unitary

scheme of animal response, recognises no dividing
line between man and brute.” (1913, p. 158)
SAVING THE SOUL OF SAFETY
Nick Bell
Nick Bell Risk
Consultancy
Max is my dog. With treats and praise I trained him to sit and lie down on
command. However, he ‘yips‘ when he sees his lead being taken off the peg. I’ll
turn my back on him and withdraw the collar until he stops. He is now yipping less
and less.
These are basic, behaviourist techniques. Andrew Sharman [1] gave a background
to behavioural safety and its links to behaviourism. If you’ve had disagreements
with someone about how to behave towards a pet, child or worker, I suspect that
lurking in the background are fundamental disagreements about why humans (or
pets) behave the way they do. Behaviourism offers just one explanation. My own,
potted history of behavioural safety will explain how it differs from other traditions
and why I have an issue with it.
The early behaviourists applied scientific methods to the observation, prediction

and control of behaviour. They had no interest in beliefs and perceptions, partly
because their theories and philosophy were a response to the ‘unscientific’
psychoanalytic tradition (Freud, Jung etc.).
Infamously, Watson (a founding father of behaviourism) trained Albert, an infant,

to be terrified of a mouse by hitting a steel bar whenever he presented the

5
For now we will have to watch and wait and see

how long these processes will take, and what the
impact will be to our industries, to health and
safety legislation and to our roles keeping people
safe and well on the shop floor.
rodent. This is classical conditioning, the same technique Pavlov used to get dogs
drooling when he rang a bell. This episode and Watson’s quote, above, illustrates
his belief that we should use the same techniques to train animals and humans.
From behaviourism to behavioural safety

Behaviourism evolved in the century since Watson wrote ‘Psychology as the
Behaviorist Views it’ in 1913 [2]. Burrhus Skinner described himself as a radical
behaviourist because he did consider that our inner world is important but
believed thoughts and feelings were conditioned through rewards and sanctions
in exactly the same way as behaviour. He called his theory ‘operant conditioning’.
Behavioural safety applies operant conditioning to safety and involves changing

what precedes a behaviour and, in particular, changes the consequences which
drive our behaviour.
If someone approaches a noisy area and sees a hearing protection sign, a

supervisor, an earplug dispenser and a poster of someone amazing wearing
earplugs (stimuli/antecedents), they might insert the earplugs (response/
behaviour) because they associate the behaviour with reinforcers/consequences
(e.g. less discomfort from noise, praise from the boss and feeling cool).

6
The HSE describe these as “behavioural modification” techniques [3,4] and

cautions us that they have pros and cons [5]. For example, if we focus heavily on
people wearing hearing protection, we might forget the principles of prevention
(e.g. finding less noisy equipment) [6,7]. Gathering lots of data about frequent,
easy-to-observe behaviours usually does little to prevent catastrophic industrial
incidents [5,8,9]. Rules can also quickly become outdated and aren’t always safe
[5,10,11].
Through my Masters Degree dissertation I investigated football card systems used

by major contractors. These were occasionally described as behavioural safety
schemes but were typically just disciplinary tools (as the HSL also found [12]).
A positive perspective
Leicester City Football Club or the likes of Google don’t, I suspect, break the
mould and achieve remarkable results by tightly controlling behaviour. Sydney
Dekker argues that, in relation to safety, we likewise need to instil a sense
of purpose in our team, increase capabilities and give people confidence
and discretion in choosing how to apply those skills [8] (especially when
facing very dynamic or novel situations). This is, incidentally, the approach of
transformational leaders [13]. Dekker is critical of behavioural safety [14] and
the “mental Ice Age of behaviourism” [15] (pg 186).
My beliefs were shaped by humanistic psychologists, such as Carl Rogers, then

positive psychology which developed in the late 90’s (so called because it helps
people lead a fulfilled life, rather than fixes them). From this perspective, human
behaviour is driven by a desire to reach our potential. Ultimately, we want to be
autonomous and creative, be part of something bigger than ourselves and to
excel. Dekker seems pretty positive, describing workers as solutions rather than
problems to be managed [14].
Coaching has much in common with humanistic and positive psychology [16,17],
treating people as individuals and helping them to gain self-insight and set
personally-meaningful goals. We respect, develop and help people direct their
inherent capabilities to plan and find solutions. This also gives us a platform to
discuss and better understand psychological health and mental wellbeing.

7
When a behaviourist talks to someone, they instead diagnose how, from that
person's perspective, behaviours are rewarded or sanctioned. The safety
behaviourist considers risk perception, the social environment and safety culture:
If these are 'poor', the person won't expect safe behaviours to be rewarded and
may even be punished with ridicule etc. The behaviourist adjusts the blend of
reinforcement and sanctions to fix problematic behaviours and secure compliance
with standards.
To me, this seems soulless. Is that how we want loved ones to be managed?
On the other hand, why should an employer help workers reach their potential?
Morally, it feels right, but my on-going PhD research suggests that this is how we
fully engage hearts, heads and hands in work, creating a win-win situation for
everyone.
Know thyself
Behavioural safety offers a systematic approach for identifying risky behaviours
and developing, and reinforcing, safe systems of work. It promotes collaboration
and worker involvement. Managers learn that undesirable behaviours aren’t
usually due to negligence or ‘wickedness’ and their own behaviours (e.g. how they
communicate with workers) are an aspect of these interventions [4,12,18]. I
wonder if the improved insights and collaboration are the real power behind these
programmes rather than behavioural modification.
If you strongly react to behavioural safety, one way or the other, I suspect you
share or disagree with the underlying assumptions it makes about people and the
reasons for our behaviour. It may be interesting to reflect on your own beliefs: Do
these explain your approach to health and safety and to people in general?
Biography
After completing his degree in Psychology in the early 1990’s, Nick began
working on a project offering support and advice to young people during which
time he took further courses in counselling and transactional analysis. He then
worked and trained as a Social Worker before joining the Ministry of Justice as
a Probation Officer. Eventually he was invited to be part of a Public Protection
unit, supervising high risk offenders. He used a range of cognitive-behavioural
interventions to help offenders gain insights into, and empower them to change,
unhelpful patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviour. In 2002 he took a
sideways move into Health and Safety. He went self-employed 18 months ago
as he explained in his recent ‘lone wolf’ article www.shponline.co.uk/lone-wolf-
going-it-alone-in-health-and-safety/

8
Nick is a Chartered Fellow of IOSH and a Fellow of the International Institute of Risk and
Safety Management.
Through his on-going PhD Nick is examining how worker engagement can be used to improve
health and safety performance.
References
1. Sharman, A., 2016. In pursuit of safety. SHPonline.
2. Watson, J. 1913. Psychology as the Behaviourist views it. Psychological Review,
20, 158-177
3. The Keil Centre, 2001. Behaviour modification programmes establishing best practice,
Offshore Technology Report 2000/048.
4. The Keil Centre, 2002. Strategies to promote safe behaviour as part of a health
and safety management system, Contract Research Report 430/2002.
5. HSE, Human factors: Behavioural safety approaches - an introduction (also known as
behaviour modification)
6. Hopkins, A., 2006. What are we to make of safe behaviour programs? Safety Science,
44, 583-597.
7. Unite the Union, Beware Behavioural Safety.
8. Youtube, Sidney Dekker – Safety Differently Lecture.
9. Zohar, D., Luria, G., 2003. The use of supervisory practices as leverage to improve safety
behaviour: A cross-level intervention model. Journal of Safety Research, 24, pp.567-577
10. Alper, S., Karsh, B., 2009. A systematic review of safety violations in industry, Accident
Analysis and Prevention, 41, 739-754
11. Hudson, P., 2007. Implementing a safety culture in a major multi-national. Safety Science,
45, 697-722.
12. Health and Safety Laboratory, 2008. Behaviour change and worker engagement practices
within the construction sector, RR660.
13. Bell, N., Powell, C., Sykes, P., 2015. Transformational health and safety leadership. Safety
and Health Practitioner, April. Available online
14. Dekker, S., 2014. Employees: A problem to control or solution to harness. Professional
Safety, 32-36.
15. Dekker, S. W. A., & Nyce, J. M. (2015). From figments to figures: Ontological alchemy in
human factors research. Cognition, Technology & Work, 17(2), 185-187.
16. Gregory, J., Levy, P., 2012. Humanistic/Person-centered Approaches. Passmore, J.,
Peterson, D., Freire, T. (eds.) The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Coaching
and Mentoring, Wiley-Blackwell.
17. Seligman, M., 2007. Coaching and Positive Psychology, Australian Psychologist, 42(4),
266-267.
18. SHP Online, Video: Safety Performance Indicators with Dominic Cooper.

