Expert Views on Safety Culture

In this episode, we’re conducting a thorough investigation of ‘safety culture’ to help HSE practitioners bring some clarity to this controversial term.

We've compiled a collection of thoughts, opinions and ideas about safety culture from 15 of our previous guests discussing various aspects of this nebulous subject.

The main dispute is whether safety culture actually exists, but even when we get past this, people rarely agree on its definition, measurement and implementation.

This safety culture special presents multiple perspectives on these crucial questions from experienced HSE professionals, consultants, authors and academics. We can’t promise definitive answers, but it will help you come to your own conclusions about safety culture - and what it means for your practice.

- [Mary] Hi there, and welcome to a Safety Labs by Slice special, where we investigate the complex idea of Safety Culture. Everyone talks about safety culture but they rarely agree on its definition. Many of the guests on our show have questioned if it even exists. Is it something that an organization is or does? Can it be analyzed, measured or managed? And is it any different from wider organizational culture?

We’ve compiled a collection of thoughts, opinions, and ideas about safety culture from some of our previous guests. We hope you enjoy hearing experienced HSE professionals, consultants, authors, and academics share their views on the many facets of Safety culture. And most of all, we hope that hearing these different perspectives helps you come to your own conclusions about safety culture and what it means for your practice.

Let's start with the confusion and move towards clarity. The chapter I referred to was a literature survey of safety research that highlighted the intersecting and consistent and poorly defined use of the term safety culture across a number of research papers. Why do you think that this confusion exists? And why is it important to address?

- [Dr Tristan Casey]: Yeah, great question. I think the confusion is because the original mainstream definition of safety culture, which emerged following the snowball incident was really a catch all phrase and sort of included behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, values, priorities, it was just a very broad term. And so I think from that early beginning, everything that's been done since has either tried to narrowly like try and get through that ambiguity and sort of cloudy murkiness of what the definition is that sort of that direction, or they've just run with that definition and perpetuated some of that murkiness, it's important to clarify, because otherwise, we don't have consistency and measurement. We have different concepts of the same what we call a construct sort of an imaginary sort of intangible thing that in psychology we try to measure. And so that means that we don't really get progress. If we start to measure things you can measure, measure a concept using different types of measures, then we're very, it's very difficult to move the field forward, because everyone has a different view on how to operationalize it.

- Yeah, it's apples and oranges, as they say.

- Yeah, definitely.

- [James Junkin] Safety is about trust, right? Nobody cares what you know, out there, they want to know that you care about them. And that's not something we teach. From a formal standpoint, we talk about it all the time. I mean, it's easy to say, safety culture, which I despise that term. By the way, there's no safety culture, if you want to bring on another guest. And I'll debate them that there is no such thing as a safety culture. There's only a culture within your organization. Right? And this is kind of part of that. So I'm gonna go a little bit of a rant, and then we'll come back to your question. You cool with that? Like? Yeah, oh, yeah. All right. Safety Culture, when you say that, it's like, it sits over here by itself. And then you have an accounting culture, and then you have an operations, culture, and then you got office culture, and then you got some other culture for the dudes in the warehouse. You know, it's your company's culture. And the sooner we understand that, the better it is, because safety and your overall company culture, the same thing, you got to correct the language, right? If we, if we say, safety culture, we're implying that is something that's separate and apart from our other culture. It's just the culture of your organization. So how do I establish good culture? Well, the first thing is I gotta establish relationships. I got to be are these soft skills really soft skills? Or are they not the most important skills?

- Yeah, that's why I like to call them core.

- I can go this book, and I can figure out what the regulation is. And now I can Google the regulation, and I can find out what we're supposed to be doing. But if you want to implement that, you got to have a relationship. You can't my favorite one of my favorite memes. Is this, this meme of a safety professional going on job and says, I don't know how to do your job, but my book says you're doing it wrong. Yeah, that is not the way to develop a good relationship. So I think we could have better training in conferences and maybe in some of the formal education that we do from people that say I went into a tough situation. And this is what I did you know, people act like culture is changed overnight, I came in, I got a new set of policies and procedures, why aren't these people following it? So your point married, that these are core skills is, is a major one, if there's any one thing that we can improve on, is that because we can learn the regulations, but if we can't get people to do it, and we can't apply it, what good are they.

