How Can You Make a Case for Empowering Safety Culture?

In our first episode, Mary Conquest talks with professor Tim Marsh, a leading expert in behavioral safety and occupational psychology. Tim Marsh discusses mental health, elements of safety culture, making a business case for management, situational awareness, effective communication in safety, and other topics.

Tim Marsh was one of the team leaders of the original UK research into behavioral safety in the early 1990s, and is a Chartered Psychologist and a Chartered Fellow of IOSH. He ran the open courses on Behavioural Safety and Safety Culture for IOSH for many years. He has worked with hundreds of companies around the world, including the BBC, the National Theatre and the European Space Agency, as well as the usual list of blue-chip organizations from manufacturing, utilities, food and drink, oil and gas, and pharmaceutics. He was awarded a President's Commendation by the Institute of Risk and Safety Management in 2008 and was selected as their first ever 'Specialist Fellow' in 2010.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport, in other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff.

♪ [music] ♪ I have Professor Tim Marsh here today to talk about the role and the importance of wellbeing in a culture of safety. Tim Marsh is one of only a few chartered psychologists who are also Chartered Fellows of the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

He was a team leader in UK research into behavioral safety in the early 1990s, and is considered a world authority on the subject of behavioral safety, safety leadership, and organizational culture. Tim has worked with more than 400 major organizations around the world, including Apple, the European Space Agency, the World Health Organization, and the UN.

He's the author of "Affective Safety Management," "Talking Safety," and "Total Safety Culture." I'm pleased to have him here today, and excited to hear more about wellbeing and safety culture. Hi.

- [Professor Marsh] Hi, Mary, how are you? That ding-dong was my reminder that we're about to start.

- So, you've said in a recent webinar that as recently as two years ago, the link between wellbeing and safety was a controversial one. Why is that, and how do you think that it's changed?

- Why is that? Because we were very wary, certainly organizations were very wary of talking about the link between mental health and accidents. You know, it was considered that any discussion of that seemed to be blaming the victim as opposed to analyzing it as a risk factor. And slowly, through understanding the data more clearly, we've realized that, actually, it's just a huge risk factor, whether you're coming at it from a continuity point of view, resilience point of view, or an individual thriving and doing well perspective.

So that the data here in the UK is that for every worker we kill, 31 workers will take their own lives, you know? And when you realize that for every, you know, for every person who takes their own life successfully, something like 25 will try on a given day.

You know, and we know about Heinrich's triangle, so you don't have to extrapolate very far to realize you're talking about a lot of people in work, operating heavy machinery, taking really difficult and important decisions, interacting with a whole bunch of colleagues who are really not in a very good place at all. Clearly, that's not ideal. The likelihood of them giving you above the line or discretionary effort is bound to be smaller on average than a person having an average day.

And we argue the likelihood of them having an accident is higher, not an awful lot in the way of good quality meta-analysis, but early studies seem to suggest twice as likely. And the fact is for that, and you're much more likely to be distracted, much less likely to have high levels of situational awareness, you know, both things we'd want to have. You're far more likely to be fatalistic, you know, with that kind of, "Oh, whatever, I don't care."

And of course, you're far more likely to create risk around you by doing aggressive impetuous things, having arguments with people, failing to be a good team player when good teamwork is important for safety. And I think all of those things are utterly self-evident. And as we've done podcasts and given talks and said, "Look, it's not about blaming the individual at all. It's about understanding that if one in five, on any given day is struggling with their mental health, that is a colossal risk factor. And you can either hope for the best, or you can proactively address it."

Know that it's there. We know from world-class safety culture that what you don't do is cross your fingers. What you do do is you proactively go out and you understand where it is, why it's happening, who it's happening to, and what we can do about it. I just absolutely refute any suggestion that those same principles don't apply to wellbeing and mental health as they do to safety itself.

- Speaking about shifting from this idea of individual blame, and to workplace culture, so 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?

- Sure. Well, you know, increasingly over the years, it's not at all controversial to suggest that culture is king, you know? And what we talk about is the incredible power of peer pressure. So, a simple example from a utility company I worked with years ago, two weeks in their university to be a fully qualified engineer.

So once they've 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, and lots of user-friendly examples that I won't use here because they're all about sport and other things.

But, you know, what you find is no matter what your intentions, you tend to react to what you see around you. So a non-controversial one, you pick up a hire car at an airport, and you're warned, 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 78 kilometers an hour as you come out.

