March/April 1999
You’ve got a good safety program, so why are your employees still taking risks? Here’s what the experts say about employee attitudes and behavior—and what employers can do to create better safety programs.
By Robert L. Reid
Robert L. Reid is managing editor of Scrap.
You’ve trained your employees in safe work procedures. You’ve provided the necessary personal protective equipment such as hard hats, gloves, safety glasses, and respirators. There are guards on equipment to prevent injuries and signs all over the plant reminding them about safety. You even reward employees when they reach certain milestones without having any injuries.
Yet your employees still risk getting hurt—or actually suffer injuries—by ignoring that training, discarding the protective gear, thwarting the machinery guards, and so on.
What’s going on here—do they want to get hurt?
Of course not. Your employees want to go home uninjured just like you do. After all, they’re only human. Unfortunately, that’s part of the problem. It’s human nature to seek out things that are pleasurable, comfortable, and convenient, but working safely often involves doing things that are unpleasant, uncomfortable, and inconvenient, explains Mike Mattia, ISRI’s director of risk management.
For instance, employees want to be comfortable while they work, but perhaps they’re uncomfortable wearing a respirator. They want to finish their tasks quickly so they can join their buddies in the lunchroom, but it takes longer to find the right tool or perform the proper lockout/tagout procedures. Besides, they reason, they used to do this same job without locking out anything, and they were praised for getting the job done quickly without shutting down production. But nobody ever praises them for working the slow but safe way.
So, how do you overcome such powerful obstacles to safety? By understanding the psychology of safety—that is, the reasons why people do or don’t work safely—and using that information to revise, redesign, and even replace your current work procedures and safety programs.
Sending the Wrong Message
Exploring the psychology of safety—also called behavior-based safety—is a somewhat recent approach to combating workplace injuries. It has been especially popular in the 1990s. But the approach’s underlying principles go back to behavioral research of the 1930s from such noted psychologists as B.F. Skinner.
At its simplest, behaviorism teaches that people will tend to do things for which they’re rewarded and avoid doing things for which they’re punished. And since behavior is motivated by its consequences (reward or punishment), the behavior can be changed by controlling those consequences, Skinner concluded. In short, apply the consequences correctly, and a new behavior can be learned.
So why do employees still get hurt even when you’ve got a safety incentive program that rewards safe behavior and safety rules that threaten to punish employees who don’t follow them?
Perhaps because your safety incentive program doesn’t really reward safe behavior. And your safety rules might be undercut by more powerful aspects of your corporate culture.
Let’s say that you tie an employee bonus to working a certain number of months without an injury. Does reaching that goal mean your employees worked safely during that period? Not necessarily, Mattia says. What you need to look at is the work processes that employees followed, not just the result of having no injuries. Ironically, your bonus program might be rewarding employees for working unsafely.
For instance, some employees might have been injured during the incentive period, but they didn’t report their injuries because that would mean losing out on the promised reward, notes E. Scott Geller, author of The Psychology of Safety. At one company, an employee who cut off a finger immediately asked to go home for the day and then pretended that he’d cut off the finger at home so he and his buddies wouldn’t lose their safety bonus, notes Geller, who is also a professor of psychology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and senior partner in the consulting firm Safety Performance Solutions, both in Blacksburg, Va.
Likewise, other employees might have worked unsafely but simply been lucky.
Even if unsafe behaviors are noticed, does your corporate culture discourage them? Employees quickly learn how much their company cares about safety, says Tom Krause, CEO of Behavioral Science Technology Inc. (Ojai, Calif.) and author of The Behavior-Based Safety Process: Managing Involvement for an Injury-Free Culture. For instance, your company may say it’s important to wear hearing protection when operating a particular piece of equipment, but the protection “isn’t available, or it’s stored in a place that’s hard to get to, or people aren’t encouraged to wear it, or nothing happens if they don’t wear it,” Krause says. In such a case, the employee who doesn’t wear hearing protection is neither punished nor injured—at least not immediately. Hearing loss often builds up over time.