- [Dr Tristan Casey] Consider your definition of what you think safety is, because you've got two little words, their safety and culture, but kind of I think, today agreed on what culture is that it's comprised of beliefs and assumptions, values, priorities, and behaviors are all together in one mix. But the safety part we haven't really unpacked today. And safety can be everyone can have different models of how safety happens, there can be no there is the definition of safety might be about procedures and compliance. It might be about adaptation and resilience. It might be about leadership and culture. And you know, these more capability type aspects of how we build safety are created. So if we sort of, say this loose term safety culture, but don't stop and think well, what do I actually consider safety to be? And what does good safety look like? What's sort of my template that I'm judging this culture by? Again, we just missed an opportunity to clarify and get a shared understanding with who we're trying to communicate with, because they may have a very different concept of safety. So if you say, well, the safety coach is great, it's good, that you're operating from that kind of procedure, alized and compliance perspective, that other person might say, well, it doesn't look good to me, you know, people are just following the rules and not using their brains. When there's an unexpected surprise, they don't deviate or improvise, they just do what they're told. So that's, again, an opportunity to just have a conversation and really defined clearly where you're coming from.

- What other issues do you see as currently problematic, or at least needing improvement in the world of OHS? I know that you speak about diversity for one.

- [Dr Linda Martin] So I talk about diversity, you talk about intersectionality, and a bunch of different topics that come up, when you're talking about how to work with somebody, okay? When I say how to work with somebody, everybody comes to the workplace, layered with all these different things, right? They have their ethnicity, they have how they think, which brings in the neurodiversity. They have, maybe the family group that they come to, they bring their issues. And so I like to talk about like, are we dealing with the person on the person level, while you're thinking about that culture? Because I mean, I don't know how many people have probably come on your program and talked about culture, safety culture. And I'm kind of like, you know, there is no such thing as safety culture, there's culture, and it's made up of who you have, at the time, at the point of task, right? So you and I might be doing a task with two or three other people. And that's the group that's the culture that matters, right? They're at, you know, whatever hazardous thing that we're doing. And so what you bring what I bring, how I think how you think how the people who are with us thing, it all matters, in doing something safely. So there's a tendency, at least recently, for people to go to those theories, and treat everybody as if they're the same, right? We all come from Oklahoma, or we all come from New Hampshire, or we all come from a construction background. But that's not enough. It's not enough to treat people as some broad group, even if it's the same company. And we all have the same orientation, it's not enough to bring people in and treat them as if we're going to be some kind of homogeneous mixture, that we can just put out a task and get things done the right way, or the safe way, or those types of things. So that's a big issue.

