Page 91 - OHS, June 2023

alike. One of the few universally defining traits is that all safety cultures are an emergent property. They are the result of established procedures and processes, the efficacy of training plans, the strengths and weaknesses of supervisors as well as the individual abilities and mental states of a whole bunch of workers, plus many other factors. It’s a classic example of the sum being equal to the parts, and then some. What Forms an Informed Safety Culture? In the case of safety culture, it’s a lot of ink all contributing to a very blotty safety-culture picture, which makes it a particularly tricky subject to talk about. James Reason identified four main subcomponents of an informed safety culture: a reporting culture, a just culture, a flflexible culture and a learning culture. But these qualities are so high-level that it can be hard to put into action. ThThere’s also a lot that those four aspects don’t capture, and you have to drill down many levels further to identify all the dimensions involved in cultural formation, whether it’s engagement, trust, buy-in, rapport with management, empowerment, positivity, common safety language, sense of personal responsibility, human factors awareness or any one of dozens more. Then there’s the matter of determining the practical impact that each of these elements has on safety outcomes. Take a moment to ask yourself whether each of the safety culture elements listed above was a factor in a workplace incident in the last year. To each one, you could reasonably answer: “Yeah, sorta...maybe.” If one worker had felt more engaged, maybe they would have paid attention during a toolbox talk and avoided making a costly mistake later in the day. If another worker had felt a greater sense of personal accountability, maybe they would have remembered to put their hard hat on after their lunch break. None of it is certain, and ambiguity abounds, but there’s definitely something there. Pinning It Down All of this is to say that the concept of safety culture may be nebulous and hard to pin down, but it nonetheless has a notable effect on workplace safety. Safety pundits spend so much time talking about culture for a reason—we know culture influences in safety outcomes, even if we often can’t point to exactly how. Much like how we know a Rorschach image resembles a bat or a butterfly, even if we can’t agree on the exact factors why. Most safety folks have a pretty good feel for their current safety culture. Some even try to assess where they’re at with a maturity model. But regardless of where they’re at today, they’re always striving to improve and struggling to maintain some desired level of cultural strength. But some days feel like one step forward and two steps back. Even safety folks who have fostered robust safety cultures still want to make theirs better; there’s no clear end-state or finish line for culture, and it’s an issue of continuous improvement rather than reaching a static destination. While the ten inkblots used in the Rorschach test have remained unchanged for over a hundred years, safety is always changing and evolving. Emergent systems like culture can feel akin to participating in a live-action Rorschach test where the inkblot keeps changing shape. With so many separate inputs—from organizational systems to individual behaviors—it’s nearly impossible to identify which input should be addressed first, and how the secondary or third-order variables will be affected by the first, since most cultural attributes are interdependent. These Essential Skills Might Surprise You In many ways, it doesn’t matter which cultural input you address first, because only changing one won’t make much of a difference anyway. Changing a safety culture requires a wide-sweeping approach that focuses on processes rather than outcomes. You need interventions that affect multiple systems components, you need methods of tweaking workers’ risk perceptions on a large scale, you need broad engagement tactics and universally applicable tools. In short, you need soft skills. Soft skills—also known as interpersonal skills or people skills, and which stand in contrast to hard, technical know-how—are probably not what you were expecting to encounter here, halfway through an article on how to wrestle the many tentacles of safety culture. Their value is severely underrated in most workplaces. But make no mistake, soft skills are one of the best ways to upgrade your cultural inputs. Consider the effect of communicating to workers that you believe in them, that you know they’re capable of doing their jobs well and that when they make a mistake, you expect they will learn from it and make better use of their attention in the future. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant suggests that framing criticism like that can make people 40 percent more receptive to what you’re saying, and more likely to adjust their actions accordingly. Expressing a degree of faith in workers’ abilities makes hard conversations easier. It also builds trust, which is a major component of culture. It makes workers more likely to participate in safety meetings, more willing to fill out near miss-reporting and less likely to talk negatively behind their supervisor’s back. In short, making a single adjustment to communication style can improve a host www.ohsonline.com JUNE 2023 | Occupational Health & Safety 89