How to Improve Safety Culture by Culture-Shaping: Beliefs are Important
Effective, sustainable, safety culture improvement is achieved via two complementary components: solution-finding and culture-shaping.
Let’s first dive into culture-shaping, then circle back to solution-finding in a bit.
Overview:
What is Culture-Shaping and why is it imporant?
Beliefs are Important
1. What Is Culture-Shaping and why is it important?
Culture-shaping is the intentional influencing of the practices, perceptions, and interactions within an organization.
Since you’re reading this, you probably want to improve an aspect of your organizational culture or safety culture. This is the essential first step in a journey of continuous improvement, but although it’s necessary, it’s not sufficient.
Unfortunately, continuous improvement cannot be done alone. Those who attempt to singlehandedly identify and implement organizational improvements are rewarded with frustration and burnout. The complexity and interconnectedness of an organization requires a group effort to untangle. Even if, miraculously, you were able to identify the perfect list of solutions, securing organization-wide acceptance and implementation would present you only a greater set of challenges.
Solution-finding itself doesn’t guarantee that the problem will stay solved or that new issues won’t arise. Problem-solving is usually reactive; it tackles issues as they arise and helps put out fires. Without the support of a strong organizational system, individual efforts are easily undone. I liken the process to rolling a boulder up a hill by yourself. All progress requires constant individual effort, and any moment of relaxation or inattention sends the boulder tumbling back down.
Continuous improvement done alone (and in non-compliant footwear, to boot).
Sustainable continuous improvement lies in consciously shaping the culture of your organization, which requires deliberately fostering an environment that supports collective engagement and shared values. It’s about moving beyond identifying problems and solutions to ingraining safety, solution-finding, and progress in your daily interactions.
It’s as if the entire organization is pushing a boulder uphill together. If one person trips and falls behind, the others continue the work. Turning improvement into a collective effort ensures that the boulder of progress doesn’t roll backward but continues forward seemingly without effort. With everyone engaged, it is easier to identify issues early, address them more effectively, and even proactively prevent them.
Continuous improvement done as a team (granted, in this depiction by a rather homogeneous team of men in questionable workwear, but you get the idea).
Parents may be familiar with culture-shaping in the context of raising their children. My dining room table has a list of ten phrases taped to it that my family recites together every Wednesday before dinner. It consists of things like: “We are all different and that makes us stronger,” “My family loves me no matter what,” and “We sometimes disagree, but we always work things out.” The goal is to create shared beliefs about what it means to be a family member and to set expectations for our family culture. Of course, raising children still involves a lot of problem-solving, but a shared perspective and clear expectations reduce and preempt many problems.
2. Beliefs Are Important
Just recently, I was talking to a client whose Sociometri data included the insight that night and weekend shift workers were unhappy about the quality of their canteen food, which was much worse than the day shift workers’. The workers felt this was unfair, and this sentiment was reflected in their Sociometri data.
Artist’s rendition of night shift canteen food.
Artist’s rendition of day shift canteen food.
Upon hearing this, a manger asked me rather agitatedly, “Where did you get this information? I took the survey myself and it didn’t ask about this. Do you have any statistics on this?”
I explained the source was free-text comments left by respondents at the end of the survey. Spontaneous free text data is sometimes more valuable than responses to predefined questions. After all, employees just took a 15-minute survey, often in their free time. When they take an extra 10 minutes to write a detailed comment, it means they really care about what they’re communicating. And when multiple people leave comments about the same issue (as in this case), the significance is even greater.
“Well, they’re wrong,” said the manager. “When they signed contracts for night and weekend shifts, they agreed to different food in exchange for a smaller canteen deduction from their paychecks than day shift. They’re wrong about it being unfair and their feedback is useless. Going forward, we only want to focus on statistical data.”
I have encountered this type of reaction to qualitative data many times when presenting Sociometri data and insights to clients.
There seems to be a preoccupation with whether employee beliefs captured are “correct,” as if a belief being “incorrect” negates its value. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of qualitative data. Qualitative methods are concerned with accurately describing a phenomenon, not assessing the credibility of that phenomenon.
Beliefs are real in their consequences, regardless of their accuracy.
Let me provide an example. Imagine I've conducted a focus group with members of a terrorist organization and report the following qualitative finding: A significant number of the members believed society misunderstands them.
Does the value of my research lie in whether the members’ belief is “correct”? Of course not! The value is in accurately describing and identifying the existence of the belief. We need to concern ourselves with the beliefs held by employees in our organization because beliefs
create behavior.
At the risk of belaboring the point, one last example. Imagine the following:
Scenario 1: I tell you there’s a $100 bill taped under your chair. You immediately reach down, feel around, and find the bill.
Scenario 2: I tell you there’s a $100 bill taped under your chair. I’m lying. You immediately reach down, feel around, and find nothing.
A quick thought experiment.
In the first scenario, your belief was proven true, and in the second, it was not. But your behavior was identical—you reached under the chair. Belief, whether right or wrong, contributes to behavior.
The Unsolved Statistics Problems
It happened because during my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day at one of [Jerzy] Neyman’s classes. On the blackboard there were two problems that I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework—the problems seemed to be a little harder than usual. I asked him if he still wanted it. He told me to throw it on his desk. About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o’clock, [my wife] Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: “I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.” For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard that I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.1
Because behavior is shaped by belief, being aware of and engaging with beliefs is crucial for both solution-finding and culture-shaping. Disregarding words—particularly from those on the front lines—means ignoring early warnings that could preempt larger problems and a frustrating march of ineffective solutions.
The words people use help us to understand their beliefs, which can help predict their actions.
Think back to my interaction with the manager about canteen food. I hope it’s clear why the “rightness” or “wrongness” of employee beliefs about canteen food is not what makes that qualitative data valuable. It’s the fact that the employees believe it to be true, and that belief is plenty real in its consequences: resentment, reduced engagement, increased distraction, and increased turnover.
So, what should the manger have done when presented with data that indicated night and weekend shift employees were upset about the quality of canteen food? He should have been overjoyed! Would that all our organizational problems were just misunderstandings that could be cleared up with a short conversation.
“Hi, night and weekend shift employees! Did you know that when you were hired, you agreed to have less deducted from your paychecks than day shift in exchange for a reduced canteen selection? Is this something you would like to revisit, or shall we continue as is?”
Manager quickly clearing things up with qualitative insights.
If we listen to the qualitative data, we can put it to work for us instead of fighting against it, simplifying the processes of solution-finding and culture-shaping.
The Theory of Recursive Culture Creation
This brings us nicely to our theory of recursive culture creation. However, given the length of this post and the significance of the theory, it deserves to be saved for next time.
Stay tuned!
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References
Donald J. Albers and Constance Reid, “An Interview with George B. Dantzig: The Father of Linear Programming,” College Mathematics Journal 17, no. 4 (1986): 292—314, https://doi.org/10.1080/07468342.1986.11972971.