- [Clive Lloyd]: To quote, the famous statistician, George Box, he once said, Let me think of a quote, all models are wrong, but some are useful. And I think most safety culture development tools would fall into that category, including the one I'm using, and the one I've been using that for many years, effectively is Professor Patrick Hudson's model of cultural maturity. But that's 20 odd years old now. And why I think it's useful still is because when I work with organizations, I believe in meeting people where they, my own preference is not really to talk about safety culture, because I don't think that's really a thing, even though I've just read a book about it, right. In other words, I've certainly believed in culture. And I believe if you've got a maturing culture will safety culture would sit as a function of that, if you like, with Hudson's model, I always found it useful for organizations, many of whom use that anyway. So let me meet them where they are, it was useful for helping them to work out where they currently sit to some degree. And I think that is useful if we can get a bit of an idea about where we currently sit, possibly even with regard to where other similar organizations or similar industry said, that can be useful. More to the point, if we know where we currently are, that can help us to really work out quite clearly what we need to do to progress what we need to do. And so I found it really useful. Hudson's model, again, that 20 something years old, it didn't include many of the things that we do now work with clients, things like psychological safety, for example, was not part of that original model. Other aspects, Hudson's original model had those five stages drawn as very discrete entities, that is, you're either in one of those boxes, or you're not, in my experience, it's not actually like that. There might be elements of the organization that said, they straddle maybe a few of those different areas. So for me, it was I just made some tweaks to that model. I drew it as not just five discrete boxes, but as a journey, because we can go backwards to, and we might come to that. And there was other things like trust was part of Hudson's model, he did concede that increasing levels of trust tended to be associated with more mature organizations, but he didn't really sort of go into any depth on that. Whereas for me, it's absolutely core. So there were a few things like that. So I made a few changes for the book. And so similarly, though, to to Patrick Hudson, those apathetic, let's start with that, really, in those cultures, safety is just something we've got to do write the damn regulators and make us do that. There's no great wish to have it there. It's like we work in a dangerous company incidents happen. And there's a resignation to that. It's really about avoiding punishment. So managers avoiding punishment from the regulators, for example, for the workforce, it's more about avoiding punishment from the managers, and so forth. So it's based purely on putting the tick in the box, avoiding trouble staying out of trouble. Now, unfortunately, that will first up quite naturally back hurt way more people, particularly really serious injuries. But there's a lot of fear amongst the workforce, because incidents are generally seen purely as the fault of the workers. You know, they are stupid. I've heard that said, they are stupid. They don't follow a procedure. They don't speak up. They take shortcuts. So intrinsically, they're it's about blaming the workforce. Now, where you have blame high levels of blame, you have high levels of fear, and wishing to avoid punishment. So secrets are kept from management. It's us versus them and secrets are kept. As I also wrote in the book, we can't fix a secret we certainly can't fix so apathetic looks like that. Now, reactive. safety is a priority. So we've moved a bit there. The trouble is, it's often more of a priority after an incident. That's when we get the action, right. And still, it tends to come back to the workforce, they might start employing some bbs tools and things like that, where, effectively it's still blame based safety, BBs sort of thing. So we still tend to blame the workers, if we progress involving them. And as the name suggests, now, we've made a bit of a shift. We're now bringing our people in, we understand they can contribute, in fact, their contribution, as we mature becomes more and more valuable. We realize they are effectively the experts in the jobs that they do. They understand the nuances of the work where the new policy fits perfectly, and sometimes where they have to adapt it, just to get the job done. And there's that realization that if we bring them in, if we involve the workforce, then our systems work better, our procedures work better. And just quietly, of course, as we bring in the workforce, what we're also increasing, there are levels of trust. So fear starts to drop, and trust starts to come up. Now, when my whole team starts to feel that level of trust, that's what we would refer to as psychological safety. So we're starting that process of involving now a proactive, of course, that has just become just what we do, we see that incidents happen because of a whole range of variables, including leadership decisions, including management decisions, the workforce, then are fully involved in safety, right across the board. Ultimately, we get to what we call the integrated, and it's integrated, because safety is now not a separate thing. We don't view safety as this separate entity. It's just how we do work. And for me, I love to hear this, the level five industries tend to not even talk about safety very much. Whereas in the lower realms of safety, so we create this whole separate world about safety. We have the safety team who hold the workforce to account, and so forth. Level five, that's rare, we just don't we talk about doing the work well and reliably, with the full and welcome collaboration from the workforce. Trust is very high fear of speaking up fear of admitting mistake is essentially gone. The us versus them is largely replaced by we, of course, because of that, because we've got the full involvement of the workforce, we tend to identify more risks, more hazards very proactively, if we do that we can manage and mitigate more risks. And of course, naturally this flies do they tend to have way less than their fair share of incidents, especially the serious one. So that's roughly the progression. Now, for me the things that stand out the most there, as we mature, we increasingly bring the workforce in, we listen to them, we respond to them, people that are now involved. And the other big thing for me, of course, is the elevating the ongoing elevating aspects of trust and psychological safety. That's in a very nutshell version very the progression as I see it.

- As far as predominant different meanings of safety culture. You've talked about safety culture, understood as a mirror, a measure or a map. Can you walk me through what those perspectives mean?

- [Dr Tristan Casey] Yeah, definitely. So the challenge we have is because those definitions of safety culture are so broad, and so established, we can't necessarily just wipe the slate clean and start fresh. So it's helpful to use little analogies to or a metaphor more precisely to try and convey the meaning of what perspective we're taking on the safety culture. So a mirror the first analogy or metaphor is really about holding up a mirror to show the organization in a deep way to encourage you to reflect on the way it thinks, the way that the assumptions, the beliefs, the very deep core aspects of what we might call the descriptive approach to the organizational culture. The second approach, which is the measure is a little more tangible and really feeds into another branch of cultural research, which refers to the safety climate, more of a tangible kind of quantifiable part of us. achy culture, which refers to the priority of safety, as inferred from perceptions of policies and procedures and practices in the organization so that the measure is more like a, you know who to take out a tape measure and assess something, that's what we would do. And the last one, the map is really about maturity models and this more pragmatic practitioner oriented approach to safety culture. So charting a landscape of different levels of maturity, showing the organization the future where it could potentially go, and helping it on its journey to improvement. Now, think with all that in mind, one of the things to consider with safety culture is, by consider it as a perspective or a point of view on which to look at the broader organizational culture is a lot of criticism to say, We should do away with this term called safety culture, because it's too confusing. It takes away attention from the broader issues in the organization and really narrowly defines things. But I would argue that, you know, implicitly, we're always evaluating our cultures, we're always looking at it from a point of view. And if we make that safety part tangible and define it and discuss it and say to each other well, this is what I think safety means to me, that at least surfaces that bias and allows us to move forward with a common understanding of what safety and culture mean together.

