Words That Don't Mean Anything
I hear you out there, I’ve heard you and, especially your leadership, use big words (that don’t mean anything) to try to explain your workers behaviors:
Why can workers get so complacent that they ignore alarms and take greater and greater risks in hazardous environments that would scare the normal human?
Why do workers not buy-in to our safety program, all they do is pencil whip our inspections, observations and reporting?
How do we get them to care?
And Ultimately
We should build a safety culture where everyone looks out for each other!
We should get our workers to take ownership over their safety!
We should get workers engaged!
Really nice folks. I applaud you for attempting to define what you want in your safety culture. However, face it, you don’t understand what any of this means… really, be honest with yourself. The reason I’ll bet you don’t truly understand terms like complacency or, on the flip side, ownership is because, if you did, you would have already done something about them. Instead you’re begging your workers to conform to some type of feelings to reach the goal. Nothing could be further from the truth and you're left frustrated.
I’m certain that you’ve experienced all manner of consultants in your company, or speakers at safety conferences, or authors contriving all sorts of definitions for engagement and ownership delivered with grand sports analogies or ‘overcoming-the-odds’ stories. As a consultant, speaker, and author myself, I had many opportunity to watch several former fighter pilots, successful businessfolks, the severely-injured telling their story, experienced safety professionals, and the usual snake-oil salesperson spin big balls of yarn describing engagement and ownership in visionary terms, linking it to awesome organizational outcomes, and then telling you how their product (usually surveys and training seminars) will improve your safety culture.
Pull that slide presentation, workshop or book that they gave you out. Look at their slides containing these words … they are full of other words that don’t mean anything linked together in a colorful model that, on the surface, has face validity, but, in reality, has no hold on behavior. Here is an example from a slide deck I got at a safety conference. According to them, the ‘traits’ of engagement are: satisfaction, pride, belief, value, and morale. They then go on for 37 slides using words like respect, communication, involvement, participation. In the end you are left with a pale word salad when it comes to the concepts.
These words, like engagement, are what we in research psychology call “constructs”. We have a notion of some phenomena, then look within our own experience to collectively “construct” a word to describe what we don’t really understand. Then apply all this mess to describe people’s behavior and we wonder why we are so confused.
When we construct our vision of safety culture based on words that don’t mean anything, we end up with a house of cards, ready to be knocked down by the next round of cost-cutting, leadership changes, production challenge or just time, the passing of time just doing the same things over and over again. But when we get it right, our ‘construction’ is based on solid foundations, such as science, leading to function that we can build solid safety systems around.
Fear not! We can define the words that don’t mean anything. We can define them behaviorally. These definitions will not be works of ‘explanatory fiction’ based on introspection. Instead, these behavioral definitions will be ‘operational.' You work in a business that operates things right? Your workers are actually doing something. Similarly, we change behavior by operating on it. We can operationally define the behaviors that vex you (complacency) as well as the aspirational behaviors (engagement) to build into your safety culture (I’ve written full scholarly papers on both of these words - read them if you can’t sleep at night - citations below).
Then we can, well, operate on them, and build your safety culture… instead of just hope and wish that the big words that don’t mean anything have an impact.
References:
Hyten, C. & Ludwig, T.D. (2017). Complacency in Process Safety: A Behavior Analysis toward Prevention Strategies. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management. 37, 240-260.
Ludwig, T.D., & Frazier, C.B. (2012). Employee Engagement and Organizational Behavior Management. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 32 (1), 75-82.