But, you know, 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? But of course, delegates would say, "Well, you've got keep up with flow, haven't you? 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 experienced confident people around you do, and you take your lead from them. And almost instantly at that, for that matter.

So, culture is king because, you know, I was involved in Cullen two, looking at Ladbroke Grove, the train crash, rather than Cullen 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.

- It's not what's on your safety posters.

- It's not what's... And you did ask me a two-part question, actually. You have to forgive me, viewers. It is Friday night here in Manchester and the football and the rugby is on the telly, and it'll take me a while to get up to speed. But you asked me a question, how is it conveyed? With subtle cues.

And, you know, and one of the things we've really understood recently is this whole kind of Kahneman thinking fast, thinking slow, and how it's manifest through nudge, you know? Behavioral economics is the science of big changes in behavior for small inputs. You know, so anybody who's anywhere near behavioral safety or behavioral change should be all over nudge. And the sorts of things we understand now are, you know, when you're in a pub, you're divorced, you're dating, and across the table comes, "You're a really nice guy, Tim, and I've really enjoyed these last couple of weeks. It's been lots of fun, but..."

you know? I've got my coat on before they've even finished the sentence, yeah? Because you know that anything before the but in a sentence is just flannel. Everything after the but is the meat of it. So, you know, in a safety brief, in a toolbox talk, "I want this job doing safely, but by Friday," means by Friday as safely as you can.

And when those corners are cut and we get unlucky, those workarounds occur and we went out of luck, we all end up being caught, you know, and the supervisor will say, "But I said safely. I very explicitly said safely." And the person on the receiving end is likely to say, "Well, yeah, but..." you know, and it's lost in the mist of time though, isn't it, what was actually said and how it was conveyed, but conveyed it was.

- You talked as well about elements of culture. There were three different elements that you mentioned. What are those, and can you tell us a bit more about them?

- Well, I mean, there's a million elements of culture, you know, values, principles, artifacts, 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 done in threes. And I think the three clusters of issues, number one, your systems, your procedures, your rules, your training, all that good...

your safety management system, your risk assessments, all the stuff that we go and audit and invest in. And obviously, if you haven't hit diminishing returns with that, there's work to be done, you know? Go and buy some safety equipment and 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. you know, getting in the way and diminishing returns is hit, and the workers are saying, "Oh, no, not more bloody paperwork," and so on. A lot of organizations call it the blob effect.

You just keep piling into it and it just gets bigger and bigger. And so, once you've hit diminishing returns, you really need to address something smarter, like turn left and focus on the human factor. And 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? And this, of course, is a factor of transformational leadership rather than transactional leadership, by which I mean 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 useful. Toolbox talks that are full of dialogue become useful. Anything that generally, you know, gets a... and of course, the classic one that we're seeing in Britain at the moment, you lead by example. Because, you know, we are 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 the most deadly of all the sort of psychosocial issues there are because it completely undermines trust, and trust is key. So, you want all that going on, and you've got your switched on, motivated workers. And what you want them doing ideally is learning.

And, you know, HSG48 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 unintentional mistakes caused by fatigue, lack of training, lack of tools, lack of time, or it's the cultural stuff. And we've made a start on the cultural stuff.

And 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 the best they can. So you hear things like, you can have it quick, you can have it cheap, you can have it good quality, pick any two, you know? And if you cascade that sort of issue down to 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 is an individual off on a folly of their own, you know, there are questions to be asked. Who employed this person? Who trained this person? Who's supervising this person? Who's responsible for sending them out there so demotivated and half-cocked?

You can't just blame the individual because they've done something daft. And, you know, an ABC analysis, temptation analysis, shows really clearly, if the safe way is slow, inconvenient, or uncomfortable, then, you know, 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 then and say, "Well, you cut the corner. You knew what you were doing," you know? "Yes, but I was really tired. I was getting towards the end of a long shift, absolutely desperate for a cup of coffee, and I just couldn't resist that little corner cut, just to try and have 10 minutes to regain my breath."

So when you step back, there's so much you can learn. And course, the classic one is instead of shouting, "Why have you done that?" You ask the question, "Why did you do that?" Because 9 times out of 10, curious why has got a good answer. And so, the final of the three pieces for me is learning.

I think Carol Dweck, and she's from your neck of the woods, I think, you know, who wrote the bestselling book, "Mindset," sold 3 million copies, or whatever. And the essence of that book is that she says her best ever boss asked three questions, "What's going wrong? Why is it going wrong? What are we going to do about it?"