- So instead of getting rid of the term, just using it to foster this kind of discussion, which will kind of unearth what's behind it, and it sort of sounds like what you're saying is everyone is projected their own meaning, depending on where they're coming from, what their what's going on in their heads.

- I think that's, that's true. And I don't dismiss their concerns that if we do focus on organizational culture, rather than safety culture, and we're going to have a broader perspective of what's going on in the workplace, you know, we might otherwise miss things that could be important for safety. So for example, you know, our HR practices or the way that people think about performance management and appraisal, that would play a role in shaping the culture, but if we narrowly defined it as a safety culture, sometimes we can miss that. I think, though, it's sort of a little play on words, you know, we're still talking about the broader organizational culture, but we're saying, how do these things, these artifacts, these beliefs, these manifestations shape, the way safeties practice? So it's still that broad approach, but we're just focusing on how does this affect the safety performance or management techniques in the organization?

- Let's talk about leadership styles. And then I'm curious if anything has changed, in your view of the reflective evidence based approach?

- [Dr Drew Rae] Sure. So the leadership styles comes to what I was talking about before about as the safety professional role gets separated from the organization, we start to use structural approaches to leadership, we lead by managing and we manage by implementing systems. And that's only one style of leadership. I'm not a big fan of the way ideas like culture have been corrupted in safety. But there is an essential point here, which is that you can influence other people by ways other than making them do a form, you can influence them by symbolic gestures, and by motivation, and by their work climate, and by your relationships with them. You can influence other people by sitting down with them and listening to them, rather than making them fill out a form. And they're more likely to go away and what do what you want. Because you listened to them talk about their kids for half an hour, then because you made them do a risk assessment. And I think in safety, as our role has become separated, we've become more reluctant to use those other tools of leadership. And I think just more active reflection on our role as leaders rather than our role as safety managers would really benefit, some safety practice in some organizations.

- [Tim Marsh] There's a million elements of culture, you know, values principles out, in fact, God knows what, but, you know, you find when you're trying to explain things, you don't want to have anything more than three, you know, everything should be down to down in threes. And I think the three clusters of issues number one, your systems, your procedures, you will see training, all that good safety management system, your risk assessments, all the stuff that we go on audit, and invest in. And obviously, if you haven't hit diminishing returns with that, there's work to be done. You know, go go and buy some safety equipment. Have a safety professional, who knows what a good safety management system looks like? Get your ISOs but what you find, of course, is a lot of organizations get from not very good to compliant with their systems. And then they think well, look, you know, we've got this far with our systems. What we need are more systems and more rules. And you know, everybody listening to this will have worked in an organization where the rules just proliferated, until they actually started getting the need to, you know, get in the way and diminishing returns his head. And the workers say, no, no, not more bloody paperwork, and, and so on, you know, a lot of organizations call it, the blob effect you just keep piling into, it just gets bigger and bigger. And so once you've hit diminishing returns, you really need to address something smarter, like a turn left and focus on the human factor. We think there are two elements of that. The first one is good old fashioned empowerment and engagement, to what extent are your workers heads up and switched on? You know, and this, of course, is a factor of transformational leadership rather than transactional leadership, by which I mean that they're coached rather than told they're praised rather than criticized, the communications are excellent and clear. So at this point, really good posters and really clear paint become become useful. toolbox talks that are full of dialogue become useful, anything that generally, you know, gets. And of course, the classic one that we're seeing in Britain at the moment, you lead by example. Because you know, we're all leading by example, at all times whether we want to be or not. So it's a good idea to be doing it well. Otherwise, people get awfully upset and demotivated and angry and think that things are unfair. And that's the last thing you want. You know, unfairness is, is the most deadly, of all the sort of psychosocial issues there are because it completely undermines trust and trust is, is key. So you want all that going on, and you got your switched on motivated workers and what you want them doing ideally, is learning. And you know, HSG, 48, shows really clearly that when you step back, objectively, what you see is that about 80% of what's going wrong out there is structural, it's it's unintentional mistakes caused by fatigue, lack of training, lack of tools, lack of time, or it's the cultural stuff, you know, and we've made this down on the cultural stuff, a lot of the cultural stuff is not people just doing what they want to do. It's doing what they think the organization wants for them, or are the best they can. So you hear things like you can have it quick, you can have it cheap, you could have a good quality, pick any two, you know, and if you cascade that sort of sort of issue, then the workforce they'll just do the best they can and they'll second guess you so hardly ever, when you step back and look at it, is it just an individual off on a folly of their own? And even when it isn't individual off on the on a folly of their own? You know, you there were questions to be asked what who employed this person who trained this person who's supervising this person who's responsible for sending them out, they're so demotivated and and half cocked, you can't just blame the individual because they've done something daft and, you know, and ABC analysis shows really temptation analysis shows really clearly if the safe route is slow, inconvenient, or uncomfortable, then, you know, it's it's highly tempting to find a workaround and crack on. Not everybody will some people have got great self control and so on. But most of us haven't. And it's just a headcount of how many people do cut that corner, and risk mounts up and people get hurt. And of course, if it's something that looks a bit daft at a glance, it's really easy to blame people and and say, Well, you cut the corner, you knew what you were doing. You know, but But yes, but I was really tired. I was getting towards the end of a long shift. I've absolutely desperate for a cup of coffee. I like just I just couldn't resist that little corner cut just just to try and to have 10 minutes to regain my breath. So so when you step back, there's so much you can learn. And of course, the classic one is, instead of sharpening why have we done that, you ask the question, Why did you do that? Because because nine times out of 10 curious why he's got a good answer. And so the final of the three pieces for me is learning. I think Carol Dweck, she's from your neck of the woods, I think, you know who the the best selling book mindset sold 3 million copies or whatever. And the essence of that book is that she says her best best ever boss has three questions, what's going wrong? Why is it going wrong? What are we going to do about it? You know, and then if you cross reference that to somebody like Andrew Hopkins, the Australian writer, we will some fabulous books like failure to learn and disastrous decisions, you know, and this mindful safety concept, which is mindful for safety concept is any complex organization is chock full of risk and mistakes every day. Now, the weaker organizations wait for those mistakes, to blow up into something that finds us, the better organizations proactively go out there and try and find what's going wrong as quickly and as proactively as possible.

