Chapter 15Creating the Culture You Want
Every operation has its safety culture: “What most people do most of the time.” If you want to know what kind of safety culture your operation has, all you have to do is look and listen—not at what any one person does, but at what “most people do.” It isn't necessary to look at everything. Pick out a few key dimensions, like people stopping at the stop signs, carefully executing job safety analyses, and reporting near‐misses…and then observe. What you observe is your safety culture. If what you see is not a “culture of safety,” you then need to be in the culture change business.
Left unattended, a culture will slowly change but in a direction of its choosing, not yours. You want transformation, which implies both speed and a change in a direction of your choosing. For that you need a roadmap.
The road to transforming culture starts with clarity about the change you want. Bear in mind, changing culture means changing behavior, the way work gets done. Next, look for leverage: key people with outsize influence and small things that can play large. Then get into the selling mode: what's in it for your followers to buy into the changes you want. Finally, look for the Moments of High Influence, when your followers are paying attention to you. Seize the Moment!
Preparation Questions
- In terms of specific and observable behavior, how would you characterize your operation's current safety culture?
- If you don't have a good sense of what that ...