9
STRENGTHENING YOUR SAFETY

CULTURE: A TALE OF TWO
LEADERS
Andrew Sharman describes how a week in Siberia,
alongside battling the cold, has left him intrigued by
two leaders with different styles and how they can be
used to motivate and influence.
I’ve just returned from a week of work in Siberia: three flights, two taxis, and a
train ride, it was certainly a long way from home. It’s Russia at its most remote.
Prof. Andrew I’m no stranger to long-distance travel: the previous week I’d been working
in Durban, South Africa. Over there it’d been 35 degrees Celsius, scorching
Sharman sunshine and warm, smiling faces, while all week in Siberia I had been well
Chief Executive, RMS wrapped up in my goose-down jacket, woolly hat and gloves and thermal
underwear - minus 25 Celsius is no joke.
As I wandered downtown, dodging Russian drivers, while simultaneously focusing

on the snow and ice beneath my feet, it was clear that the relaxed flip-flops,
sunshine and smiles of South Africa had been replaced with a more sombre
attitude of ‘Let’s just do what we need to do and then get back into the warm’.
With a temperature difference of 60 degrees between my work locations, and a
physical distance of 7,104 miles, it felt like I was on a different planet.
No matter where I find myself in the world, I’m always intrigued by the local
culture. In post-apartheid South Africa there’s a burning desire for learning and
growth. Many are keen to point out that their nation is ‘second’ or even ‘third
world’ in comparison to Europe.
Despite still being ‘under development’ there’s a sense of pride for the journey
so far and a calm, understated confidence that the future is bright. Working
with clients there always brings a smile to my face as I see people from different
backgrounds coming together to demonstrate a strong sense of community, team-
spirit and a mindful dedication to improving workplace safety.
Despite the chill in the air, Siberia showed similar signs of humility and hunger
when it came to improving safety. Working with the top team of an oil company,
during our workshops we’d been discussing how to develop safety culture

10
and build authentic safety leadership. We’d been exploring classical styles of
leadership and with many of the executives present coming from engineering
backgrounds they identified with the transactional style as their own natural or
‘default’ style.
Typically, process-oriented, transactional leaders are skilled in planning, direction

and facilitation. They quickly get things under control and are expert at identifying
and driving appropriate action. These are the leaders that ‘find and fix’ and ‘make
things happen’.
Unusually, the Siberian company is run by two chief executives. Nicolay is the
visionary, having strategically plotted out the corporate direction well into the
future. For Marina, a tightly-focused former lawyer with a disarmingly warm smile,
nothing is a problem.
Servant leaders, like Marina, can appear selfless, concentrating on how they can
support others in achieving their tasks and goals. Totally committed, with high
levels of awareness and empathy, they are excellent listeners. Servant leaders
actively seek out opportunities to help, bringing teams together and building a
sense of pride and community.
Transformational leaders (like Nicolay) are those who have energy and drive in
abundance. Usually highly charismatic, they use their ability to look ahead to
create a vision for their organisation’s prosperity. Attentive to the needs of others,
they paint clear pictures that persuade others to follow and support their cause.
The combined joint leadership at the oil company got me thinking. It’s not
unusual for an engineering company to have a wealth of transactional leaders
– after all, getting oil out of the ground is key - but could the blend of servant
and transformational leaders at the top provide a more effective climate for
engineering mindsets to prosper and safety excellence to flourish? I suspect it
does.
Whilst leadership style should certainly be relevant to context, great safety

leadership - combining transactional, servant and transformational elements -
may just be the secret to bringing smiles to faces, warming the team spirit and
helping us create safety excellence – no matter where we are in the world.
So what’s your natural leadership style? Do you adapt your style depending on
the situation you’re in? Which servant, transactional and transformational leaders
could you recruit as safety ambassadors in your business to help you provide an
effective climate to further strengthen your organisation’s safety culture?

11
CROCODILE DUNDEE AND

SAFETY CULTURE
Tim Unspoken assumptions and perceptions around the world

Marsh Malcolm Gladwell has described how a culture of deference and respect for
Hon Prof Plymouth
superiors in a Korean cockpit may have meant a co-pilot was afraid to question
University the judgement of the pilot (when he should have been screaming at him to climb),
and founder of resulting in a crash at San Francisco International Airport, killing two people and
RyderMarsh Safety
injuring more than 180 people on board.
Following an inquiry, all Korean airlines’ crew were instructed to converse in

English (apparently less conducive to deference) and all also received assertion
training.
It’s a good example of wider cultural norms underpinning an important safety

interaction. My model of safety culture has a key central element that stresses
the importance of ‘subconscious perceptions’ and ‘unspoken assumptions and
norms’. I stress that the importance of these simply cannot be underestimated
when seeking to understand why people do what they do on a given day and in a
given place.
Recently undertaking a lecture tour of New Zealand and Australia reminded me

what wonderful countries they are. Though neither a Kiwi nor an Aussie would
thank me at all for bracketing them together they do both often share a direct,
no nonsense way about them that people warm to. The visit reminded me of an
interesting paper about Australian values that illustrates the point about societal
norms in ways most people are familiar with.
Six Australian Values

Six values, all with direct reference to safety culture are worth considering.
Importantly, all six reflect an often unspoken but important mind-set.
Mateship refers to the Australian attitude that sticking with your friends and
peers is vital and is reflected in the fact that deference to authority is perhaps
even scarcer in Australia than in most countries.

12
This is great for ‘interdependence’ but the downside is that workplace norms
are even harder to overcome. On the upside the 'fair go' value mitigates this
somewhat and reflects the inherent sense of fairness that is egalitarian in nature.
Getting that stupid new idea from HQ accepted by the workforce might be a
nightmare - but first up you’ll get a reasonably fair hearing in that canteen!
To an extent the related values of ‘she’ll be right’ and ‘give it a go’ reflect the
macho ‘get stuck in and get on with it attitude’ that isn’t always ideal from a safety
perspective but also reflects ingenuity, self-reliance and innovation.
(Though a Kiwi – with major cultural differences acknowledged! - the ageing

motorcycle rider played by Anthony Hopkins in “the World’s Fastest Indian” who
turns up in America and breaks the world speed record on something he built in
his garden shed exemplifies all aspects of these values perfectly. It’s not safe
though. Think Crocodile Dundee on a bike that his mate Wally built).
‘Fair Dinkum’ stresses the importance of honesty, integrity and trust. Say
what you mean and mean what you say – a trust concept utterly central to the
‘interdependent’ element of the Bradley curve.
Finally “good on ya” reflects the ease with which a typical Aussie gives and
receives praise. Praise to be given readily and received humbly.
Simply presenting ‘down under’ provides illustration of these values. For example,
you ask for people to really get stuck into an early morning clap along exercise
and some people jump on the table! No I hadn’t risk assessed that! Feedback
afterwards is frequent, direct, warm and unselfconscious. Comments on the
‘authenticity’ of the talk are frequent and not something you very often see
elsewhere.
Therefore, anyone who has seen the film Crocodile Dundee actually already has
a working understanding of the sort of mind-set valued in a typical Australian
workplace and the benefits and challenges these bring. Fore warned is fore
armed.
On the other hand, an example of a misleading mind-set might be film Borat which
of course doesn’t in any way reflect the national culture of Kazakhstan! (The writer
of the film never having been there).
Anyone hired to undertake some work on the oil fields of Karachaganak (as I have)
might want to do a little research on the (Soviet-era influenced) norms and values
that underpin that society!