And then if you crossreference that to somebody like Andrew Hopkins, the Australian writer who wrote some fabulous books like "Failure to Learn" and "Disastrous Decisions," you know, and his mindful safety concept. Mindful safety concept is any complex organization is chockfull of risk and mistakes every day. Now, you know, 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. That's my three things. Energized workers being asked, "Why is that going wrong?"

- Yeah, you've spoken about the importance of situational awareness, and actually, you had an excellent metaphor... well, not even a metaphor, but example of this in the 1955 Le Mans 24-Hour race disaster, right? I'd like you to talk about that, but I also wanted to ask, standard planning around risk is flawed, is something that you have said.

We all know that situational awareness is important, but standard planning around it isn't great. And you've talked about this as the model of human error. So can you talk a little bit about situational awareness as well as understanding human error a little bit better?

- The example you've obviously seen is the Le Mans race. Juan Fangio, he's driving a Mercedes, I think he's twice a world champion on the way to winning five in seven years, something like that. And he's obviously the big star, you know, the Lewis Hamilton of his day. And in that race is a serious incident, I think 85 people were killed, and he could have driven into the back of it.

It was obviously just a horrendous collision, but he didn't. And afterwards, people said to him, "Well, how on earth did you manage to not drive into the back of that? It was a blind corner. You slowed. How did you know to slow?" And the way he explained it was, he said, "Well, look, you know, I'm Fangio, a big star, I'm driving a bright silver Mercedes at 200 miles an hour, and I noticed that nobody in the crowd was looking at me, so I knew something had happened."

That's pretty switched on, isn't it?

- Yeah, at those speeds.

- If I was driving with this man, I'd have my eyes closed and I'd be screaming. But, you know, that level of situational awareness is not easy to get to. Obviously, he's experienced, he's in flow, he's in focus, and so on. You know, and of course, a lot of organizations will say, if only everybody could be like that, if you do get to the end of the run of events from bad decisions to bad maintenance to bad supervision to bad behavior, you'd be alert and you could nip it right at the end there, and block the last of the cheese, you know, Reason's cheese model.

But, of course, we can't do that because even a person who is absolutely switched on is going to be away with the fairies for about five minutes an hour. It's a physiological limitation. It's why sports in the UK, of course, we have soccer and that's 45 minutes long, rugby's 40 minutes long, TV programs tend to be 50 minutes long.

It's because that's really how long we can concentrate comfortably, you know, is about 50 minutes. So, even if you've got no issues going on at all, you've slept well, you've got no relationship worries, you've got no financial worries, your kids are thriving, you get on with your boss, you enjoy your job, etc., etc., etc., you're not on medication of any type, you're still probably going to spend five minutes an hour away with the fairies.

And, of course, if you come across a trip hazard, you might trip over it. So people being exhorted to always pay full attention, always keep an eye on what you're doing, you know, always be bright and alert, has got a limited efficacy. You know, if you've 10,000 workers, 5 minutes an hour times 10,000 workers is an awful lot of zombie time. And so, what we found is a much better approach is to say, look, in the 55 minutes when you're bright and alert, if you see a trip hazard, stop and tidy it up so that it's not there to trip over when you come back around the corner 20 minutes from now away with the fairies, you know?

The second approach is just much more effective. And when we start talking about human error, of course, not everybody is in that five minutes away with the fairies an hour, you know? And we have a model, it's a circle with a little blue sliver representing five minutes. And when we put up the big blue sliver, that's more like a 20-minute away with the fairies.

And we say, "How many of you have days that look a lot like this?" You know, most people in the room will say, "Yeah, I have days like that." I certainly have hours like that, you know? I've stayed up too late the night before, I went to my pub quiz, I'm a bit hungover and I got through the morning on coffee. I had a heavy lunch to soak up, you know, what was left of last night's booze.

And between 2:00 and 3:00, there could have been an alien invasion and I'd have struggled to notice or care, you know?

- Yes. That's a pretty common sleepy time of day.

- And, you know, then there's shift work and all the rest of the stuff, you know?

- You said something that I found interesting. Goals should be less about making good people into great people, and more about keeping average people upright. Can you explain what you mean by that?

- James Reason, who's the godfather of all this stuff, another Manc, I'm in Manchester as I speak and henceM the Emily Pankhurst mug from one of my daughters. And James Reason is, you know, the great godfather of all this stuff. And he came up with his golden rules of human error. The last one was, you know, we need to make good people great, you know? Not really for me to contradict James Reason, but...

- But I'm about to.

- Because, you know, that's great, and obviously, we want to try and make good people great. But for me, the vast majority of the accidents and the problems we encounter in work, and the bigger barrel to shoot at is to keep average people on an average day and not let them slide back into something worse.

So it's keeping Joe Average, upright, and focused, and safe, and switched on, and engaged. Not about the elite. You know, it's not about fighter pilots for me. It's about the engineers who maintain the plane.

- You also had some thoughts about Mental Health First Aiders. Now I'm not as familiar with sort of the culture of safety management and how it's developed, but I imagine that it's a relatively recent adoption in workplaces, is to have Mental Health First Aiders. But you have a particular point of view about them that I'd like you to share.

- Yeah. You'll see me joke about my first week's work. Well, in the UK, I don't know what it's like in Canada, but certainly around the world, there are Mental Health First Aiders. The whole idea, you know, came up in Australia, a long way from the UK, and also Mates in Mind, another initiative. So all Australian, as it happens.

And it's a big thing now in the UK, mental health first aid, is you go on a two-day training course and you get your badge that says you are aware and, you know, you're taught to intervene and signpost, and so on. That's great. You know, it certainly doesn't hurt and it certainly helps a lot if done well. But what we're finding, a bit like the battle days of behavioral safety, 30 years ago, a behavioral safety course might be, "Listen to somebody like Tim. He's going to give you a lecture to tell you how important behavior is, and some good examples. Now, just pay full attention, don't forget that, and off you go."

And that's it. That's our behavioral safety program, the magic bullet silver dip thing. And I think what we're finding in the UK certainly is a lot of organizations are sending 5% of their staff on Mental Health First Aider courses, and then what they're doing is they're saying, "Well, we've got it covered. That's our mental health problem covered."

And the example, a guy called Chris Jerman, he's a thought leader for IOSH, actually, at the moment. He was working for me at the time, and he said, you know, "We talked about steelworks and, oh, I worked in the steelworks." So it's a slightly hypothetical example. My first week's work in the late 1970s, I want you to imagine that my mum took me in. Actually, I rode in on my motorbike as it happens, but imagine my mum takes me in.

And it's Llanwern Steelworks. And as she drops me off, the supervisor says, "Oh, thanks, Mrs. Marsh. Now, it's true. We have hot metal splashing around all over. We have noxious gases in all the buildings. We have forklift trucks charging up and down like it's a Grand Prix, and we have a horrible bullying management culture in the there. But don't worry about it. Tim will be fine with us because we've got four highly skilled first aiders in there, and they'll look after him for you."

You know? And obviously, the point is she shouldn't have been spectacularly reassured by that, and nor should we, you know? We don't want to be looking at having Mental Health First Aiders as the solution. We want to be proactively looking at what we're doing to our workers that they might need a Mental Health First Aider in the first place. And proactively trying to create a culture that is strong and empowering and gives you the benefit of good work is good for you.

Because people who enjoy their work and find their work rewarding are mentally healthier than people that don't need to work at all.

- Well, that leads me into my next question, which is really the big question. What can organizations do to make meaningful changes, you know, more than just sort of a backup, like a Mental First Aider? Not that that's a bad first step, but more meaningful changes once they accept some of these concepts that we've been talking about?

- Well, I mean, the first thing, of course, you have to do, is you have to do the reactive stuff, just like we have to have accident investigations and fines for people who...and so on, is to spot, actively spot, that people are hitting critical. And when you look at these issues, we all of us have bad days, you know? 85% is depression and anxiety, you know, when we're talking about mental health.

And depression is merely, really, if you talk to a cognitive-behavioral therapist, depression is merely thinking of about things that have happened in a negative way, which we all do. So, it's a continuum. Whereas anxiety is thinking about things that haven't happened yet in a negative way, you know? And a behavioral therapist would say, "Look, every minute you spend doing one or the other, unless the depression stuff is a spur to learning, but every minute you spend thinking negatively steals a minute from you to do something more positively," you know?

Especially with the anxiety, it steals a minute from you to work towards making whatever it is you're worried about less likely to happen. So, it's a continuum, but like everything else, once we get to the stage where that's getting in the way, and it's going to get worse, you know, with a risk to' ourselves and we might be a risk to our colleagues, we might get to the stage where we're off, you know?

Initially, we know that we'll be off with a bad back. 80% of people who are off with bad backs are actually off with mild depression and anxiety, and all those other studies. So we don't want that to happen, and we certainly don't want them to have a florid breakdown and be off for months. So, spotting them and then pointing them in the direction of employee assistance or the Samaritans and other issues is a really good thing to do.

Now, Mental Health First Aiders, of course, can be really useful for that, but if you put absolutely everybody through mental health awareness training, and the training we do now for organizations on human factors has, this is the top five things you need to do for this, and these are the five things you need to look for. So it's really easy to blend into good old-fashioned human error training or even HSG48, and so on.

But if you've got everybody doing it, you don't really need Mental Health First Aiders at all. So that's a very long-winded way of saying... But the second thing is we want to be proactive. We want to create an environment that keeps people in the middle, keeps people away from critical naturally because they actually find work empowering.

If I could just go off to the side, I did a job for an organization a couple of months ago, and I was working with the board. It's only a relatively small company. And I said, "Look, good work is good for you. Sometimes having a good job is the only thing that keeps you upright." There was only six of us in the room. The head of HR just said, "Yeah, that resonates. Yeah."

Bang. And we had to have half an hour off. And when we got back, I said to the CEO, "Well, when you do your talk, you know, I'd really like you to talk about this." He's a big guy, ex-rugby player, 6 foot 4, super confident, pretty intimidating kind of guy, you know, said, "I'm not doing it." I said, "Oh." He said, "But I'll stand on the stage, but I can't talk in public. I'm too anxious."

So, I'm, jeez, you know? So, it's that creating a job that really keeps you energized, gives you a reason to ping out of bed in the morning, you know? "Boom. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that." And we know what that looks like, you know? A guy called Paul Zak, a modern writer, it's kind of a variation on that famous book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," Covey, wasn't it?

It was this guy I can't... Stephen Covey. But 30 years ago, at Sheffield University, a guy called Peter Warr wrote about the vitamin model of mental health at work. And he identified nine factors that determine how mentally healthy you are at work, or how good that job might be for your mental health.

So, we've known about it for 30 years, but of course, 30 years ago, the only people who paid any attention were students, and did a few master's research projects. But now, of course, we're using those questions. So when we talk through leaders, things you should ask for, we can cover Warr's factors. So, a very simple example, interpersonal contact.

Some people like lots of interpersonal contact, some people don't like very much interpersonal contact at all, but absolutely everybody wants it to be good quality. Or something like autonomy, you know? So some people love working from home, other people hate it. Autonomy is a really good example. You know, as a rule, we like a bit of autonomy.

Now, some people like a lot of autonomy. You know, if you like a lot of autonomy, you can only really function in society as a self-employed person. A lot of people listening to this podcast, if they had the level of autonomy that I've enjoyed over the last 30 years, they'd never sleep. So, it's about tailoring the job and the task to the individual best you can, you know? Other people have a really high N-Ach, you know, need for achievement, and they really want to be on training courses and they want to be developing their skills and using their creativity.

And other people have got a really low N-Ach and they just want to be left alone to do a reasonably straightforward job, you know?

- Yeah. I think people like different amounts of structure. And another guest I was speaking to was saying, you know, some people don't want to make the decisions that are required to be a safety manager. They don't want to make the tough calls, that they're quite happy within a more predictable framework. So, yeah, know thyself, know your workers, I suppose.

- Yeah. And if you go a mental health first aid course, they'll talk you through windows on the world. And there's just like an onion, you know, who are you at core? Your values, your family, you know? You know, other stuff, where you work, and sexuality, and so on. And how can you use it on a training course just to say, look, you know, individuals are infinitely complex and infinitely different?

You know, we're not going to go through this whole model. Just remember the next time you talk to somebody else, they're not you.

- Yes. Yeah. That's what it comes down to.

- And you can't tell who they are by looking at them. You're going to have to talk to them and see what they think, see what they like. And so, I'm rabbiting on 10 to the dozen here, I know, to try and get some stuff across. But, you know, being a good listener, it seems to be absolutely core to everything. So, any good training course, whether it's Mental Health First Aider, safety leadership, human error leadership, which is what we do these days, active listening is core.

- I have a few more questions. One is, so you've talked about what organizations can do to make meaningful changes. What about individuals? So if an individual OHS professional sees the need for cultural change, and I would assume in this example, if this individual sees the need, then maybe they're the only one who sees it, or the first one who sees it.

How would you recommend they go about trying to make a way forward, trying to affect some kind of change?