Even worse, the company’s managers might send the message, overtly or covertly, that other priorities—such as productivity or the firm’s image as a safety-conscious workplace—are valued more highly than working safely. In the case of the cut-off finger, Geller says, the supervisor knew what had happened but willingly pretended the injury happened at home because that maintained the company’s supposed safety record.
Getting Distracted and Taking Risks
The psychological factors behind workplace injuries can be divided into two broad categories—injuries that occur because an employee was distracted and those that occur because the employee deliberately took a risk, says Michael Topf, president of Topf Organization (King of Prussia, Pa.) and author and editor of How to Make Your Company Safer.
Distraction-caused injuries can stem from an employee’s daydreaming, inattention to the work being performed, or preoccupation with personal issues such as family illness or financial trouble, Topf explains. They can also be caused by a sudden noise, someone calling out the employee’s name, or drug or alcohol use.
To help prevent distraction-caused accidents, Topf recommends teaching employees stress and time management techniques, as well as other methods for prioritizing work better and maintaining focus.
The second type of injuries—so-called “deliberate” ones—occur when an employee decides not to follow the required work procedures or safety rules, such as refusing to wear protective gear or deciding to work on a machine without properly locking it out, knowing that the lockout is required and that the work is dangerous. “They generally do it,” Topf says, “because they have an attitude or belief that says they can take this shortcut and get away with it because they’ve done it that way in the past, or they think they can beat the odds.”
In essence, you can give employees extensive safety training and provide all the necessary protective gear, “but it’s their attitudes and beliefs that shape their decisionmaking process that determine ultimately what they do,” Topf says.
For many people, their attitudes and beliefs indicate that we live in a risk-taking culture. The United States was founded by pioneers, people who took risks, Topf notes, and there remains a strong “macho” attitude among some employees that says accidents are a way of life in a high-risk work environment.
Involving Employees
To overcome “deliberate” injuries, employers should focus first on employee beliefs and attitudes and have them recognize the risks they’re creating for themselves and their coworkers, says Topf. Others, including Geller and Krause, suggest concentrating on changing employee actions first. Both approaches aim to get employees working in a safer manner. And the consensus is that employee involvement is an essential element of a behavior-based or psychologically based safety program.
When Mattia talks about the psychology of safety at ReMA chapter meetings, seminars, and other events, he tries to involve employees through games such as writing their own safety commercial, drawing a safety map of their plant noting where workplace hazards are found, even designing a safety poster that doesn’t use words so employees with poor literacy skills won’t feel threatened by the process. He also recommends sending employees through the plant with cameras to take pictures of everyday working conditions and activities. Later, they review the pictures to identify elements that they think should be changed.
Traditionally, Geller notes, most safety programs have been based on the three Es—engineering, education, and enforcement. You engineer a safe workplace, educate employees in how the workplace has been engineered and what protective gear they need to wear, and then enforce the safety rules.
To take your safety program to the next level, Geller suggests adding a fourth E: empowerment. Empowered employees feel responsible for not only their own safety, but the safety of their coworkers, Geller notes. To achieve that mindset, employees need to move from dependence (the company must keep me safe) to independence (I must keep myself safe) and finally to interdependence (we must all keep each other safe), he says.
To keep each other safe, employees must be willing to tell coworkers when they’re working unsafely and, conversely, accept feedback from coworkers who see them working unsafely. Similarly, employees must be ready to praise each other for following safe work procedures. As Geller notes, “The most powerful reinforcer for most of us is social interaction.”
Praising an employee for working the slow but safe way—by locking out equipment, for instance—can help overcome the incentive to work quickly and unsafely. To reinforce safe behavior, special safety thank-you cards or stickers can be handed out whenever an employee goes beyond the call of duty for safety, Geller says. Such stickers could become badges of honor, adorning hard hats in the same way that football players put stickers on their helmets to celebrate a great play.