13
WHAT DOES GOOD SAFETY

CULTURE LOOK LIKE?
You should know and accept that your organisation has a culture and that
it influences everything! It’s developed and honed over years, with different
influences from within and without. There may be surveys to explain what that
culture is, or you may just know from the people you speak to and the way things
get done.
So let this question help you consider you culture: what is counted as
success?
“Jobs are done and all is well”
Alicia
Mather For any size of organisation the absolute objective is to ensure no harm comes to
its people whilst the work is not just done, but done brilliantly.
Head of Sales ,
Peoplesafe
In a thriving company the two have to go together. There needs to be a purpose
about how “no harm” translates to a positive health, safety and wellbeing culture.
The culture of the organisation has to align on those two issues. If it doesn’t yet,
and if that is recognised, then fine. How do you move forward to a positive safety
culture? So how is that achieved?
The answer is people, now what is the question?

Culture is nothing more than the normalised behaviour of a person in a group.
Good, bad or indifferent, you need to start with individuals. Where are they?
How do they define success? What do they understand by their bosses or the
organisations definition of success?
Staff should have the confidence to express concerns with safety or report
incidents and near misses without the fear of reprimand or punishment. The
safety system should be informed by the workforce, not designed and enforced
only by management. The key word being ‘informed’ – this means staff need not
worry about speaking freely.

14
You can still use rewards and incentives if they are awarded for the right reasons,
such as reporting incidents and including near misses.
You might think that they key individual in a positive safety culture is the CEO, or
the boss! It’s probably right – what is their mode of explaining success?
The promotion of good safety culture should come from all levels of a business
but should be led from the top. A positive outcome is the result of combined
individual and group efforts toward values, attitudes, goals and proficiency of an
organization’s health and safety system.
Safety Culture is always moving either forward or back.

The benefits of a positive safety culture reach beyond lowering accident rates.
Companies that have a good safety culture can enjoy lower absenteeism, a
reduced risk of fines and penalties, and a lower staff turnover.
In a positive safety culture, nothing takes precedent over safe work. Staff should
never feel as though safe work procedures are an obstacle to doing their jobs
correctly and on time.
If that does not exist they surely culture is going backwards.
Follow The SME way: “Look out for each other”

Would you let a friend drive off in if they had “one too many”. Absolutely not. In
smaller businesses based in local communities there is normally a sense that
safety is personal and relational. It’s never a lukewarm corporate safety message.
Organisations do well to foster a team environment where work colleagues can
hold each other to account and not be afraid to call out unsafe behaviour.
All members of staff from the front line to the senior leadership, share the same
responsibility for safe work. In a good culture you won’t find one single person who
is overburdened with the full responsibility for the safety of everyone else.
Are we nearly there yet?

Are you making progress? It seems that many of the biggest UK organisations
have made a real virtue out of signalling how the culture of their organisation
supports the safety and wellbeing of their organisations. Some of it might be
hype, corporate marketing in overdrive. Some of it might be aspiration leading the
organisation forward.

15
The benefits of a positive safety culture reach

beyond lowering accident rates. Companies
that have a good safety culture can enjoy lower
absenteeism, a reduced risk of fines and penalties,
and a lower staff turnover.
But more than 14 million people in the UK are employed by SME’s. I want to know
whether safety culture can be found in small site operations, that is the true
challenge and the indicator of the real progress of safety culture.
One thing Peoplesafe advise our own clients to help build their own safety
culture is to appoint a personal safety champion at each location. This person is
responsible for understanding what it will take to build a safety culture at their
location, including hazards, areas for improvement, and the necessary training
that is needed.
Training and learning is another important area in which both management and
staff should participate. Educating managers or allowing them time for learning
benefits the whole team. Staff look to their managers for guidance, best practice
and support, so giving them the tools to lead by example from the start is crucial.
Employees may at first resist the idea of training but if you ensure the training is
relevant and interactive they will soon come round to the idea.
Changes to a culture are usually slow and often imperceptible. Nonetheless,

history demonstrates that over finite periods of time cultures can change - the
same should be true of safety culture.

16
HOW LEADERS CAN CREATE

A RESPECTFUL CULTURE AND
BOOST WORKPLACE SAFETY
An employer's duty of care to provide a safe workplace free from bullying and
harassment is increasingly fraught with challenges. One key challenge has been
the massive and on-going work and social changes wrought by mobile hand held
technologies. These technologies have changed how humans communicate,
interact, and has blurred the lines between people’s workplaces and private lives.
This issue is one element explaining why cyber-stalking, cyber-bullying and cyber-
harassment are escalating problems that can undercut workers’ productivity,
safety at work, corporate values and culture.
Dr Felicity Workplace bullying and cyber-bullying can hugely impact corporate values and
Lawrence culture. Research has found cyberbullying behaviours can remain unnoticed
and affect workers’ face-to-face and online conduct, decrease productivity,
Organisational Social
Psychology Expert, job satisfaction and wellbeing. Yet ask any employer the key to attracting and
Stop Workplace retaining high-performing people you are likely to hear the words “values”,
Cyberbullying
“culture” or “brand”. To counteract the impact of negative online and offline

conduct, leaders must consistently talk up and model respectful company values.
So, what is workplace culture, why is it so important, how do employers go about
creating respectful cultures, and how do you keep it healthy and “alive”? It is
important to ask these questions now, given how workplace innovation and
productivity can mean the difference between triumphant success, tenacious
survival, and abject failure.
We all know examples of bad culture impacting workplace safety. An NHS study
indicates a health service potentially riddled with professionals who report being
“switched-off” and “disillusioned” arising from the bullying environment. In this
context it was particularly encouraging to note Australia’s recent million dollar
workplace bullying payout. Reports of this case indicate the ex-government
employee received compensation for total and permanent disablement, paid out
by a private insurer, and a worker's compensation payment for past and future
earning capacity.

17

18
What is workplace culture?

According to researchers, workplace culture is a reflection of the rules and
policies governing contemporary society. It represents “a construct denoting
the extent to which members share core organizational values” (Vardi & Wiener,
1996, p. 160).
Why is workplace culture important?

Literature consistently depicts culture as an enabler of either beneficial or
damaging values, behaviours, attitudes. Depending on how culture is created by
workplace leaders, it has the capacity to either increase or decrease corporate
productivity and competitive edge (Lieter & Patterson, 2014).
Recognising the difference between good and bad work cultures

Most people withdraw and protect themselves in stressful situations, thereby
decreasing their problem solving abilities (Edmonson, 1999). Some indicators of
a toxic culture include: a reluctance take responsibility; entrenched factions; low/
intermittent productivity; unexplained tension and conflict; rapid staff turnover,
escalating recruitment and unexplained absenteeism; presenteeism; rocketing
psychological injury claims and insurance premiums. Alternatively, supportive
and empowering environments built on mutual trust tend to enhance people’s
psychological safety, thereby enabling them to open-up, communicate, share,
take risks, and make mistakes that sometimes result in innovative breakthroughs.
Simon Sinek is an notable teacher on this topic.
Is it possible to “consciously create” a respectful culture, and to keep

it healthy and “alive”?
Unsurprisingly, researchers found the answer to this question is both surprisingly
simple, and complex. Simply, workplace leaders and employees co-develop - and
own – the principles, values, mission, vision, attitudes, behaviours, policies,
frameworks and practices guiding their shared view of a respectful workplace
culture. However, as expressed in my Respectful Workplace Cultures Blueprint
(www.drflis.com/blueprint), these simple steps require thought, hard work, and
consistent effort to embed and animate across the organisation. And, similar
to any good relationship, if you take workplace culture for granted it can quickly
wither and spoil.
Dr Flis has a BA SSc and a PhD in organisational social psychology and is

passionate about helping people who lead and work in organisations create
better workplace experiences and improving work cultures. Get free resources
and tactics on appropriately dealing with negative online and offline workplace
behaviours at www.drflis.com or contact Dr Flis at team@DrFlis.com or
LinkedIn. You can also follow Dr Flis on her blog Twitter or Facebook.

