The video came out of a conversation with a company, where we were planning a discussion with their leadership. The goal was to help their leaders understand where they were and ‘what better looks like’ when it comes to safety management. We used the Hearts and Minds safety culture ladder and combined this with a real study that had been conducted in an Energy Institute member company. This went down very well with leaders. So, we decided to turn this into a video so that other leadership teams could have the same sort of conversation.

The study discussed in the video is real. An Energy Institute member company employed a PhD student to sit in leadership meetings in the corner of the room and to listen to the conversations that leaders were having. Their job was to decide whether the conversations were about events or the causes of events, using the Tripod causation model of incidents as a guide. The student then had the brainwave to look at the data (key performance indicators etc) that was being given to leaders. They found that the majority of conversations were about events – leaders were trapped in the bottom half of the safety culture ladder, which is characterised by low amounts of information and low trust and low accountability (for more information, watch this video). But they also found that most of the information being given to leaders was about events – numbers of events, seriousness of events, etc – so the data was driving the conversation.

Moving up the culture ladder is not a straightforward step-by-step process of ‘do this’ then ‘do that’. It is ultimately about improving how the organisation does things – its processes and practices. You also can’t jump from the bottom to the top. You have to move up the ladder one rung at a time. If one foot is on the bottom and one is at the top, then you aren’t halfway, you are still at the bottom. You have to bring the whole organisation with you before you can say you have moved up the ladder.

The first step
Often, organisations want to start a culture improvement programme following an incident that has surprised them and told them that they’re not ‘as good’ as they thought, and that they suspect culture is the issue. Incidents are often the trigger for companies to go through the ‘understanding your HSE culture’ survey tool, which is part of the Hearts and Minds Toolkit.

The first step is to gather insights from people on the front line; people who may say the safety culture is lower than expected. Often companies then also survey leadership, who may say something different. The first goal is to understand the culture; not just to survey people but to really understand why they say the culture is lower than expected. It is about turning a generic statement ‘the culture is at this level’ into specific examples of problems that people are facing. Understanding the challenges is needed to improve the culture. Then using that to get leadership buy-in is key, as without that nothing can happen.

You have to bring the whole organisation with you before you can say you have moved up the safety culture ladder.

Dr Marcin Nazaruk has written a book called Learning from normal work. People might think that means learning from when things don’t go wrong, but I believe it is more than this. It is about understanding how work is really being done – not how we think it should be done. Often when an incident occurs, a manager may ask questions such as: ‘Were you following the procedure?’, ‘Were you using the right equipment?’ If the answer is ‘No’, then the manager concludes: ‘Ah, that’s the problem.’

But a deeper truth is revealed if an observer can learn how work is normally done, and to understand why the workers didn’t follow that procedure or use that equipment. The truth is usually because the organisation itself has created the conditions where using that procedure is impractical or even impossible, or the equipment isn’t available or suitable. The ‘Understanding your HSE culture’ tool is trying to get a sense of the challenges in operations, the error traps and other performance factors that are making life difficult. This is also the subject of the ‘Making compliance easier’ tool.

Other tools in the Hearts and Minds toolkit focus on change management, risk assessment, driving, learning from incidents, situational awareness, measuring learning, working safely, and improving supervision skills – because supervisors rarely become supervisors because of their supervisory skills, but because of their technical ability.

Ultimately the Hearts and Minds tools are meant to be an excuse to bring together front-line people and managers to have a conversation about safety – perhaps for the first time – and together bring issues to light so that they can be changed and improved. Through these conversations, the workforce gains more trust in managers, and managers gain more trust in the workforce, because they are hearing about issues that they haven’t heard before and giving the workforce more accountability. It is about everyone lifting each other up together.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author only and are not necessarily given or endorsed by or on behalf of the Energy Institute.

• Further reading: ‘Making industry safer, one job at a time’. Discover the value of reporting incidents both for individuals and companies working in offshore wind and in other industries. 
• ‘Feeling stressed: How to establish an effective framework for mental health in the workplace’. Mental health is a sensitive issue, particularly when it comes to the working environment. According to a new report from the Energy Institute, poor employee mental health has emerged as one of the biggest people challenges facing organisations since the COVID-19 pandemic.