It may seem far-fetched to suggest that the effective management of the people side of business change can be a life or death matter. However, my recent experience working with a client in the mining industry helped me to realise how important it is to ensure that we do not lose our focus on people.

In a world increasingly focussed on safety (post the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster), affecting a change which results in safety becoming a priority, as opposed to safety being a measure of success, should be easy. But as you will see, affecting this change in reality required nothing short of fundamental shift in the attitude of every single person in the organisation, as well as their immediate families.

Background

Our client is a key supplier to the mining industry, operating in a challenging environment, characterised by:

A contracting economy
A changing socio-political context
Difficult working conditions

Unfortunately, the pressure to increase production, can sometimes contribute to unsafe practices. Beyond the critical personal impact of safety incidents, the cost of safety incidents has a significant impact on the bottom line. With this in mind, we were engaged to help our client to significantly reduce the number of safety incidents.

Responding to the challenge

Human beings, like all other creatures, have a natural instinct to preserve their safety. Being safe typically starts with accepting responsibility for your own safety, and then making a personal choice. Once taken, the personal decision to adopt a safe lifestyle initiates a journey of self-acceptance and self-awareness, where each person realises that, “I am accountable for my own safety.” This internal level of awareness generally leads to an acceptance that, “I am part of a system, at both work and at home, and that I influence (as do those around me), the safety of the people that I interact with, whether they are my colleagues or my family.”

Organisational culture is strongly influenced by the power of individual choice, which has an important role to play in establishing acceptable, and unacceptable, norms and patterns of behaviour. Therefore, when one views safety at work from this perspective, a company’s safety record becomes the simple sum of all of the individual choices made by their employees. Typically, organisations approach the challenge of safety by imposing (and policing) safety policies and procedures. There is certainly a place for this, but ultimately, creating a safety conscious culture requires an individual commitment to safety. Affecting change in our clients’ environment would require considering the choices employees make all day, both at work and at home.

An innovative approach to facilitating change

Each person has a role to play, and once they have taken a decision to behave safely at all times, this influences the people around them. This leads to a collective sense of awareness and acceptance of the role that each individual has in creating a safe environment, and fostering a culture where safety is a collective cornerstone.

With this in mind, we set about establishing a foundational principle:

Safety is neither a negotiating tool for employees to use with management, nor a punitive measure for management to use with the workforce

This principle established the foundation for a balanced approach, where each person understood that safety is their own responsibility while the company has a collective duty of care for those that work for it. If safety starts and ends with me, it is ultimately MY responsibility. And this responsibility actually starts at home, before I arrive at work – it’s actually a 24/7/365 task.

The ultimate safety partnership exists at home within the family unit. Therefore, to affect change, we needed to involve the heads of each family unit in establishing the acceptable behaviours that lead to a safe home life. These rules, choices and socially acceptable norms would ultimately lay the foundation for behaviour change at work. Therefore, the audience for the change programme was extended to include the families of each employee.

A dynamic approach

Leveraging Industrial Theatre

With these insights in mind, we designed a holistic change programme to facilitate this transition. The focus was on engaging the hearts and minds of employees and families alike, to encourage them to make safety a lifestyle choice, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the business imperatives.

To launch the initiative, we invited employees, and their families, to an open day at an onsite operational support centre. A series of talks were given on safety and the business as a whole by senior members of staff, and everyone was invited to get inside and see how the company’s equipment was used on a daily basis. Photo booths were set up around the site to capture the day and these photos were later shared with the employees as well as being turned into notice boards to remind the employees of all the people who were waiting at home for their safe return.

The central focus of the day was an industrial theatre production, which was positioned as a key medium to initiate the change programme. The show was designed specifically to focus on both the employees as well as their partners and used song, dance and comedy to portray critical messages. A narrator was dressed up to resemble characters with whom staff have become familiar through previous workplace safety campaigns. The narrator wore all the safety equipment (as depicted in the familiar campaign), including protective eyewear, helmet, fire extinguisher, protective boots, neon bib, etc.

The narrator held the show together, reinforcing the safety messages that apply to both the home and work environments and driving home the core message that we are all accountable for our own safety. The narrator also encouraged the audience to engage with the production by calling them to action throughout, particularly during the dance scenes.

To ensure the emphasis on fun, the narrator introduced three couples, whose spouses all worked at the mine. The employees’ spouses were depicted as stereotypical ‘battle-axes’ who rule the roost at home, forcing their partners into compliance on the home front and nagging them until they do things their way.

The undertone of the narrative emphasised that the spouses all love their partners and have their best interests at heart. They want their spouses to take safety precautions at home so that they will get into the habit of being just as vigilant at work which is a decidedly more hazardous environment. The performance culminated in the actors and the narrator calling upon the audience to stand up and join them in a final ‘safety dance’.

The production emphasised the core theme that the business of safety is as important to the worker’s loved ones as it is to the workers themselves. A broader change programme followed this initial intervention, focussing on:

Making safety real and relevant to individuals and their families requires leveraging personal choice, 24/7/365
Ensuring that all understand that safety is an individual choice, regardless of rank, level, skill or experience
Emphasising the principle that the imperatives of business efficiency and productivity and safety are inextricably linked and can never be seen in isolation;
Shifting safety from being seen as a discretionary effort, to it becoming an emotional objective with meaningful, tangible benefits
Enabling every employee to do their bit to achieve their own personal safety objectives on a daily basis

How we leveraged theoretical insights in the development of the programme

A system’s perspective of change (illustrated above) reflects that the individuals’ choice of safety as paramount in the creation of a sustainable safety system. However, the home environment, the community, the organisation and its collective leadership are equally important. It is generally acknowledged that leadership is the single biggest driver of sustainable safety systems, and leaders have a key role to play in defining and managing the culture in the environments they oversee.

Communities and companies need to ensure that the drive for safety goes well beyond a fear of failure or statistical success but is rather guided by a genuine concern for people. Through consistent and transparent behaviour, leaders need to lead and underpin the organisation’s efforts to make safety a lifestyle decision where specific behaviours become widely accepted as being acceptable or unacceptable to the whole group. The diagram below graphically represents the interrelationship of these concepts:

How we leveraged theoretical insights in the development of the programme

What did we learn

Using peer-to-peer involvement and positive reinforcement aimed at increasing the number of safe behaviours, you can influence the adoption of safe behaviours and improve both productivity and work quality. