Influencing and embedding a health and safety culture

It’s time to rethink the role of leaders in workplace health and safety, with the emphasis on influence and culture rather than command and control, writes Alex Mullings.

Infrastructure and its construction play a key role in economic recovery. But if our industry is also to generate positive outcomes for society, it’s vital that amid the pressure to raise productivity and get things done, organisations adhere to the highest standards of health and safety and do the right thing by their workforce.

Yet challenges remain. Around 36.8 million working days, costing the equivalent of £18.8bn, were lost due to work-related illnesses and non-fatal accidents in Great Britain in 2021–2022, according to the Health and Safety Executive.

If they are to improve, it’s crucial that all organisations understand their own health and safety culture: where it comes from, and how it can be changed. There’s a particular need to rethink the role of leaders. The actions and decisions of leading individuals can have significant impacts in shaping their cultures – especially those surrounding health and safety best practice.

Why is the current approach to health and safety not working?

Traditional command and control style approaches no longer work. When things go wrong, leaders with this mindset seek retribution, apportioning blame without digging deeper into the root cause. This often leads to a cycle where you learn nothing new and fail to capture opportunities to grow and improve.

A paradigm shift is needed from ‘doing’ health and safety towards designing adaptable and resilient health and safety systems with all stakeholders in mind. Instead of fault-finding, we must lead with fact finding as a default first step.

Culture change starts from the top; and this is just as true for supply chains as it is for individual organisations. Client organisations with a commanding influence over the supply chain play a fundamental role in challenging stakeholders to continually improve health and safety standards.

Defining an effective health and safety culture

A good first step towards change is to determine what you consider to be an effective health and safety culture. By breaking it down into constituent parts, you can build understanding of this based on your organisation’s unique characteristics. Assumptions, values and artifacts are unique to every team, group or organisation and subcultures can also exist within these systems. Therefore, culture is a complex phenomenon that can be hard to define and quantify.

It’s often assumed that a health and safety culture consists of common practices and behaviours which, under known conditions, everyone in the organisation should act and behave in accordance with. However, organisations operate in complex environments, juggling many conflicting and evolving priorities.

Organisations, and the people within them, must be resilient and adaptable to respond to emerging risks as they arise. Leadership must recognise that the capacity of their people to respond to health and safety risk requires a fundamental change in approach from reactive to proactive. A possible way forward may be to think about how sound health and safety decision-making fits into the wider organisational context.

An integrated approach to problem solving and decision-making will consider the interdependencies between different elements within a system. Everything is connected, and one person’s action (or non-action) can have a ripple effect with wider consequences elsewhere. Recognising this complexity, organisations must redefine their understanding of health and safety culture as something which is integrated into every system, process, and action of the wider context in which it operates.

Coaching for improvement

Adopting a coaching approach to health and safety leadership and looking at the challenge through a systemic lens may help to us understand the various complex layers that influence an organisation’s health and safety culture.

In the first instance, it is essential to explore the personal challenges your people face. Explore what is important to them and what they need to perform at their best. Utilise a coaching approach to understand their goals, their reality, the necessary actions, and the will to change. While at first a challenge may seem individual, exploring the situation at a deeper level may uncover a wider issue within the system.

It is then important to work with all the data available to you. What is going on within teams and the connections between them? What are the barriers preventing these relationships to perform at their best? This is an opportunity to explore individual and team insights to better understand different working styles and preferences.

Take the time to explore issues and challenges as a whole team. An often-overlooked step in this process is to involve those who are closest to the work. They often feel the consequences of decisions the most. Involving these key stakeholders in developing a shared purpose and direction enables the team to be resilient and adaptable during times of change.

Developing a joint endeavour through a shared purpose and goals can then enable teams to overcome difficulties and differences. A team charter with a clear commission for teams to work towards can be very effective.

Stakeholders and context

It is essential to understand key stakeholder expectations within the system, whether that be a regulator, the executive board, or the workforce. Leaders must be accountable for identifying, setting, and communicating clear expectations. Considering the source of information, the message you wish to communicate, the channel in which you communicate, and the recipient of information will help you determine the most appropriate method of communication.

A leader must be aware of what is going on in the world around them. The political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental (PESTLE) context changes rapidly and this can create tension between conflicting priorities. Staying on top of your professional development and leveraging the resilience and adaptability you have built within your team will enable you to respond to the needs of the wider context most effectively.

Organisations that adopt an approach where leadership values of trust, respect and learning can effectively influence health and safety at all levels of the organisation, will more effectively respond to the needs of the system in which it operates. This not only impacts health and safety culture, but the wider organisational culture that supports growth, consumer confidence and market reputation.

Experiential learning

According to the 70:20:10 model for learning and development, 70% of learning comes from on-the-job experience. So an experiential approach to learning, in which leaders are coached rather than directed and they draw upon concrete experience, observation and active experimentation, works best.

Our work with high-profile clients across the world has seen them reach a level of maturity where they seek to move beyond health and safety compliance, striving to develop a culture that represents resilience and adaptability.

To take one example, we have helped a leading highways company become a learning organisation by introducing a system for sharing lessons learned, particularly from significant incidents. Data analysis has revealed health, safety and wellbeing trends, enabling proactive management across the organisation and supply chain. Across all regions, we have helped the organisation to reduce their lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) below their target of 0.15. The most recent staff survey revealed that 89% of staff (up from 81%) agree the organisation takes health and safety seriously, while 83% (up from 79%) thought their work environment felt healthier and safer.

In summary, by moving away from a command-and-control leadership approach to that of the leader as a coach, organisations can foster collaboration, knowledge sharing and best practice. This is the best way to create a culture where everyone is empowered to stop, step back and consider - are they working as safely and as healthily as they can be?

Find out more about how Mott MacDonald can help you develop your health and safety culture