No one can question Robert Pater’s commitment to safety leadership and safety culture.
He goes from advocate to a champion when it comes to establishing not just a safety program in workplaces, but instilling a culture of safety that flows through the blood of everyone who works at a company. A culture goes beyond the personalities currently at the company – it is a way of life that transcends everyone who ever works there or will ever work there.
Pater, along with his colleague Ron Bowles at MoveSMART, collaborated on an article in the January 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine, that was another installment of Pater’s initiative to promote safety culture and safety leadership. In this most recent article, Pater and Bowles wrote about what they see as five “master keys” to unlocking real change in safety culture, or even to build a culture of safety in a workplace.
In my last post, I recalled the first part of Pater’s and Bowles’ article which discussed “five futile mistakes” that companies may often make that can sap the energy and motivation out of any real hope of safety culture change. To enact change doesn’t take just rote actions practiced over and over; it takes owning hearts and minds and creating an emotional passion for safety, and the five mistakes are those that work in the exact opposite way.
![[Image courtesy of Flickr user Vinoth Chandar via a Creative Commons license] Safety performance, like a musical performance, is nto about rote practice of various actions; it's about creativity and having a mental and emotional investment in doing right and well.](http://www.safetymatterstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/Performance-by-Vinoth-Chandar-e1455554729555.jpg)
[Image courtesy of Flickr user Vinoth Chandar via a Creative Commons license]Safety performance, like a musical performance, is nto about rote practice of various actions; it’s about creativity and having a mental and emotional investment in doing right and well.
Master Key #1: Drop Anchor
When you are looking to implement a change in safety culture and consciousness, you will often have a lot of information for workers and supervisors to process before they can implement it. And of course it would be unrealistic to expect your workers to retain all the information, so it would be wise to develop an anchor for your workers. This anchor goes beyond the emotional where everyone gets excited, and it goes to the logical, where workers understand the information and how to utilize it.
One of the best ways to anchor the information is by demonstration and hands-on examples. It is one thing to show a training video or give a presentation; the next step is to take the workers and supervisors onto the floor and actually demonstrate, and have them prove they understand what is being taught by having them do the work you are asking and you providing them feedback.
Master Key #2: Time the Market
This key is all about taking advantage of the emotion. To get passion and drive positive change, you need an emotional investment. And conducting training or having safety meetings only when you can schedule it most conveniently for everyone lends itself to seeing that passion and emotion ebb over time.
In other words, strike while the iron is hot.
You will make more of an impact when you are emotionally fired up and you have some workers fired up, than you will by waiting until everyone can hear what you have to say at the same time. In a worksie of 100 peoplee, if you call a quick safety meeting or training session where only 10 people show up, but you get them emotionally charged up to make positive changes, those 10 can go on and be ambassadors for the change and can help reach the 90 people who weren’t able to schedule the meeting into their calendars. Waiting until 100 people can all meet at the same time could take weeks, and whatever emotion or passion you mmay have had may certainly be gone, and you will find it more difficult to recruit ambassadors in that setting.
Master Key #3: Get in Motion
Inertia is always the enemy of progress. And if you want to make progress in changing your culture, you have to put your people in motion.
This key is about taking the words and picures and audio that you have in your training sessions or meetings and turn them into putting your workers to work during the training or meeting. If workers just sit there and get their ears and eys worked, they will eventually tune you out and no habits can actually change. Engage the workers during the meeting or training by coming up with activities that will reinforce for them what you are telling or teaching them. When they put their bodies to work during a physical task and it’s new, their minds will also be engaged. And when the physical and mental are engaged in an actvity, the retention of the information increases dramatically, and thus the resistance to change drops in proportion.
Master Key #4: Practice
Oh sure, it might be far more efficient for you to have one or two meetigs or training sessions and get out all the information you need to inform workers of these bold new changes to safety in your workplace. But as with professional athletes or professional musical artists, they can’t just absorb information by osmosis and expect to get better.
They have to practice, often several or many times, before information is fully understood and change takes root. So while it might be more efficient for you to “dump” a lot of information in a short amount of time, you will find that it is actually more effective (a different word, but important) to have several opportunities for workers to demonstrate their understanding of the new concepts. Giving them several opportunities to practice and engage in a particular new action or activity will improve retention and will be better long-term. To make them the best workers they can be, you have to think of them as Michael Jordan or Mozart – they all had to practice, over and over, before they not only understood the new skill, but werre able to use it effectively.
Master Key #5: Ownership
This can sometimes be one of the harder parts of culture change – making it internal and personal. It is possible to make something a corporate goal and get everyone to buy into being a part of it, but in order for a change to have some real staying power, that ownership doesn’t just rest with a single person’s contribution to the whole, but to find ways to make them individually whole owners.
What is meant by this is, it is important to get to a point where you or your ambassadors don’t have to be the ones to reinforce externally; the workers themselves should have it in themselves to reinforce their own skills and habits and claim their own ownership of their bodies and their work in order to do it safely all the time.