- In your book, you said that traditionally, safety is about the business of managing failure. And what you are trying to push it towards is the business of gaining process stability.

- [Chris Smith] So inside that envelope of building stability and being rewarded with all of the things that our business needs, that's where the culture comes in. I do say often when I speak on this that I think within our profession has a fatal flaw in it. We've taught generations of managers to manage failure, it's like slapping on the hands and saying, don't touch that. And really what it leads to is also a culture of managing failure. And we don't learn the skills in our profession to build an organization that maybe doesn't manage failure, but doesn't tolerate error, or doesn't tolerate variation in process controls, who looks at the safety profession and its own lane. And somehow it looks and decides that that lane could somehow provide enough gravity to pull all the excellence we need in and around it. And it simply isn't true. Safety is just as an input, it is an outcome. And looking at it as an outcome, we're looking at process and process capability and process data state stability, as the objective, it changes the way we look at how we do our hazard assessments, how we, how we engage our people, how we engage our leadership, I'm not discounting all the very important things we do around compliance and training, that none of that gets lost in this discussion. But how do I generate a culture that values stability is willing to not value error in a way that they're willing to fix processes incrementally every day.

Mary, something funny about safety. And I've been doing this a long time, as I said, I can't tell you how much safety weighs. I don't know how I don't know what it eats. I couldn't tell you what it looks like in the wild. I don't know if it's, if it's tameable. What I'm saying is safety is kind of a nebulous concept to rally an organization around. If I lined 100 people up and asked them what safety are you get 100 different answers. Because it really is very, it's very intangible. It's kind of like pretty, I mean, everybody has a definition of pretty right. My mom says I'm pretty but you know, I don't know.

- Well, moms are always right.

- But those are the things that really are difficult because when we talk about rallying around safety and zero harm and safety culture, it doesn't mean doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. And everybody doesn't have the same level of focus around that objective. But if I rally around error and process controls, and I can put together things in safety that helps enhance those processes, and I get you into continuous improvement, to make processes better, I make things 10%, better, 50% better everywhere, we're going to continuous improvement, do that 10,000 times in small, incremental improvements next year, and you'll wake up with a different company at the end of the year.