- Oh, well, obviously, buy all my books and give them to the C-suite. Well, I don't want to be too cynical, but when they're looking for inspiration, when they need to make a change and it's looking promising, my business partner, a guy called Jason Anker is Europe's leading inspirational speaker.

Unfortunately, back in the early 1990s he fell off a ladder and paralyzed himself, and is now acknowledged as Europe's leading inspirational speaker. A lot of organizations will get Jason in, put everybody in a hanger or canteen and say, "Listen to Jason," and he'd slay them with his talk about what he went through, what he put his family through, subsequent suicide attempts because of mental health crisis, all this sort of stuff.

Although now he finishes really positively because he's thriving at the moment and really enjoying his work. But that's a different matter. But, you know, when you're trying to create an impression, an inspirational speaker seems like a good idea, but it's the same as the Mental Health First Aiders thing. You know, we've done that, they've all had the talk, half the audience were in tears, they all filed out in silence going, "Oh, I'll never take a shortcut ever again." And then two weeks later, the environment has put you straight back where you were and you've got a week's benefit out of it.

I think, you know, if you're a safety professional and you're really struggling to get the C-suite to listen to you, you've got to go in with the win-win stuff. You've got to be able to articulate the figures, you know? But if you've got a workforce... so we've talked about mental health before, and the figures are just astronomical, you know?

And I know they're similar in Canada as they are to the UK. I did look it up. We lose 5,000 people to suicide, 4,000 of working age, which is a ratio of 31 to 1, compared to the people we kill in industrial accidents. And as I said earlier, you know, for everyone who completes suicide, you will have something like two dozen who'll have tried it on the day.

And another factor, again, 3 times that many, so 100 or so will be planning it. So, if you've got a workforce of 10,000 people and we talk about 1 in 4 in a year, or 1 in 5 at any given time, that is a colossal risk factor for you. And you don't have to...you know, obviously suicide is still relatively, even with those figures, it's still relatively infrequent.

But if you have a workforce that's unhappy, you know, if you have a culture that's quite toxic and unsupportive, and a workforce that are not really particularly engaged, you can guarantee you've got all sorts of people out there just going through the motions. You've almost certainly got a high absenteeism rate, you'll almost certainly have a high turnover of your best staff, and it'll be the best ones that go quickest, of course, because they can.

You won't be attracting the best staff in because you'll have a bad reputation, you know, and these days online, everybody knows everything. I mean, it doesn't have to be down the pub where somebody says, "Oh, you don't want to work there." It's everywhere, isn't it? You'll almost certainly have, as I said, absenteeism rates will be high, presenteeism rates will be high.

You know, that whole thing about, "I'm just going to get between hereand 5:00, you know, as quietly as I can." You know, at Llanwern Steelworks, I said I worked there, we had a makeshift barracks in Llanwern Steelworks. I never got to use it because I didn't stay more than a week, but you would go in for the night shift, you'd take your sleeping bag with you, and you'd go into the barracks. People would cover you, and you'd just sleep through the night.

That's presenteeism.

- That's a fairly extreme example. I actually worked at a radio station where the station manager, now, this is a college station, so not as much scrutiny, put on some album on a loop and just went to sleep in the studio because he couldn't make it through. This was the university station.

I imagine he had been cramming for exams or perhaps doing something more fun than that, I don't know. But...

- Anyway, you know, in the old days we did presenteeism better than these young 'uns, you know?

- Yes, that's right.

- And of course, you've got your above-the-line behavior, citizenship behavior, all that lovely stuff that we want, creativity, helping new starts, putting yourself out, going the extra mile, whatever you want to call it. All that stuff that you get if you've got a switched on motivated workforce, well, you're not getting it if you've got a workforce that's really hanging and demotivated, you know? And of course, one of the things we're talking about here is good old-fashioned productivity and customer service and quality assurance.

Clearly, all of that is compromised if you've got a workforce that hates you.

- Yeah. So it's not just about frankly being a good person and wanting to have a happy workforce. But there's a business case. There's a very clear business case for, you know, healthy workers.

- No, absolutely. It's clearly a win-win, you know. And one of my books finishes with a cartoon. It's a pastiche of the famous "Monty Python" scene, you know? And you've got a guy saying, "Well, so, you know, fewer of our best workers leaving, less absenteeism, less presenteeism, more above-the-line behavior, more productivity, you know? Why else should we worry about the wellbeing of our workforce?"