19
PROMOTING A POSITIVE
SAFETY CULTURE
Although 9 in 10 employers state that they involve their employees in the

management of their company’s health and safety, only 4 in 10 businesses
actually achieve what the HSE deems to be good safety practice. Here, John
Southall, co-founder at Southalls, explores the simple steps employers can take to
engage employees into adopting a positive safety culture.
Trust, respect and cooperation. These are the three factors that the HSE’s
Director for Scotland emphasises as the key pre-requisites for the prevention of ill
health and injury at work. Employee engagement has been a main point of focus
John for the HSE, with this year’s #HelpGreatBritainWorkWell campaign encouraging
Southall business owners to build and maintain engaging relationships between
themselves and their employees.
Co-founder,
Southalls
The campaign builds on a year’s worth of research into how duty holders can
achieve and sustain a positive safety culture, which evidenced that employee
engagement across all levels, from owner to contractor, is vital. As the HSE
statistics above show, even if a company has the most thorough safety systems
and procedures in place, their business’ safety aims can quickly fail if their own
employees do not actively support them.
So, in an environment where health and safety may often still be met with
disinterest, annoyance and a lack of cooperation by some employees, how can

20
employers achieve this all important engagement? The first step employers
should take when promoting a positive safety culture is to focus on themselves
and their senior management.
Starting from the top

As with all areas of a business, senior members of the team should lead by
example. Founders, owners, managers and supervisors are all responsible for
ensuring that a positive safety culture is consistently promoted throughout all
areas of the business.
Before beginning to promote this culture, employers must make sure that their
own health and safety practices are in keeping with relevant health and safety
legislations. As well as being responsible for ensuring all of their own health and
safety training is up to date, they should also make sure each member of their
senior management teams have received the most recent and relevant training.
As an employer, conducting regular visits around all areas of the business is

key to understanding how well employees are engaging with health and safety
practices, especially during busy periods. By taking time to regularly visit the
shop floor and view how well certain areas are performing, will not only provide
an insight into what health and safety procedures require improvement, but also
strengthen relationships between management and employees.

21
Two way communications

While an employer’s visibility and leadership is essential in ensuring
a positive culture change is promoted, it can only be successfully
implemented through continuous two-way communication between
employer and employees. Business owners should regularly update
employees on the business’ safety goals, the reasons behind them, and
how they can be achieved both individually and as a team.
A common pitfall that workplaces may face when trying to achieve this is
the absence of effective and consistent reporting of accidents and near
misses due to employees fearing they will be reprimanded or dismissed for
their mistakes. However, comprehensive reporting of all incidents, no matter how
minor, is key to ensuring that lessons are learnt and relevant prevention is put in
place.
For many businesses, adopting private and easy to use reporting systems, such
as Safety Cloud’s Staff Safety Observations module, is an effective method that
allows employees to privately report any concerns or safety issues they have.
Once discreet feedback from team members has been received, employers
should hold regular meetings to identify and understand why a certain problem
may be occurring, and how it can be solved.
To help support this, employers should make sure that health and safety is
adopted into each employee’s everyday job role to ensure they proactively engage
with and complete necessary health and safety processes. Employers should also
make sure that all contractors and part-time members of staff receive the same
level of communication and support as permanent, full-time employees.
All too frequently business owners are criticised for not being actively involved
within their workplace, creating a concerning distance between themselves and
their employees. By encouraging continuous two-way conversations between
themselves and their employees, business owners can create a positive safety
culture change that each employee is part of.

22
SAFETEY DIFFERENTLY SPONSORED BY
IS SAFETY DIFFERENTLY REALLY

ALL THAT DIFFERENT?
Last year, when John Green came out and said “Safety is broken”, I was hooked.
I started to spread the word, getting him involved in webinars, writing for SHP, and
speaking on panels at Safety and Health Expo.
It appealed to me, because having worked among the health and safety profession
for 25 years, I can see that we need to build on the excellent work which has been
done since the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act, and there is a real
case for change emerging.
Heather
Beach This is notwithstanding the fact that there are some brilliant health and safety
leaders in this country. I have had the pleasure of working with many of them and
Director ,
The Healthy Work they are characterised by their ability not to think they have all the answers, but to
Company be collaborative, self-critical, and to be striving to be the best version of themselves.
There is no doubt that John Green is a great orator. That he has huge credibility. And
that he has got the safety profession talking.
However, a lot of what I've heard from others has been that Safety Differently,
isn't all that different. That, really, a lot of what is being talked about as radically
different, is already being done.
Having attended a couple of short introductions on Safety Differently – led by John

Green and Daniel Hummerdal – I didn't feel I was in a position to argue one way
or another. However, last week I was lucky enough to be invited to ITV's Safety
Differently masterclass, and I think that John is certainly posing some interesting
questions.
I did ask him if he deliberately wrapped Safety Differently inside an enigma in order
to make people come to the masterclass? But no, he thinks that in one or two hours
you just can’t get across what you need to – or perhaps, the message just needs
some repetition.
Now that I have attended a session, I want to see if I can get across in a really
succinct way, what I see the differences suggested by safety differently to be. I
would love to hear from people who are already using some of these distinctions,
for instance, examples of where collective insights have worked well. In my view,

23
SAFETY DIFFERENTLY SPONSORED BY
examples of experiments performed in practise are needed at the moment as it

is seeing how these ideas can really work in practise, in a world of regulation and
insurance, which will impact whether “Safety Differently” really does start to thrive,
or is just an interesting idea.
The masterclass starts with a suggestion that if we ripped up the rule book for
traffic management, then people would be safer. A Dutch engineer called Hans
Monderman actually did this – and his system is alive and well in 600 locations –
including on Exhibition Road in London.
When Monderman took all the traffic lights and rules out of an intersection, there
was risk involved in this innovation – but it actually turned out to reduce accidents
and improve traffic flow significantly.
The dual implication of course is that when you allow people to take complete
responsibility, they generally act safely and that we should rip up the rule book for
health and safety…
A caveat here: we don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water – but
perhaps we could do it with a series of micro-experiments.
Disproving Heinrich's triangle

One of the key elements to John’s assertions which very much goes against
conventional health and safety thinking, is that Heinrich’s triangle – which states
that likelihood of a fatality rises in line with the number of incidents – has no basis
in fact or research.
That, in fact, ALL the major disasters bar one (the only major incident preceded
by warning signs was the second Texas City Refinery fire which was preceded by
the warning signs of the first Texas City Refinery fire!) have been preceded by long
periods of excellent accident performance. That there are over 50 research reports
from around the word which say that fatalities are not preceded by incidents and
accidents.
So, does it not make sense that, by far the greatest degree of focus should be on
where your business has the greatest risk of fatalities? John asserts that you shift
your focus away from the slips and trip and cut fingers; focus on where it really
matters.
“There is no such thing as an accident-free organisation. Just don’t kill or seriously

injure anyone.” he often says. At this point I have to say that, if we are interested in
what really kills people, then where does health fit into all this?

24
With 13,000 people dying of long latency diseases and 6,000 suicides a year then
where is health in the “Safety Differently” agenda? John asserts that the same
principles apply, it fits perfectly with the safety differently principles as they see the
worker as being the centre of the management of risk and that would include health
risks. In addition giving employees mastery and autonomy over the tasks that they
perform as been shown to improve mental well-being and reduce stress.
What does Safety Differently look like in practice?