- [Dr Tristan Casey] It's a temptation, I think, to sort of say, look, safety culture is comprised of everything from beliefs and assumptions of these fundamental ways of how the world works in our heads, all the way up to documentation behaviors, you know, things that we might see signs and symbols in the organization. The problem with those more tangible aspects of culture, which Edgar Schein talks about is that can be interpreted multiple different ways, we could look on the wall and see a poster that says something about, you know, behavioral based safety, or stop and think or something like that. But is that really reflective of the broader culture, it could just be something that was put there by an individual that doesn't necessarily represent the broader shared the shared pneus of those perceptions and beliefs in the organization. So we have to be careful over interpreting the artifacts or the tangible signs of safety culture, we have to do so in conjunction with some of those deeper, more meaningful units of meaning in the organization.

- [Mary Ann Baynton] Alright, so we'll go through the first one is, I'm quoting here, a work environment characterized by the shared values of trust, honesty and fairness.

So that's organizational culture. Right, is the factor. And, you know, from a health and safety perspective, you might think, well, I can't do anything about that, right? That's the culture. But culture really comes down to the way that we feel about the way we're treated in the workplace. So that's why Honesty and trust is so important. So as a health and safety professional, you could be asking people on the ground floor, you know, what is your experience? What would it take for you to trust that this organization had your back? Had your best interests balanced with the interests of the organization? They can ask that and get an honest answer, and they can turn around and say to the employer, like they would with other hazards. Here's some ways we think that you can mitigate this risk and improve it And it's as simple as that, that you are getting information that maybe the employer can't get through a survey that maybe they can't get it through interviews. But people will be honest with you because of your position. And you know, that if you can change the way people feel about the organization, you're going to change the way they work, you're going to improve that idea of a safety culture where we all have each other's backs.

- How does a safety professional go about fostering psychologically safe workplaces? Kind of an abstract?

- [Rey Gonzalez] I think that's a great question. Because, you know, we do rely on our safety professionals to help any organization set up the right culture. And by that, I mean, set up the right behaviors, right. I mean, if you look at the definition of culture, it's all about the behaviors we use in any organization. It's how we grow up together, and how we influence one another to behave in certain ways. That's really culture in a simple definition, we rely on the safety professionals who foster an environment that provides safe behaviors going forward. So I think one of the biggest things they can do right off the bat is show a tremendous amount of gratitude for when workers come to them and have want to stop work right show a tremendous amount of gratitude and appreciation and recognition. However, they do it when people do stop work. And they have questions because they're trying not to proceed in the face of uncertainty. So safety professionals could certainly reinforce that positive behavior through gratitude, recognition, reward, those type of things. I think also that once a worker has been brave enough to do something, raise a concern, stop work or whatever, it's imperative that the safety professional follow up with them, to let them know how these things were resolved or handled, or you know, what we need to do for next steps before we proceed, they start collaborating working with them. Or if it's just a concern they had, make sure we follow up with them, to let them know how things were handled.

- Where would you focus soft skills training? In your case? I think I would say maybe psychological skills training for tomorrow's safety professionals. What skills do you think would be most helpful to them?

- [David Heap] I think if they don't have a background in psychology, their undergrad degree or whatever, then I think one way or the other bit formal workshops or just watching a whole bunch of videos on YouTube. YouTube, or doing short courses, things like that, really getting up to speed on this whole idea of psychological health in the workplace, and how it fits in with what they may have been focusing more on in terms of physical hazards. And I think too, and again, this is extending what they're probably already into in terms of moving just from that reaction and compliance mindset to more of a safety culture approach, and extending what you've been doing there, into the having a culture of psychological health and safety. And might be bringing in a site, someone who is a psychologist, either as a consultant, or as someone in the organization to look after that aspect. And again, often, it's really hard if you're 45, to go all the way back and become a cycle, fully registered, licensed psychologist. So often, what really worked, there is a bit of education yourself upon that education is often working with people who are already there, to bring in a qualified psychologist, and to work and partner with them. And so that you get that level of expertise within the organization very quickly. But also you are learning by doing the 7020 10 road, you can do some reading, you can partner with people, but most of it is 70%, of developing ourselves is really about learning by doing experiential learning. So getting involved and partnering with people who are subject matter experts in this area. And they will learn from you about safety, culture, and the organization itself, and where all the roadblocks and who's helpful and all that sort of business. And you'll be learning from them and working with them and the management in order to create this environment. So it's more culture, because it needs to be systems and practices and things and policies and investment. So creating this environment of positive psychology, promoting positive psychological health, well being and productivity in the workplace.

