6 minute read
Safety and Security
I’m ready to develop my culture. Now what?
Russell Keir, Vice Chair of the Railway Group at the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) and Paul Leach, Human Factors Specialist & Occupational Psychologist at the RSSB explain how to develop a safe culture and how to you know if you are going in the right direction
Whichever approach you take to develop culture, the fundamental principles for success are likely to remain the same and are often cited in literature and good practice guides e.g. • Leadership commitment. • Buy-in. • Communication. • Feedback. • Visibility. • Being prepared to change direction. • Learning as you make your way through the change.
There are also typical pitfalls. These are often the opposite of the principles describe above, such as poor communication, lack of buy-in, limited leadership support, sticking to the same plan regardless of what the feedback tells you. The mechanics of change management can also be overlooked. This covers area such as: • Resourcing the intervention. • Developing project plans. • Coordinating activity.
But should also include the people side of change e.g. understanding and utilising resistance to change, helping people manage and express the positive and negative feelings associated with any type of change and eventually (hopefully!) feel some commitment to the change.
Biting off more than you can chew can also be another less discussed pitfall. There can be a tendency to change everything right now – a big bang culture programme that will change everything for everyone. This type of approach can quickly become unmanageable due to size, complexity and the amount of effort and time required. A staggered and phased approach to culture development can be seen as a less attractive option, but it allows an organisation to develop, reflect, learn and apply the learning to another area of the organisation. An example could be implementing a culture development programme within one location or department. Attention is focused on this one area with lessons and successes recorded. This is then used to build a business case for expansion to another area. This cycle can then continue throughout the organisation, helping the culture development programme improve with each iteration.
What about competence? An area that sometimes gets less attention is competence. This may be the competence of those supporting the intervention (leaders), the competence of those implementing the intervention (managers) and the competence of those receiving the intervention (front line staff). Competence can sometimes be taken for granted, but how do you know your leaders have the knowledge and skills to support culture development? How do you know managers can implement the things you are asking them to implement? Are front line staff ready to change and do they have the skills and knowledge to make the desired change? And, how do you know that all these groups believe that the intervention is really the right thing to do and will benefit them and the organisation?
Developing culture should include identifying what competencies and level of competence is required to make it happen. Some of these can be done before you start, other aspects can be done during the journey.
I’m developing my culture – but how do I know I’m going in the right direction? It is often cited that developing culture is continuous and something that never ends. It instead continually evolves and should always be a focus of attention. It is not surprising that measuring success can be difficult.
The safety vision is a good place to start, as measurement is ultimately about determining the extent to which you have achieved the vision e.g. can I see people demonstrating the behaviours we desire? Are the systems in place and helping people demonstrate the desired behaviours? and, is all of this having a positive impact on the management of risk?
Measurement should not only be about understanding success but also maintaining momentum. A focus on the bottom line (e.g. safety performance) is understandable but is a long-term pursuit. It can take a while before changes in attitudes and behaviours
Russell Keir
Paul Leach
translate into improved safety performance. Moreover, the management of safety is multi-causal. This means that many different factors affect safety performance. Safety culture is likely to be one of many factors that affect safety.
Using activity-based measures (e.g. leading indicators) can help maintain momentum during a culture programme and allows you to see if you are heading in the right direction to eventually achieve your end goal. These measures can give a better indication of how the programme is progressing and allows reflection on progress and identification of changes needed to keep progressing in the right direction.
My culture development programme is a success! But how do I keep it that way? Another part of the jigsaw is embedding changes so that success continues and becomes business as usual. This can be difficult as once the business spotlight is shone elsewhere; people can start to think that as the development in culture has happened and was a success nothing else is needed. Over time though people can fall back into old habits. Identifying and developing competencies as part of culture development can help, as the behaviours and actions fostered become part of peoples on-going development and competence management activity. On-going measurement and the development of KPIs related to the development of culture can keep the change on the radar and allows on-going monitoring to take place. As part of this, new milestones and activities can be identified so that the development in culture never truly finishes but evolves into something that maintains a continued focus on people, systems and performance.
To have continued success, a culture development programme should utilise peer pressure and peer learning, tapping into and influencing the informal ways that people learn in an organisation. Although there are many ‘formal’ ways to learning e.g. training, briefings, rules and procedures etc, informal learning through peers can be as, if not more, powerful. Influencing this process, through empowerment, involvement, change champions etc, can mean that staff learn the desired behaviours and actions through their peers as well as through more formal means. Also, those who return to the ‘old ways’ of working become the minority. They will stand out and either may bow to peer pressure, or are likely to be challenged by their own peers.
Either way, the desired state of any culture development programme is where peers become the custodians of the safety culture and are invested in maintaining positive behaviours, actions, and attitudes because they believe it is the right thing to do. And finally, if you can get to this point, then you know you have been successful.
Russell Keir is Vice Chair of the Railway Group at the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) and Paul Leach is Human Factors Specialist & Occupational Psychologist at the RSSB
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