And there's, like, little black shadows in the front. And there's a joke that one of the little black shadows says, "Well, fewer accidents and better mental health, Reg." You know, and says, "Well, fewer accidents and better mental health taken as rare, don't need to... it's self-evident, you know, no need to mention that." And there is a business case, and all sorts of studies now quoting twice as productive and this and that, you know, a third less likely to lose your best staff, and all these other figures.

And my experience is, unless you've just killed somebody and everybody's feeling really quite focused on the human factor, you really need to hit senior management with the win-win data, because otherwise they're not going to listen to you. Because at the very least, they're busy, they've got lots of other things to do, they've got shareholders to worry about, they've got their...

and of course, a fifth of them will be hanging by a thread because they've got mental health issues, and so, the last thing they'd want is a new difficult project to roll out. But they will, if they think it's a really good thing to do for the shareholders, for their career, for their workers.

You have to make the business case, I think.

- Okay, well, I have a few more questions. I ask these to every guest. They're just a bit of fun. The university of Tim, if you were to develop your own safety management training curriculum, where would you start? And I realize that the answer is probably everything we've just talked about, but which core human skill do you think is the most important to develop in tomorrow's safety professionals?

- Ooh, goodness. As you say though, I mean, obviously, I do get to write training courses.

- Yeah. It's not hypothetical.

- So, you know, my books that are in universities, I've just described for the safety professional, I think the book that I would point them at first is Matthew Syed's "Black Box Thinking." I think it's the most important book written about safety. It's not written about safety, although safety is a recurring theme. "Black Box Thinking," by Matthew Syed.

You know, along with things like "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre. There's only three or four books you need to read and you've got graduate-level thinking straight away. And one of them, I think, is Matthew Syed's "Black Box Thinking." And he compares and contrast aviation and their approach to learning, and he compares and contrasts that with hospitals.

You know, you might not know this, but if you take North America and Europe combined, hospitals kill about 1 million people a year, you know, from infections, from medical errors, and so on. And you'd think, given that data, that they would be fabulous at proactively learning and understanding about their mistakes and sharing that knowledge.

And they're useless, you know? No offense if you're working in that industry, but you are. And James Reason did a fantastic podcast about this, you know, and organizations that understand that actually, they're going to make lots of mistakes. And what you need to do is not be defensive about it, but just like Andrew Hopkins says, "Know these things are coming and try in front of them as best you can."

And Matthew Syed's book really makes the case well with lots of really user-friendly examples. And it makes the case basically that countries, societies, species go forward fastest when they have a really good objective analytical approach to learning.

- So you've actually answered one of my other questions. I'll ask it again in case something else comes up, but I was going to ask for your best, most practical tips or resources for safety managers looking to improve their work relationships or their core skills. So that could be a book, and you've mentioned several just now, a website, a concept.

Are there any other that come to mind, because you have already kind of answered the question?

- Yeah, no, I genuinely think soft skills, you know, we all know that lots and lots of people out there who've got IOSH qualifications, NEBOSH qualifications, and so on, being effective is all about your soft skills, really. And anybody looking to develop themself as an individual really wants to be on as many courses as they can for active listening skills, how to give negative feedback, why being a monitor evaluator is a fantastic thing, but only if you've got high levels of soft skills, because otherwise, you're really annoying.

I don't know if you know, the monitor evaluator is the person who hovers above the group and has a really good idea to whether they're going wrong or not, you know? So, they're almost always right, but the way they convey that correct thinking can make all the difference in the world. A little bit of a coaching style, "Hey, can I just ask, are we still heading for that ultimate aim that we put on the board earlier," is one way, and, "We've gone wrong again," is another.

So, soft skills make all the difference in the world to being able to apply your technical skills. And, again, I think he might be Canadian. Is Goleman Canadian? I think he is. Daniel Goleman. He wrote a book called "Emotional Intelligence." I think he makes the case, I think I remember this correctly, Mary, that, you know, if you correlate people coming out of law class with, you know, and I know over your side of the pond you like to know where you are in the class.

We don't here. You either get a first or two out of a two, two, and that's... But you know, where you finish in your class, that doesn't correlate at all well with success as a lawyer, for example. But if you can assess their emotional intelligence as they graduate, that does correlate incredibly well with success.

And the same is true with safety, really. I mean, obviously, you need to pass the law degree for this to apply. So there's a bar that you have to jump, you know, before you're even in the game. But in the world of safety, again, just having a good qualification is not as useful to you once you've got it as being able to convince people about what you know, and to able to be nuanced and subtle about your thinking because the world is a nuanced, subtle, difficult, political, annoying, corrupt, dysfunctional place, isn't it?