Such peer observations are the most effective way to gather safety information—provided employees are properly trained, Krause agrees. They must understand why the process is being done and what will happen with the data that’s being gathered. They must also be assured that they won’t get in trouble for anything they observe. It’s especially critical that employees who are observed behaving unsafely remain anonymous. Otherwise, the program could do more harm than good. The object isn’t to punish but to discover behaviors that need to be changed.
“Any time you try to single people out from the group and say which of them are the problem, you set up a negative process,” Krause notes. “It’s hard to get people involved that way.” Instead, he suggests, “work on building a culture in which safety is truly valued.”
Keeping Score
Unfortunately, many workplaces work against valuing safety in subtle and not-so-subtle psychological ways. The problem is obvious in companies where supervisors give lip service to safety while promoting higher and faster production. But there are also unintended psychological impediments to safety.
Your safety signs, for instance, could be sending the wrong message, even when touting your company’s good safety record. Signs that boast “We’ve Gone 365 Days Without a Lost-Time Injury” indicate a reactive approach to workplace safety, Geller says. Counting the days without an injury sends the psychological message that you’re keeping score by waiting for an injury to happen rather than taking action to make the workplace safer.
“How do you keep score for safety?” Geller asks. “Do you just wait around until you have an injury and then mark up a number? That doesn’t motivate people very well.”
Besides, it takes a careful analysis of the data using statistical process control methods to even know if your days-without-an-injury numbers are meaningful, Krause notes.
Of course, OSHA is as much to blame as any company for this negative scorecard, Geller asserts. “OSHA auditors don’t look at what you’re doing for safety. They look at the mistakes.”
But companies can take steps to actively keep track of the positive things they do to create a safe workplace, Geller says. For instance, rather than celebrating X number of days without an injury, he recommends holding a party when your employees complete X number of safety audits, or when they’ve properly locked out the equipment X number of times, or even when X number of them talk about times they narrowly avoided getting injured and what they did to work safer in the future.
Geller also recommends avoiding the use of words like “accident” because it “has a psychology connected to it that does more harm than good. It teaches the idea that we’re not in control.”
Instead, he urges companies to replace phrases like “accident investigation”—which also has the negative connotation of investigating who’s to blame—with “incident analysis.” That may seem like nothing more than a change in terminology, but “how we talk can influence the psychology of the situation,” Geller says.
Making the Commitment
Before you think that a few semantic changes are all you need to make, Geller offers the following anecdote about the time he refused to take on a safety training job.
The potential client was having trouble with repetitive-motion injuries from employees performing tasks too quickly. When Geller interviewed the employees, he learned that they were consciously working fast because they wanted to get to the lunchroom sooner to socialize with their buddies. The supervisor asked Geller to develop a training program on doing the work at the proper speed. Instead, Geller urged the supervisor to change the system that allowed employees who finished early to have extra time in the lunchroom. When the supervisor said that couldn’t be done, Geller turned down the job.
“I told them that I didn’t have anything [such as training, incentives, and so on] more powerful than what was already in place to reward fast work on the job,” Geller says.
So, trying to approach safety psychologically isn’t a simple task. It’s also not cheap. And you need to be careful—the psychology of safety has become almost a fad, Krause warns. A poorly planned effort could do more harm than good—for instance, by surprising employees with peer observations that they don’t understand because you didn’t prepare them.
The good news is that there are inexpensive books, videotapes, and public workshops that can at least introduce small business owners to the psychological side of safety.
Most importantly, perhaps, the process shows results. Krause points to data he’s collected from more than 70 companies over a five-year period. On average, these companies saw a 29-percent reduction in their injury frequency rate in the first year, jumping to 69 percent by the fifth year.
“You can do this approach as easily for three people as for 500,” Krause says, if you’re willing to invest the time and resources. “It’s every bit as applicable.” •
You’ve got a good safety program, so why are your employees still taking risks? Here’s what the experts say about employee attitudes and behavior—and what employers can do to create better safety programs.