I was asked to contribute to this article, “Organizational Safety, Culture and Resilience,” and I felt that I could not contribute to most of the questions. I now realize that I could have said a lot more. The safety professional language yes quite different than my native profession of organizational development.
Andrew Hopkins stated “the people doing the work are more removed from the people at the top of the organization, and this has huge implications for safety because of the problems of transmission of communication of information up and down the chain.” We need to come to the realization that the top of the organization is not the level that needs to communicate with the workers at the front line. That is not their job.
Communication requires social interaction. The frontline supervisors communicate two employees. Each level above controls what the level below pays attention to and communicates to the ones below them. It doesn’t stop there because when employees talk to each other they are also interpreting the information for each other.
The people at the top of the organization should be focusing on coaching the level directly below them to become excellent listeners and coaches so that they can communicate the broader purpose and expectations to the next level. Until this is done there is very little chance of the top influencing the front line.
David Provan makes a different point. Management should stop trying to change culture and focus on changing the management practices that directly encourage people to work in a safe and reliable way. I am no longer an advocate of safety culture change as the solution to preventing fatalities and serious injuries. However, we cannot forget that the way we got to safety culture was because focusing on control and planning activities wasn’t having the wanted results. Safety culture was an attempt to make the intangible connections visible—the ones that influence behavior, beliefs, and decision-making processes.
Fixing the visible world was not enough. Management is now about understanding people and working with them to develop their skills, clarifying priorities and being aware of the emotions impacting the team’s ability to perform. Resilience is possible because of human adaptability and that ability comes from the security of our relationships.
On page 26 and 27 you will see that I was asked to include some of my thoughts about the importance of relationships and personal fulfillment as relates to safety performance. As I read through it and compare it to the other perspectives I see a practitioner that has spent a lifetime working with the front lines and attempting to make sense of the situation in a way that it can be communicated to those above in a way that they could act on it. I don’t think I did a very good job, but I’m not done yet.