- [Stephen Harvey] I'm definitely a big believer in listening to the language that people are using, you'll get an indicator very, very quickly about the culture of an organization, just the way that people talk. You know, if you hear the Start Here, blame and punishment, it's our language and our Elks. And right away, I will go in and sort of change that and challenge it, I will start talking to learning or start talking about improving, you know, innovation, then yeah, why did that make sense for them to do that, rather than and that's uncomfortable, because we don't really, you know, like, I've been challenged, and I'm gonna, thankfully people can't lie, he's just an idiot. You just have to be dogged, you just have to be true to your values, and just keep going for it. That will be challenging, but it will be worth it in the interest me.

- [Amy Roosa] What about male trades workers? I mean, we're mostly talking about trades. But of course, there's PPE and workwear for all kinds of different industries. But do the male workers have a role in the solution of this problem?

Allied ship, being an ally, and accepting women into the trades. And I think there's a healthy amount of that. I know anywhere I've gone, I've never found the male workers in the field, I've never really experienced a problem only maybe a handful of times. So having male allies that can speak up for you, when you don't feel comfortable, that can be there to partner with you not doing the white knight thing, but being proactive and saying, Hey, I got you and I want to make sure you feel comfortable and inclusive within our safety culture within our work culture. What do you need for me to be safe while you're working? And when they come across the comments? Well, that's what it is, are the misogynistic comments even, that they're standing up and saying something, because we're changing at such a rapid pace that I think there's this little bit of old school mentality still out there that needs to just be shattered. Women want to come to work, they want to do job, just like a guy does. And we want to get paid the same as well, which is, you know, part of the reason why women go into trades.

- [Dr I. David Daniels] Ultimately, this is why the workplace and everyplace ends up being unsafe for some people, because we just really didn't think about it. You mentioned earlier about how do you get this sense of safety? You know, depending on who's in the room? The question is, who is it that we're trying that we say we're trying to help? So you're an organization, you hired X number of people, 10 people, 10,000 people doesn't matter. If you hired these people, or you brought people into your organization, they should have a voice, particularly should have a voice in how safe environment is created, how the safety policies are written, how they should have a voice in that not this classic command and control kind of leadership that says, I'm the CEO or the safety director, and I was telling everybody what to do. That doesn't work, it really never did. But it works even less now that you have people, I have more information in my phone than NASA had when they put folks on the moon. And these, we now have Generation Z and millennials, who are digital natives who can get this information in seconds. They don't need you to tell them, it's this way that they need to tell you what we're trying to accomplish not how to do it, most of them, a lot of they can figure it out, they can go watch it on YouTube, and learn better than you who doesn't really know much about it. But that's the way we do it here at our company or organization. So what I'm saying is having this culture of openness and inclusivity in everything that we do that says so OSHA requires us to have a policy on this. But what that policy looks like for us should be the product of all of our input. Now again, I'm not naive enough to believe that every single person will be able to contribute, but every interest group and we should give everyone the opportunity to say, you know that part doesn't work for me and if it doesn't Let's make the adjustment because ultimately the goal is to cause them or help them feel safe. That's what it's about. So yeah, it's gonna be different. It's gonna be different. I say this so often I heard someone else say, and I continue to repeat it different, does not mean deficient. It simply means different. And when we're having conversations about diversity, and equity and inclusion, I find those sometimes almost exhausting. Because they're slogans. Because as soon as someone sees it different, we, you know, all heads of room turn to that person. And well, how could you think that? Well? Because I do, I don't need a reason to think that way. I just do. I don't feel safe. Well, why not? What's wrong with you? There's nothing wrong with me if there's wrong, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the system, either. But it just doesn't cause me to feel safe when it goes away. That's all, let's not make this something that is not let's not make it accusatory. And that's not the point. The question is, does the person exposed to that environment feel safe? Or not? And if they don't, what is it going to take to get them there? Because again, as soon as we bring them in to the family, to the organization, we have a responsibility. If we didn't want that responsibility, we shouldn't have hired them in the first place.