The first Holy Grail to address is the risk assessment process. Would there be much
disagreement that there are generally too many procedures in safety?
John asserts that we have turned safety into something which is no longer about
keeping people safe, but is about keeping regulators and boards happy. We talk
about the cost of non-compliance, but what is the cost of over compliance?
Similarly with audits. By the time we do an audit, we are finding things which are
already broken. Does the relationship between the auditor and the person being
audited allow the latter to point out areas which they know will break soon if not
addressed? How do you focus on building relationships so that there really is no
blame attached to finding an issue?
Safety Differently advocates that rather than looking at where things go wrong, the
focus should be on 'normal work'. Where can we find examples of work being done
well and emulate those?
John is critical of behavioural-based safety (BBS) as he says it provides incentives

for people to do things the way the organisation says, and punishes them for doing
the opposite. I have to say I think this is unfair. In fact, anyone who has heard Tim
Marsh’s 'curious why' question sets might think so as well.
Tim would say his whole approach is about empowerment, and the reputation
of BBS has latterly been somewhat tarnished because of badly executed
programmes. The distinction between the two programmes could, I believe, be that:
– behavioural based safety tries to alter behaviour to fit the system, whereas Safety
Differently creates the system around the behaviour.
It has to be said that the team at ITV is an amazing group of health and safety
professionals; they are open to learning and are already a fair way along the journey
of innovating inside the profession. They began talking about how they could take
some of these new approaches back to the business and start experimenting
straight away. By the end of the session they had agreed to drop routine
inspections. Ruth Denyer, group head of health and safety at ITV, talked about
having mature conversations with insurance about areas where some of these
experiments could be undertaken.

25
Daniel Hummerdal closed the masterclass by asking what the role of the safety
professional was? To me this was the most powerful question asked. He said that
they had started with three definitions and latterly discovered a further two (4 and 5
on this list).
1. To detect and correct

2. To inform and advise
3. To listen and learn
4. To be an administrator
5. To be a servant of the business
This really struck a chord with me. When I was working 25 years ago I believe the
profession was mostly about 1, 4 and 5. In latter years, it has been moving to 2
and sometimes to 3 T here are a growing number of voices, like Rob Cooling, who
recently wrote an excellent article on Linked In on the subject,
[www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-safe-health-safety-profession-rob-cooling] that
unless the health and safety profession shifts completely away from that early way
of doing things, that it will become completely irrelevant.
Having just started my business in training health and safety professionals in new
skillsets outside the technical, including influencing and leadership, as well as
providing them tools to move into the mental health space, I cannot but agree with
him.
However, having conversations with safety leaders who are on that journey, one of
the biggest issues they have is that the business expects them to be a certain way:
the way the profession has trained them to expect them to be!
Moving out of the box of being an authoritarian checker who is responsible for
ensuring everything is done safely (even if they never have been responsible in
reality!) as well as being the fount of all KNOWLEDGE when it comes to safety, is a
huge challenge not only for the profession, but for educating the business.
So yes, there are some radical ideas in there. Some professionals will embrace
these as revolutionary and there is no doubt that John is a disruptor.
What is certain is that the profession needs to continue to look critically at itself and
look at where it can be responsible for moving the conversation forward and away
from the media depiction of 'elf and safety' and into a more interesting place.
Because only by taking responsibility, can it have any power in the matter. By
blaming the media and regulators it becomes powerless.
And there is huge power in learning and experimentation.

26
HOW SAFETY BECAME ALL

ABOUT NEGATIVES - AND HOW
TO DO IT DIFFERENTLY
I don’t know when it happened but it did.
Sometime, somewhere safety became all about negatives, all about bad stuff and
stopping bad stuff happening and about nothing else.
I say this for a number of reasons. Firstly safety is linked to unwanted outcomes,
when we ask our people to discuss safety they think about accidents, incidents and
breakdowns or malfunctions. We frame safety not in terms of what we want but in
terms of what we don’t want. Safety then is the absence of something – normally
John accidents.
Green We then go on to describe and examine the precursors to these events – errors,
HSEQ director for
Laing O'Rourke mistakes, shortcuts, deviations, breaking the rules or non-compliance.
Then we select from the vast array of tools at our disposal the means with which
we will prevent these bad things happening – more rules, procedural compliance,
barriers, limitations on behaviour, etc, and then we ask people to engage with this
programme….. Really?
What this means for organisations

This view of safety as a means of managing deficits becomes increasingly
problematic for successful organisations as over time they will have increasingly
less and less to remove. Fewer accidents means fewer learning opportunities and
organisations get locked into managing past deviations as a means of ensuring
future success. This further deepens the negative view of safety.
I have absolutely no doubt that every safety professional approaches his or her task
with the best intentions, that each one of us has the good of the organisation and
everyone that works for it at heart. But surely our role has to be about much more
than simply controlling and constraining work activity against some predetermined
notion of what is right or normal?
We need to manage safety differently and this means a fundamental shift in our
definition of safety, our view on the role of people in creating safety and how safety
responsibility is organised and discharged within an organisation.

27
We need to see the purpose of safety as being to enable things to go right as

often as possible. This is how excellence is built, on understanding and recreating
the conditions for success under a variety of conditions. Some people call this
resilience but I believe it is much more than that.
Our people complete difficult tasks every day. They have to navigate the competing
and often contradictory values of the organisations on a daily basis and somehow
in spite of the difficulties that are placed in front of them they create success at an
exceptional rate.
Yet the only time we display any interest in the way that they work is when
something unexpected happens. How fair is that? Should we constrain and control
this innovative and adaptive capacity in our workforce or should we try and figure
out a way of supporting and investing in the ability of people to achieve desired
outcomes?
None of this requires that we abandon our traditional safety efforts but it does
require that we look at what and how we create safety through a different lens.
It requires us to suspend the notion that our role is to have all of the answers
but that the skill is in the ability to ask better questions. Questions like “ tell us
when work is difficult around here”? or “what changes in the last year have you
found helpful?” or “if there was one thing you would like the person who wrote the
method statement for this job what would it be?”. These questions and the resulting
dialogue open up a world of possibilities.
Safety differently represents the opportunity to develop alternatives to the

traditional paradigm of control and constraint and to see safety, once again, as a
positive force in organisations. As an aspect of success.
This year many more organisations will be shifting their safety paradigms
from seeing people as a problem to acknowledging that people are a source
of innovation and insight into how safety is created and will be examining the
performance drag created by an over burgeoning bureaucracy in favour of an
approach that appreciates and harnesses the possibilities and contributions that
happen every day.

28
BEHAVIOURAL SAFETY SPONSORED BY
DISPELLING THE MYTH -

POSITIVE PEOPLE ARE NOT
SAFER PEOPLE
Professor Tim Marsh explores the reasons why posi-
tive people are actually not safer. Why? Quite simply
because "positive people get stuck in". See Tim's video
and article below.
The elastic band model

Reason’s overstretched elastic band model suggests that maintaining a genuine
balance between safety and the productive dynamism required to compete and
evolve requires effort. Extrinsic factors make this difficult – like competition local
and/or foreign, raw material price changes, legislation changes, inclement weather
and contractors who talk a great fight at bid but then prove problematic. Then
there are intrinsic factors like competence, systems weaknesses or omissions,
job design, resources, culture and interface issues like the selection of those
problematic contractors!
Tim
Marsh The model suggests that in a complex world it is likely that even the best
organisations will be liable to drift away from balance and into a ‘vulnerable’
Hon Prof Plymouth
University and place where risk is too high and the likelihood of someone getting hurt too great.
founder of Everything we do in the name of safety feeds into one simple metric therefore.
RyderMarsh Safety
How quickly do we spot that we have drifted and how quickly and efficiently can
we snap back into balance. Walk and talks, accident investigations, pre-accident
investigations, behavioural safety, safety culture enhancement work, safety
leadership training, even basic soft skills training all feed into this simple KPI.
Using a large rope to illustrate this principle can add energy to a training session
but volunteers nearly always start to compete, usually around the first time I say
‘thank you for letting them drift, you can snap them back now’! Even if an unofficial
tug of war doesn’t break out whilst I’m explaining the model it’s really not at all
difficult to persuade them to go for one – especially if the ‘winning team’ are
promised free books or if different nationalities, regions, trades etc are involved.
This allows the presenter to jump in quickly, grab the rope and ask ‘What are you
all doing? This is a bloody safety conference…!’ then point out that to get people
to take risks that they shouldn’t, you simply have to ask them. In short: ‘It’s not the
people in the rope exercise it’s the person in charge of the rope exercise’ - with
reference of course to the Just Culture model and the many organisational cause
of violations. I’ve always also liked to point out that ‘these lovely volunteers that
jumped up to help me out are hardly the worst of us are they?

