Safety directors don’t have the power to impose their will—or their program—on the workplace. To improve safety performance, they must work within the context of the organization’s culture. However, the safety director can play a role in shaping and defining the culture of their organization.

Helping Shape the Safety Culture

Imposing a culture from above is, by definition, unsound. A real culture must be the product of the work environment and all the people in it. You need to go back to the basics. Get the input of your people. Determine what you want to do, who’s going to do it and how it’s going to get done. Then hold all levels of the organization accountable for their activities and safety and accident performance. Give people credit and let them help you develop a system which meets not only their needs, as part of their defined culture, but yours as well.

You also need to be sensitive to the current business climate. Nearly a decade of cost-cutting, “rightsizing” and rationalization is beginning to take its toll. The recent wave of layoffs has left behind workers suffering from “survivor syndrome.” They’re overburdened. Many are just going through the motions. Such an environment is not conducive to higher performance either in safety or other business operations. Some have used the phrase “corporate anorexia” to describe what’s going on—the workforce may be getting thinner, but it’s not getting healthier.

In this environment, what are we to do to improve safety performance and get people pointed in the right direction? The answer lies in mutual goals and the sharing of knowledge and skills at all levels of the organization. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: empowerment. In the context of safety, it’s about getting employees to take ownership of certain safety initiatives. Here’s how it can work.

Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?

Traditional safety systems are characterized by differences in perception of how safety works, and the roles that workers, management and safety professionals play in those traditional safety systems.

According to F. David Pierce, “paradigms work as information filters. Information that agrees with the paradigm is easily accepted, but information that does not is usually rejected and, in some cases, not seen at all.” Paradigms have three effects, Pierce explains. They mask recognition, limit learning and, as a consequence of the first two effects, bolster the status quo.

Consider the differences in safety perceptions between senior and middle management and the shop floor worker. Managers like to grumble about workers’ attitudes, behavior, carelessness and complacency and wonder aloud why it’s so hard for them to work safely. Workers, by contrast, are quick to perceive all the problems management is failing to address and identify what they should be doing. At the end of the day, each side’s perceptions have some merit. But because the perceptions aren’t shared, they don’t lead to improvements. It’s like Monty Python where contestants in the 500-meter dash all take off in different directions.

So, one of the first steps in safety empowerment is to change the traditional paradigms of health and safety roles.

Conclusion

How does empowerment happen? Who drives the process? More precisely, how do you ensure that all levels of the organization drive the process? Next week, I’ll consider these questions from two perspectives: the TQM perspective on the management side and the joint health and safety committee on the workers’ side.

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