Want to Change the Culture? Focus on Changing the Mind-Set

Mind-set drives behavior.

If you’re wanting to change your organization’s safety culture, then whether you understand it yet or not, you’re really wanting to change thousands of individual acts (i.e., human behavior). If we want to change behavior, we must change Mind-set first. Unfortunately, the typical ways of addressing behavior won’t get us much. Do you think that pointing out what people did wrong, scolding them for being that stupid and then bringing out a big whip to drive the unsafe demons out of their body will change their Mind-set relative to safety? Of course not!

For an organization to truly drive injuries to zero, it must have a safety-focused Mind-set, both from the organizational point-of-view and from the point-of-view of each and every person working within that organization. If our intent is to have an Absolute Safety, 365 culture, then our Mind-set has to support the elimination of at-risk behaviors.

There are three steps involved in changing Mind-set:

1. Thinking
2. Talking
3. Doing

One of the main reasons that safety initiatives typically fail to produce the desired results is the lack of an Absolute Safety, 365 Mind-set. Unless and until people start to THINK about zero injuries as a way of life, they will never change their Mind-set. If they do not change their Mind-set they will not change their behavior. This lack of Mind-set change is why people continue to allow and accept at-risk behaviors. We tend not to notice the hundreds of safe behaviors we routinely display…we just notice the ones that have resulted in an injury.

“Thinking” about an injury-free workplace begins at the top: management must come to embrace safety as more than an “initiative” or a “priority.” “Initiatives” come and go, and “priorities” change based on business need. In organizations that have made major step changes in their safety statistics, management has wrestled with and confronted the “profit at any price” mentality and have made safety a constant, lifting it to the level of core value, in effect concluding that nothing – not late shipments or lost product or anything else – is more important than ensuring that each employee goes home safe at the end of the day.

Because developing this Absolute Safety, 365 Mind-set is a major change for most people, they must then TALK about it. The talking phase of Mind-set change is done both on an organizational and personal level. The key things to talk about include, but are not limited to:

• What are we going to do to achieve an Absolute Safety, 365 work environment?
• What are the benefits of eliminating at-risk behaviors?
• Why do we (I) allow and accept at-risk behavior? What do we (I) need to do differently in the future to eliminate at-risk behavior?
• In what at-risk behaviors have I personally engaged? How will I avoid them in the future?
• What will the organization look like after we have developed an Absolute Safety, 365 Mind-set?
• What at-risk behaviors have we (I) allowed and accepted from others? What do we (I) need to do differently in the future so we (I) no longer allow and accept at-risk behaviors from others?
• Relative to an Absolute Safety, 365 Mind-set, what are the new roles or changed roles of everyone affected? What are our new accountabilities? What new skills are required? How will we provide those skills?
• What do we need to measure to achieve and maintain an Absolute Safety, 365 culture? How will we measure it? What is the best way to give (and get) feedback?
• What do we need to communicate? How are we going to communicate it?

The Thinking and Talking of mind-set change need to be underway before effective DOING happens. In order to achieve an Absolute Safety, 365 culture, our Mind-set must focus on opportunities, not problems. Although started in the Thinking and Talking phases, the Doing phase directly addresses:

• Communicating success, progress, set-backs and how to address them.
• Fine tuning the measurement system
• Finding opportunities and capturing them
• Implementing appropriate training
• Identifying proper, safe behavior and rewarding it
• Identifying at-risk behavior and eliminating it

Thinking-Talking-Doing is a simple concept that any organization can employ to move their safety culture towards Absolute Safety, 365. Don’t allow the desire to “do something” get in the way of sponsoring reflective thought and in-depth conversations about safety. If these steps are systematically implemented, then the DOING phase will be much more effective.