29
PRESS PLAY
Positivity and safety

Recently, however, some fascinating data from a major ‘positivity’ study in the
United States throws this last observation in a new light. It seems that people
with good attitudes – i.e. positive, optimistic, and with a strong locus of control,
do not have fewer accidents than their more negative and fatalistic counterparts.
My initial thought was that surely that can’t be right? That’s just taken as read
isn’t it? Certainly there are lots of positive behaviours that do flow from a positive
mind-set: they recover more quickly from injury, take less time off sick, come
to work with a bad back and do stretching exercises in the corridor, contribute
better to accident investigations and problem solving, show more ‘above the
line’ or citizenship behaviour and prove excellent trainees – but they don’t have
fewer accidents. Yes, if shown why they should or shouldn’t do something with
data and illustration they’ll learn from that. (So are first into hurricane shelters for
example.) But something counterbalances this on a day to day basis.

30
Two factors seem to be key:

One factor is that it’s long been known that optimists have a more accurate world
view than pessimists. A touch of overconfidence is the default setting of our species
generally and overall that’s stood us in very good stead. At this point we could of
course consider risk assessments formal and dynamic and how it’s long been
known that a dedicated ‘nay sayer’ can help prevent group think but this short
article is about point 2. The second, and rather startling point, has always been
staring us in the face but I’ve never heard it mentioned before. With obvious links
to risk homeostasis theory and risk tolerance / appetite literature, the bottom line
is that positive people tend to get stuck in. Of course they do – we see examples all
the time. We’ve even filmed one for you!
As well as the need for very specific and illustrated safety training as above this
is more support for the Just Culture approach and the union argument that safety
approaches shouldn’t even be primarily person focused. For example: Formula
One showed a massive step change in accident rate following the weekend
Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger died because, traumatised by events,
the industry ensured that their world class engineers worked on safety as well as
speed and made many design changes that made it much harder for people to
hurt themselves even if the new safety features made them push even harder than
before! What they certainly didn’t do was persuade a single driver to slow down.

31
HOW EMPLOYERS CAN

IMPROVE BEHAVIOURAL
SAFETY IN CONSTRUCTION
Mark
Paterson
senior risk manager
The construction industry employs 5 per cent of workers in the UK yet accounts
QBE
for 31 per cent of all workplace fatalities, the highest of all industry sectors. With
“Target Zero” being the industry’s ultimate goal and employees and managers
required to be familiar with the law and their own organisation’s policies, why is
there still a problem?
Part of the issue is an over-reliance on individuals’ behaviour on site and if workers

are flouting safety procedures themselves or failing to report the failings of others,
the problem continues to grow. There are three main behaviours that can have a
serious effect on site safety and turning them from a negative to a positive is not
complex but does require commitment from senior management.
1. Complacency
One of the key contributors to accidents at work is complacency. Low risk, repetitive
tasks contribute to a large percentage of work-based incidents. For familiar and/
or simple tasks workers’ risk perception is reduced and as a result an “it will never
happen to me” attitude can prevail. This can lead to the most severe injuries.
What employers can do:
• Remind employees that low-risk activities can cause severe injuries and provide
examples
• Emphasise the risk of injury through complacency
• Explain the difficulty of maintaining focus on repetitive and simple activities
• Emphasise the importance of following procedures and wearing Personal
Protective Equipment (PPE)

32
2. Ownership
Construction sites often have many workers, trades and companies working
alongside one another. This poses a significant challenge with regard to worker
safety. Silo mentality, rivalry and mistrust can all present themselves through
negative worker behaviours, with people focusing only on their designated tasks and
refusing to take a holistic view of the overall work environment.

• Encourage a consultative approach to working methods on site
• Recognise positive ownership and those that take responsibility for colleagues’
safety
• Ensure the leadership team encourage honesty
3. Culture
The critical success factors in creating a safety culture are the confidence and
capability for individuals not only to look after themselves but also their workmates.
Individuals who are willing to challenge unsafe acts are the drivers of a robust and
enduring safety culture.

• Develop and promote a whistle blowing policy to enable and encourage
employees to raise concerns freely and without fear of recrimination
• Involve employees in the development of this policy as it will greatly influence the
success of its implementation
• Ensure that the policy is understood and enforced by management
• Promote the positive outcomes of whistle blowing to reinforce the message to
workers that this is something the company encourages
For more information on behavioural safety and other health and safety challenges
for the construction sector, download QBE’s Protecting Employees on site guide.

33
HOW DO WE MEASURE
BEHAVIOURAL SAFETY?
As one of the original UMIST Behavioural Safety researchers, I am delighted
to see so many companies adopting Behavioural Safety as part of their safety
improvement effort. I am sure many injuries have been avoided and many lives
saved. Looking back over the past 25 years, however, it becomes apparent that
not all are sure about measuring safety behaviour or are unaware of the types of
metrics they should be adopting. As such I thought it timely to provide a reminder
for some and a primer for others. These metrics are listed in what I think are in
descending order of importance.
Dr Dominic 1. The ‘Percent Safe’ score is the foremost measure used to track the rate of
Cooper
behaviour change. Behavioural Observation checklists are constructed, and
trained observers score their colleagues behaviour against these. Calculated
CEO at B-Safe Management
as the number of safe behaviours observed, divided by the total with the
Solutions
product multiplied by 100, this measure lets you know if safe behaviour is
improving, unchanging or declining (assuming the observations are
honest efforts). It is used at the beginning of a process to provide a baseline
or comparative purposes, to set improvement goals, track behavioural
safety performance over an extended time period, and it forms the basis for
feedback[i].
2. ‘Percent Visible Safety Leadership’ score is used as a measure of managerial
involvement in the process. Groups of managers (senior, middle, and front
line) agree on sets of 10 behaviours or so that they can perform regularly to
support the process and safety in general. Once a week, each manager
records which of these behaviours they performed. The number of ‘Yes’
scores is divided by the total number recorded and multiplied by 100 to
calculate the Visible Safety Leadership score. This metric has been shown to
help improve people’s safety behaviour by as much as 86 percent[ii].
3. The Corrective Action Rate refers to the number of corrective actions
completed, divided by the total reported in a given time period (usually within
30 days), and the product divided by 100. On its own, this measure has been
shown to improve people’s safety behaviour by around 21 percent.
4. The percentage of behaviours observed that are potential Serious Injuries &
Fatalities (SIFs). This metric tracks those unsafe behaviours that could lead
to a life-altering (e.g. amputation) or life-threatening event (e.g. death). The
lower the number in relation to the total number of behaviours observed the
better[iii].
5. The Praise Ratio measures the extent to which people are being positively
acknowledge for their safe behaviour, compared to being coached, supported
or the job being stopped because it is too dangerous to continue. In other
words it provides a measure of the consequences applied by the observer for
working safely or unsafely. The ideal Ratio to strive for is 4 positives (e.g.
praise), for every negative (i.e. coach, support or stop-the-job).

34
6. The Quality of Observations is assessed by comparing ‘Percent Safe’ scores

for particular checklist behaviours against those identified on near-miss and
incident reports. As the ‘Percent Safe’ scores recorded increase (e.g. PPE) the
associated injuries and near-misses involving those behaviours should
decrease (e.g. Head and Hand Injuries).
7. ‘Participation rates' are used by many as their primary Behavioural-Safety
measure. This is calculated on the basis of the number of active observers,
divided by the total number of available trained observers, multiplied by 100.
In my view, although a useful metric to gauge the extent of uptake among the
workforce, this is often over-emphasised as all efforts to make the process
work become a huge exercise in simply ensuring people are doing their
“quota” of observations, rather than focusing on how safe people are actually
working, what the issues might be that lead to unsafe behaviour and fixing
them.
Collectively, these metrics provide a comprehensive overview of the effectiveness of

a Behavioural Safety process. When all trends are in the right direction there should
also be proportional reductions in incident frequency and severity rates. If there is
not, something is not right and a comprehensive process review should immediately
be undertaken.
Although the Visible Safety Leadership, Corrective Action Rate, and monitoring the
percentage of SIFs are the most difficult metrics to achieve they each exert the
most fundamental influence on safety performance. The Safety Leadership scores
demonstrate that managers are safety leaders, while the Corrective Action rate is
feedback to the workforce that the company is taking the process very seriously,
and is concerned to reduce risk. Monitoring potential SIFs helps stop people being
serious injured or killed and shows the work force the company really does care
about them.
In combination with the other Behavioural Safety metrics (e.g. Percent Safe) these
provide 'proof positive' the company is travelling on the road to safety excellence[iv]
References:
[i] Cooper, M.D., Phillips, R.A., Sutherland, V.J & Makin, P.J. (1994) 'Reducing
Accidents with Goal-setting & Feedback: A field study'. Journal of Occupational and
Organizational Psychology, 67, 219-240.
[ii] Cooper, M.D. (2010). Safety Leadership in Construction: A Case Study. Italian
Journal of Occupational Medicine and
Ergonomics: Suppl. A Psychology, 32(1), pp A18 A23 Retrieved
[iii] Cooper, M.D. (2015) Behavioural Safety: Reducing workplace accidents.
[iv] Cooper, M.D. (2009) Behavioral Safety: A Framework for Success'. BSMS,
Franklin, IN, USA ISBN 978-0-9842039-0-1.
Dr Dominic Cooper is CEO at B-Safe Management Solutions[/vc_column_text][vc_
separator][vc_column_text]

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BEHAVIOURAL SAFETY
HAS LOST ITS WAY
Martin Cook, director, Turner & Townsend, explains how
the concept of behavioural safety used to be hailed as a
utopia, but suggests that now it might have lost its way.
Martin
Cook
Director,
Turner & Townsend
In the last five to ten years behavioural safety has been the conversation of
many health and safety consultants across industry. The concept of influencing
and changing an individual’s behaviour to improve risk management and reduce
accidents/incidents was hailed as the utopia across the profession. However
in more recent times conversations have been taking a different route with an
increasing number of organisations becoming frustrated in the lack of progress, and
in behavioural safety generally as a concept.
Has behavioural safety lost its way, or is it that it has just not achieved the
effectiveness and utopia that was originally sought. There is no disputing that many
of the concepts that sit behind a positive influence on behaviour have achieved a
significant improvement in performance, but widening opinion suggests that the
benefits of many developed initiatives have a short life span or impact and fail to
interest those they are aimed at influencing in the longer term.
The commonly held view is that words such as ‘behaviour modification’ or ‘culture
change’ are greeted with open arms in the board room and yet fail to grab interest
at a grass roots level, where they are primarily focused, and is now starting to
divide opinion on the subject. It has long been recognised that it is important that

36
language around behavioural safety is used correctly at all levels of hierarchy,

and recent initiatives developed have recognised this as a ‘blocker’ to having
the message received and understood, since the language of the boardroom is
definitely different to that on the shop floor.
When developing initiatives formed under the ‘behavioural safety’ remit it is vital
that its longevity is considered alongside the communication methods and media,
and that it is not seen as a quick fix. At Turner & Townsend we have been focusing
on this very issue and have concluded that effective assurance and monitoring of
performance, including initiative and communication success, will drive the correct
behavioural response.
An assurance process that measures and provides predictive data on actions that
can be taken to prevent a failure occurring can be more effective at influencing
behaviour than an initiative itself. A colleague recently used the analogy of modern
cars measuring the driver’s actions, the environment and the status of the car,
and making recommendation on when they should rest – effectively guiding the
driver towards the right decision. The measuring of the driver’s responses and
quality of their driving brings about risk mitigating advice to prevent a failure – or
as we incorrectly call it, an accident. The same concept can be used in an effective
assurance process where we measure human factors and the effectiveness of
surrounding processes to provide predictive data that can be used more effectively
in our quest to have a positive influence on behaviour.
At Turner & Townsend we have developed such an assurance process that uses
such leading indicators in the manner discussed above, alongside innovative data
collection and reporting tools that will enable you to bring longevity to your initiatives
and avoid the whole behavioural safety agenda from losing its way.
If you would like to discuss this in more detail then please visit me, Martin Cook,
Director of Turner & Townsend on Stand S1800 in the Safety & Health Expo.

37
ZERO HARM SPONSORED BY
NOTHING SMART ABOUT ZERO

I moved to Australia from the UK just over a year ago to take up a new role with a
consultancy in Sydney. Prior to that I had been working in the rail industry in the
UK where I had numerous challenging discussions about the use of Zero in one of
its many guises as a corporate safety objective. When I refer to Zero in this article I
am referring to any safety campaign based with Zero in the title or as an objective
(e.g. Zero Harm, Target Zero, etc). I have in the past undertaken a fair amount of
research into Zero, or more correctly the arguments against it, and found that it
was widely used throughout Australia, with some jobs even titled as 'Zero Harm
Managers'.
Andrew
Petrie
I recently gave a presentation at the 4th Safety Psychology Conference in Sydney
and my talk covered the journey that the UK rail industry has made over the last
Expert in health
few years. I talked in detail about Network Rail’s recent ‘Safety 365’ initiative and
and safety in rail.
how this was effectively a version of a Target Zero campaign which rewarded staff
This article was originally and contractors for not having incidents for 365 days. I discussed how this had
published on SHP Online in
March 2015. led to gross under-reporting of incidents across the industry in order that projects
and organisations appeared to have no safety incidents, while in reality they were
often being covered up. The Rail Safety Standards Board (RSSB) covered this in an
independent report.
Given my preconceptions of the Australian safety profession I expected the

delegates at the conference to disagree with my views and challenge my opinions
on the Zero approach, however I found the vast majority were of a similar view. Over
the two-day conference, four other speakers also mentioned Zero, and all of them
from a similar position that it didn’t work and we needed to move away from it.
I was very pleased to see that these industry thought leaders shared my point of
view and we discussed the concept at some length. There was a general consensus
that safety professionals wanted to move away from the Zero approach but that
senior management were pushing it and couldn’t comprehend why it would be an
issue.
From my own experience I have seen leaders who have heavily promoted a Zero
approach. In some cases I think that as they have personally invested so much time
and energy into the approach they would consider themselves to be losing face if
they changed tack. One comment I like to use in this context is that it’s like trying
to convince a priest not to believe in God. Some priests do actually lose their faith
during their career, but because they’ve invested their life in the church, they feel
they have to publically maintain their front and nothing will convince them to leave.

38
At the conference in Sydney we discussed how to approach the problem of

convincing management not to use Zero, but at the time we were stuck for ideas.
There are people out there also working to this end, in particular Dr Robert Long
whose book ‘For the Love of Zero’ is a must read for all safety professionals. But
there is still a large proportion of the industry who, using the religious metaphor
once more, see Dr Long as a heretic and will not have anything to do with him or his
methods.
Since then, I have been thinking about an approach to help convince people that
Zero is not the way to go, but it has not been an easy thing to do. On the surface
Zero sounds like a great idea and that is the reason why it’s been so widely
adopted. It’s only when you take the time to look into the psychology of Zero and
the case studies of how it can actually make things worse that you begin to see the
problem. The vast majority of people don’t have the time or resources to do this and
so we need to find a way to make the message as simple as possible.
A SMART Objective
I have always been told that when setting an objective it has to be SMART; that is
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. Some people have
different interpretations of these terms, but this is the one I am used to working
with and what I am going to use for this discussion. For each of these measures I
am going to give my views on whether a Zero approach meets the relevant SMART
requirement to be considered a good objective.
Specific – Is Zero specific? Well, the number certainly is and the common
objectives of Zero Harm or Zero Accidents therefore seem pretty specific. At first
glance, it seems to pass this test but I will come back to this later.
Measurable – This is a tricky one, a lot of people would say of course it is

measurable, why would there be any doubt that it’s not? The problem is that it that
it relies on people to report incidents, and only if they are reported can they be
measured. People cannot be relied upon to report all accidents, even those with the
best intentions will under-report and there will always be more potential reasons for
this under-reporting than any organisation is able to manage. This is backed up by
evidence such as the RSSB report into Network Rail that I mentioned earlier.
Achievable – To me the word ‘achieve’ means working towards something, to put

in effort to reach a desired outcome. Training all of your life to run 100m in less
than ten seconds is an achievement. You can’t claim something is an achievement