- [Gareth Lock] Second stories. For those who don't know, first story is where something happens, an accident happens and incident happens, and you get this stuff that's happened, you get the narrative straight away, the time that people the immediate cause, about what happened, there's often a lot of blame, there's a lot about focus on individuals. The second story is, comes out slower. It takes curious questions to understand what's going on. It requires a just culture so that people can talk about, you know, these are the trade offs that I have to do all the time to get this job. But why haven't we had the accidents before, because I'm managing that capacity and managing those uncertainties and getting it done. And for whatever reason, something took the balance, and I lost control of the capacity and we had an accident, it's about understanding how busy management are, because often is this bit of safety, culture, poor leadership. That's it. And you actually find out how busy the leadership is and how busy the management are, and the goals that they've got to manage. And instead of going through, you know, this expectation, here's the document sent, you need to review all of this as part of you the sort of the process, the validation process to make sure it's okay, the auditing process before it's sent out there. And then you find out that actually, they only got 20 minutes to review it, because they had a whole bunch of other big KPIs, which their bosses said, that's the most important thing. And they know that that document set has to go out because there's a project coming in coming in and they've got to execute it because there's money associated with it. So it's going up and out, not down and in to find out what's going on.

- [Chris Moulden] We are in a world right now where I want to say safety has matured and, and a lot of organizations are becoming more sophisticated and and it's truly about, you know, process and all that but it's truly about, I believe a leadership commitment and how you're leading your people. And so, if the leader is is coming from a space or a place where something is more important than the person, however, they still say that the person is most important thing, then it's going to be a ripple effect. So, authenticity is extremely important, at least from the at a minimum, which is a big ask is to have the leaders of the organization in all different levels coming from a place that there is a genuine authentic concern for the people of the organization. And then from there you can safety is kind of like a byproduct of creating a nice, a good, safe environment and I want to say safe environment. I don't mean like making sure everyone has the product. PPE and all that. But like creating a safe environment, that kind of a psychosocial safe environment where folks feel free to bring up bring up concerns free of reprisal and, and things of that nature. But again, without an authentic leadership design or without authentic leaders, you'll never get there

- Workplace culture plays a big role in your thinking, and you've spoken about potentially unconscious cues that show cultural priorities that influence people's behavior. So can you give an example and sort of explain why culture is foundational to safety?

- [Tim Marsh] Sure, well, I get increasingly over the years we've it's not at all controversial to suggest that culture is king. You know, and what we what we do talk about is the incredible power of peer pressure. You know, so a simple example, you know, from a utility company I worked with years ago, two weeks in that university, to be a fully qualified engineer, you know, so the two weeks, once they have qualified, they have to do two weeks to be qualified for the company. So it's quite an intensive training session. And what we found is that you put them in the back of a van with three experienced guys. And they've gone native by lunchtime, because you know, a lot lots of user friendly examples that I that I won't use here, because they're all about sport, and, and other things. But you know, what, what you find is, no matter what your intentions, you tend to react to what you see around you. So a long controversial one, you pick up a higher car at an airport, and you won't do not speed on our island. I don't know Cyprus, Trinidad, because we'll nail you and ruin your holiday. And as you hit the motorway, you see a big sign that says 80 kilometers an hour maximum severe penalties, you're definitely doing 70 kilometers an hour as you come out. But you know, as you as you drive down the road, what you find is, the inside lane is doing 90, the middle lane is doing 100. And it's a free for all in the outside lane. You know, and we used to ask the question, well, what speed would you be doing 10 minutes later? Because delegates would say, Well, you've got to keep up with flow revenue, it's not safe to not keep up with flow. So we found a better question was how many of you would have used the outside lane within the first half an hour? And as a rule, half the audience put their hand up? Because you respond not to what it says on the tin or what you've been trained? You respond to what the experience confident people around you do, and you'll take the lead from them. And almost almost instantly at that, for that matter. So So culture is king because, you know, I was I was involved in Colin, Colin to looking at Ladbroke Grove, the train crash rather than column one, the Piper Alpha disaster. And when we came up with a definition, which was you know, your culture is what is typical or unremarkable on a normal day. So it's not what we say it is. It's what actually happens around us on a normal day. That's your culture and culture is king.

- The last one is avoid using safety, culture and safety, climate interchangeably. You touched on this a little bit earlier.

- [Dr Tristan Casey] Yeah, it's something that unfortunately, still happens today, despite so many different articles and journals saying do not do this. They are different concepts. As I said, the best way to think about it is that the culture is the sort of the overarching umbrella concept, which includes safety climate within it. Climate is probably more representing the middle layer. If we think about culture as a big onion, the middle section of the beliefs, the descriptive ethnographic approach, the middle layer is the climate or the perception and the values and the priorities and the outer layers or the manifestations and tangible signs of what people do in the organization. So if we confuse the two, we're sort of not really being accurate in what we're saying.

Mary: And then we're just creating two confusing terms.