World Day for Safety and Health at Work

As we reflect its humbling to recognise what has transpired over the years. In April 2022, it has been 2 years since the first lockdown in the UK as a result of the COVID Pandemic forcing millions to stay at home and the working environment to change. This, 70 years on from WW2 which was seen as the last time to have implemented such dramatic effect across the UK and working environment. It has been nearly 50 years since the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, introduced at a time where mechanical machinery was large, heavy and dangerous. A lot of working practice was manual and there was no mobile technology or remote working.

The Cambridge dictionary defines culture as a set of customs, behaviours, attitudes and opinions of a particular group in society. The culture of organisations is often known to employees and each organisation has its own particular culture but culture doesn’t happen by accident. It is a combination of responses to events and actions that lead to a “way of doing things”, whilst this is no accident it is not necessarily developed with a purposeful intent and therefore can become a subconscious culture. Leaders and senior management within an organisation have a pivotal role in establishing the culture of an organisation, how they respond to situations and deal with change sets the tone of the organisations culture.

It is because of this that culture plays an important role in the management of H&S to the extent that the HSE take time to describe this and how a positive H&S culture leads to improved safety standards as a whole. If the behaviours and attitudes of the workforce are to place safety at the forefront of decisions clearly this is a huge benefit to any organisation. However, if this was so simple we would not need to take time to think about it!

The HSE provide a number of resources to help you in assessing the H&S culture within your organisation this includes their Safety Climate Tool available on license to help you assess the culture of your organisation. This along with other tools provided by the HSE will assist you in assessing where your culture lies in respect of H&S and to support this the HSE developed the Safety Culture Maturity Model. This model below is available within OTO 049/2000 and describes the 5 levels of safety culture maturity in an organisation.

Investing in the culture within an organisation leading to level 5 will have huge benefits in reduced risk and costs to an organisation, at this level employees not only focus on health and safety but will be more engaged to drive efficiencies within the work place as a whole.

The challenge with these changes is to measure success and to assist with this it will be important to assess the current status and collect current data on business performance and establish some key KPIs. This will allow the changes to be measured and the benefits demonstrated. IOSH recently included in their recent magazine some good insights into how this can be done (https://www.ioshmagazine.com/2021/09/01/strengthen-your-safety-culture).

In achieving a positive safety culture you will need to tackle both how leaders in the organisation behave and respond but also how the rest of the workforce behave. This may be subtle such as being proactive if you see some spilt drink on the floor, but it can also involve really difficult changes such as influencing key business decisions. One of the biggest challenges I can see coming is that our Safety Cultures will need to adapt to industry 4.0. As technology and our recent requirement to adapt to new ways of working comes crashing through, our cultures and organisations will need to adapt, this adaptation also plays heavily on wellbeing and health.

With this in mind and as I spent time considering what I might like to write for this piece, I considered the cultures that surround me, the positives and the negatives. I recognised that one aspect of culture that is not discussed is how they can change and evolve, whilst this might take a long time and not be easily done it is important to recognise it can be done and recognise our society and our own culture has or is shifting.

Denise has a few words on how behaviour plays an important role in making cultural changes and touches on how these changes may be impacting our health. As James has already described, changing behaviour, and therefore our culture, sounds easy to do but is harder in practice. To help put some of this into context, over the following few paragraphs I’m going to talk about investment behaviour and experience behaviour. They may not be familiar terms for you, so let me explain.

Investment behaviour is the behaviour we exhibit when we are sacrificing something we could have now, for something better we can have in the future. It’s putting in effort now for a future reward. Examples include saving for your pension, spending your evening building flat-packed furniture, painting a room in your home, preparing for a work presentation or studying for a qualification. All of these require effort now, but with the promise that you will be rewarded for it in the future.

Experience behaviour on the other hand is about the here-and-now – the present moment. It’s how we behave on holiday; going for a walk in the sun, enjoying a leisurely breakfast, buying an ice cream or a cocktail. It’s the thrill of buying a new car or a new outfit. It’s going with a friend to see your favourite band in concert.

Time for the spoiler, humans love to be in experience mode and we are not hard-wired to enjoy investment behaviour. We’d far prefer a day at a theme park or an evening out with friends than staying in to save money for a new boiler! We are designed to want immediate gratification, immediate resolution and immediate enjoyment. Call it “nowism”. It’s why buy-now-pay-later deals are so appealing, why our need to be entertained in the moment send us immediately to Instagram or why a burning question has us asking Google for an instant answer.

It is because of these behaviours it can be challenging to make changes in the organisational culture, our tendency to want to be in experience mode means we want instant results and struggle to see the long-term gains. As we begin to move into industry 4.0 and on the back on the pandemic we are seeing increased levels of health issues as these technologies play on our “nowism”.

In the years that have passed our society has seen immense change, at a far greater rate that has previously been seen. Publications such as Safety I, Safety II talk about these changes and demonstrate the impact on how we work today. There has been a shift from obvious tangible risks to obscure complex system risks such as working in isolation and using computers, this places more emphasis on human behaviour and with that the culture of our organisations.

So on World Health and Safety Day, take time to reflect on the culture of your organisation, reflect on where you are and where you might want to be. But join us next month as we delve deeper into the challenges industry 4.0 might be presenting and hear more from Denise how this may be impacting our health and what we can do using our culture models to support our employees.