39
because it just happens, I don’t get an Olympic gold for walking 100m. You need
to differentiate an achievement from an event. Can you get a ‘Zero’ accident? Yes,
of course you can, but this is more often down to luck (and under-reporting) than
anything else.
I have seen organisations with very poor safety management practices complete a
project with no reported accidents, while other organisations with extremely good
safety systems have accidents. Why is this the case? The answer is simple: people.
People make mistakes, they make them all the time, unless you can eliminate
people from your process you can never claim that Zero is something you can
actually achieve.
Realistic – Is it realistic for people not to have accidents? No, of course it’s not,
most people injure themselves on a regular basis, whether it’s a paper cut, a
scalded finger, a burn from the iron, or a twisted ankle. For most of us, not a week
goes by without us injuring ourselves in some way. Why do we accept this as part of
life for 138 hours of the week, but not the 40 that we’re at work? This is where Zero
really begins to be a problem as now we have to start changing the goalposts to suit
our needs. I have heard numerous people justifying Zero by stating things such as
measuring Zero actually only applies to major accidents or lost time accidents, not
all minor cuts and scratches.
I’m going to take us back to that first test: is Zero specific? It now turns out that it’s
not. It’s obvious to most people that you can never have a 100 per cent injury free
workplace, so people change the meaning of Zero to suit their needs by filtering out
minor incidents and increasing the bar of what is being measured.
Time-bound – Most Zero programmes are a bit schizophrenic when it comes to

measuring Zero. The objective will be set as Zero forever, but then they measure
success each year, although as often as not they fail to meet the target of Zero.
So how exactly do you set a timescale? On the one hand, the longer you make the
timescales, the harder it is to achieve and on the other, the longer you go without an
incident the more likely people won’t report it because they don’t want to mess up
their statistics.
If your objective is to go a full year with Zero incidents, then what do you think
happens on day 364 when somebody has an accident? The pressure on them
to leave it unreported is immense and it’s simply not fair to put the pressure of
an organisation’s objective on the shoulders of one person. If you have a positive

40
objective like achieving a financial target, if it fails to be met then the entire
company is responsible, if you fail to meet a Zero target then only the people who
have reported their accidents are responsible.
What’s not SMART?

For an objective to be SMART it has to meet all five of the tests described above.
In my view, Zero fails on all five counts. I have no doubt that many people would
fervently argue that I am wrong on all five points, but I do hope that rather than
going on the defensive immediately, people will take the time to review each of my
arguments and see that at least some of them make sense to them and as such,
Zero does not pass all five tests and therefore cannot be considered a SMART
objective.
If, as an organisation, you still wish to continue to use a Zero objective then why
don't you consider if it passes the DUMB objective test instead:
• Deluding ourselves that our programme must be working because we’ve invested
significant amounts of money in it.
• Unable to actually measure the output because it relies on people reporting
accidents, and people won’t do this 100 per cent of the time.
• Management focused objective, designed to make the board feel like they’re
doing something about safety with no real consideration for the views of the
workforce.
• Blindly following the crowd and not looking at the latest research and the use of
positive safety objectives.
So what are the alternatives to Zero? Well, there are plenty of different approaches
out there, and while I don’t have the space to cover them here, my recommendation
would be to make the safety message a positive one, something that people can
look to and understand, and if you do put in place any objectives make sure that
they pass the SMART test.

41
FIVE REASONS YOU’LL NEVER

ACHIEVE ZERO HARM
Mark Ormond, Managing Director, JOMC: zero harm
has become a corporate brand rather than a meaningful
vision delivered with the right programme
Mark
Ormond
Managing Director,
Tribe Culture Change
It is always energising to hear a company say they’re aiming for zero harm. In
15 years of improving cultures, few things say more to me about a company’s
commitment to wellbeing. It reassures me that there are people out there who get it:
that no one deserves to be hurt at work.
However, zero harm has become a more of a corporate brand than a meaningful
vision for a culture. Put simply, zero harm is the right thing to say and little more.
It has become a message conveniently plastered everywhere for short-term
commercial gain, either to win more work or to say: “look - we’re focused on the right
things” to shareholders.
Hopefully your organisation is focused on the correct intention behind zero, but
more often than not, when safety vision becomes zero, performance comes
nowhere near.

42
Here are five reasons why that might be the case:

1. Zero harm works for senior managers, but not the workforce:
Admittedly it’s a powerful statement of intent from the boardroom when a CEO
declares a zero Injury target. Yet how does that translate to the workforce?
What does that mean on the front-line and what changes? Meaning isn’t clearly
expressed, disengagement follows and later resentment.
2. Zero harm doesn’t take account of the tribes:
Whether you like it or not, your organisation is composed of different tribes of
people with conflicting interests. So safety performance is often seen
competitively between those tribes, meaning your zero target drives reporting
underground, rather than out into the open where people would learn from
valuable data like near-misses.
3. Zero harm is practically impossible:
When senior management declare zero, they often fail to emphasise that
it’s a long-term aspiration and that it won’t happen overnight. So unless people
understand the vision behind your journey to stronger safety culture, each time
an incident happens it’s just another nail in the zero coffin.
4. Zero harm is an outcome, not a vision:
Without good engagement and communication with your workforce, zero becomes
just another target like all the others. It’s mistaken for a number to write in a box,
and all the good intentions behind your vision are lost in cold, hard figures.
5. Zero harm is a cliché:
If you must use zero in your safety campaigns then bring it to life, that means
thinking creatively about how you sell your vision to your workforce and make
zero mean something relevant in their everyday lives. There are so many different
ways to engage your workforce, especially in the process of creating that vision
in the first place. Talk about what really matters to them - that way you’ll make it
resonate with them personally.

43
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44
Continue to improve your
health and safety practices.
Learn from the leaders in occupational health and
safety at Safety & Health Expo in London.
SHP has organised over 100 seminars across health & safety topics, from legislation through to
behavioural safety, taking place at Safety & Health Expo in London in June.
Safety and Health Expo will return to London ExCeL on the 20-22 June 2017, showcasing a collection
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ways to enhance lone worker safety culture.

0800 990 3563 sales@peoplesafe.co.uk www.peoplesafe.co.uk

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Lone Worker Training Directory

Behavioural safety and culture, an expert review

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BEHAVIOURAL SAFETY AND CULTURE,

Behavioural safety and culture, an expert review

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In my world Peoplesafe is absolutely involved in the physical as well as the

Behavioural safety and culture, an expert review

SAFETY CULTURE SPONSORED BY

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"The behaviourist, in his efforts to get a unitary

SAVING THE SOUL OF SAFETY

The early behaviourists applied scientific methods to the observation, prediction

Infamously, Watson (a founding father of behaviourism) trained Albert, an infant,

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For now we will have to watch and wait and see

From behaviourism to behavioural safety

Behavioural safety applies operant conditioning to safety and involves changing

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The HSE describe these as “behavioural modification” techniques [3,4] and

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My beliefs were shaped by humanistic psychologists, such as Carl Rogers, then

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Behavioural safety and culture, an expert review

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Behavioural safety and culture, an expert review

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STRENGTHENING YOUR SAFETY

As I wandered downtown, dodging Russian drivers, while simultaneously focusing

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Typically, process-oriented, transactional leaders are skilled in planning, direction

Whilst leadership style should certainly be relevant to context, great safety

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CROCODILE DUNDEE AND