And being able to navigate your way through all that requires all sorts of skills that are not just in a certificate. So, I'd strongly suggest anything you can do that improves your soft skills or non-technical skills, we're trying to call them now...

We don't say soft because it implies weak, you know, it's a...

- I like to call them core skills, actually, because I think that's just a personal preference, not a... because, well, for obvious reasons, right? They really are core to your success and that goes beyond safety.

- Well, and in relationships and things, you know, so. I wish I had a penny for every time I've been accused of being a bad listener.

- So, our last question, let's turn back time for a minute. If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your career, perhaps this is 16-year-old you on your motorbike, and you could give young Tim one piece of advice, what would it be?

- Oh, well, actually, do you know? I wouldn't. Because as it turns out, I left school at 16, I didn't get on with school very well. It wasn't a very good school, and I left under a bit of a cloud. And then I had a succession of jobs, none of which I enjoyed at all and none of which I was interested in. I was convinced I was going to be a golf professional for a long time, until I realized I wasn't dedicated enough at that either.

But what it turned out to be was a fabulous apprenticeship for being an occupational psychologist. So I wasn't paying attention to loading the vans at Woolworths and working as a teller for the NatWest Bank, and all the rest of the stuff that I did. I wasn't paying any attention at all. I just thought, "Oh, God, I don't like this very much."

But as it turns out, it turned out to be absolutely fabulous, entirely unintentional apprenticeship for being an occupational psychologist. But that was luck. That was sheer luck. That was by accident and not design.

- I would say luck and inclination, right? Because...

- No. No. It was sheer luck. Absolutely sheer luck. You know, because, as an occupational psychologist, I wasn't even enjoying doing that very much because once you've done a development center for managers, you've done a development center for managers. But a guy called Dominic Cooper who is over in America who was next door to me, was running the big project on the construction sites for behavioral safety, and I'd just finished looking at suicide in army recruits for my PhD.

Dominic had a big argument with the department about some technical issues and decided not to continue and go off on his own, and has thrived ever since, but they were desperate for somebody to step in. And I happened to play touch rugby with a professor who needed a replacement. He said, "Well, you've just worked with army recruits. You can go on a construction site without getting eaten. So, you know, could you just stand in for a month?"

I said, "Yeah, I'll go on. Then it's a favor for you, Ivan." And of course, I loved it. I just absolutely loved it. And it was so much more fun working on a construction site and looking at safety on a construction site than it was dealing with yet another group of managers. So I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. And because I'm in safety, I'm working with the frontline often.

People who work in nuclear power plants, people who drive trains for a living, people who fly planes for a living, you know, people who run data centers, oil rigs, etc., etc. So it was pure luck. So my advice would be read Matthew Syed's "Black Box Thinking," realize that keeping your head up, looking around, and seeing what you can learn as you travel along is really useful because you never know when it'll come in handy.

- So, if our listeners would like to look you up, where will they find you on the web, certainly, and your books?

- I'm too old for all that social media stuff. It drives me up the wall and I can't conceive that anybody needs to hear from me twice a day about what I had for breakfast, and God knows what. So, my books are on Amazon. The new one, and thanks for the opportunity to... I did one about 10 years ago, 14 years ago, Christ, called "Talking Safety," which was, if you just do one thing, do this, go out and have a really good two-way dialogue about safety with the frontline.

And that did well. And the new version of it is "Talking Health and Safety," which is talking all about this mental health stuff and wellbeing and really embracing the new move, this new front that we've got in the safety world where we're really looking at the individual, as we've discussed. So, the new book, "Talking Health and Safety," and developing an empowered workforce in a post-COVID world or something like that.

That's the new one. That's on Amazon. And if you Google me, Tim Marsh safety, there's quite a few clips and articles, SHP Online and "IOSH Magazine," and things like that. And my company, which does work, and has done work in Canada, Anker and Marsh. Anker with a k, not a ch, ankerandmarsh.com. Obviously, we do frontline leadership training and cultural assessment, as we've discussed.

And I'm certainly happy to come to Canada to do it, especially if it could be somewhere nice, like Vancouver, one of the world's most beautiful cities.

- Yeah, well, thank you very much for your time. A lot of interesting ideas for people to think about, our international audience, and, yeah, we just really appreciate your thoughts. ♪

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