A strong safety culture does not come from policies and training alone. It develops through the way people respond to risk in their day-to-day work and through the example leaders set.
In this Q&A, Jonathan Klane explains why knowing the rules does not always translate into safer behavior and why lasting change depends on creating a culture where people care about protecting one another.
Most labs already have safety policies, procedures, and training in place. Why can a strong safety culture still be difficult to achieve?
Lab safety culture is all about group norms, behaviors, values, and beliefs and the artifacts that accompany those aspects of the group.
But policies, procedures, and training aren’t emotional motivators. They’re dry, technical documents written by others (e.g., leadership, EHS, or a manager). Too often they’ve got generic statements (e.g., use with adequate ventilation or wear protective gloves). But we’re all more intrinsically motivated than externally. Leaders can and often do help to catalyze or facilitate staff motivation. It can be with what they say, but it’s more often with what they do. There’s a saying I learned from another safety colleague years ago that’s attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Your actions thunder so loudly, I can hardly hear what you’re saying.” Last, I’m reminded of what a Title IX Coordinator and attorney said, “Jon, I hope you’ll agree that training is a terrible tool to change behaviors”. Having spent most of my career in the field of adult learning or andragogy, I agreed with her 100 percent.
So, what should safety culture be about? A culture of caring.
Why do employees sometimes take shortcuts or make less-safe choices even when they know the correct procedure? What should leaders understand about the factors influencing those decisions?
They are humans trying to be efficient and who perceive risk differently. As Kahneman said in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “It is wrong to blame people for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.” It’s why decision-making is also known as judgement under uncertainty. We don’t know the outcome until afterwards when it seems so obvious, which is of course the bias of hindsight based on the curse of knowledge.
Plus, there are many human factors involved. There’s work as imagined (i.e., the SOP) vs. work as performed (i.e., what staff actually do), local rationality (i.e., it made sense at the time), cognitive biases and heuristics, our affective risk system, and fast thinking brain. And at times, the wrong metric is incentivized. If speed is rewarded through bonuses, quotas, or raises then speed rules and safety takes a back seat with the procedure also being altered in the lab.
When leaders want to strengthen safety culture, where should they start?
Study and observe their actions, behaviors, habits, and rituals (ABHRs) as an ethnographic researcher would, or as James Gee advises in How to Do Discourse Analysis, as an alien who has come to study humans. An action happens once. Behaviors happen more often. Habits become routine. Rituals go a step further because they are reinforced by group norms and culture.
Take handwashing in a lab. If you tell me to wash my hands and I do it once, that’s an action. If I do it inconsistently, that’s a behavior. if I do it each time, it becomes a habit. But if my lab partner and I go to the sinks together, sing a song while washing, and do an air high five afterward and everyone is smiling and laughing, it’s a ritual. And its power is hard to undo. Promote lab rituals that encourage safety and risk reduction before risky ones become embedded in the culture.
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When a leader notices an unsafe behavior, near miss, or recurring risk, what separates a response that changes behavior from one that produces only short-term compliance?
Care and empathy does, especially when leaders use emotional and vulnerable storytelling. Knowledge alone does not always change behavior. People respond to how an experience made them feel, including the fear or discomfort of a close call or incident and the desire not to repeat it. Here’s an exercise that I commonly do:
I ask for a volunteer, give them a pair of safety glasses three times, and ask for their reaction each time. The first time, I say, “Hi, here are your safety glasses. Please wear them since OSHA requires it.” They tell me that they’re unmotivated; they feel nothing. The second time: “Hi, here are your safety glasses. We all wear them here so please do so.” They respond that it’s a little bit more motivating. The final time, I say, “Hi, here are your safety glasses. I want you to wear them every day so that when you go home, you can see the love in your family’s eyes, and they can see your love for them in your eyes. Can you do that for me?” I always get a smile and sometimes their eyes moisten, “Yeah, you bet. I feel like you actually care.”
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You use a multi-stage approach to building safety culture. Without walking through the entire framework, what can you tell us about why leaders need to think about safety culture as a progression rather than a single initiative?
There is so much to it! You can’t do it all at once, so steps or stages make sense, are feasible, and allow us to focus on each stage at a time. It’s far easier this way. As a lab progresses, they can see how each stage integrates with the others. And there are steps or stages that relate closely with others in this model, making the linkages easier to describe, demonstrate, and implement.
There are many opportunities to weave these together into a tapestry that embodies your lab’s culture. It’s a constant work in progress that takes a bit more toward the start, but as you progress, keeping it going is easier.
What is one misconception about building a strong safety culture that you would like lab leaders to rethink?
The one I’d like people to rethink is that many people often fail to appreciate that safety culture isn’t independent of the overarching organizational culture. It’s not. Some in the field of culture say that there is only organizational culture and the others are subcultures as viewed through its lens. So, it’s not safety culture as its own phenomenon. Instead, it’s organizational culture viewed through the lens of safety.
Having witnessed this up close and studied organizational cultures through the lens of safety, I agree. Good luck changing safety culture if the organizational culture is resistant to change in general or has a negative overarching culture about caring for each other.
If I had to sum it up, let me quote a CEO of a company with an enviable safety culture. At the end of an emotional story about their journey he was asked, “But how do you do it?” He said, “It’s easy. All you have to do is care more than the government requires.”
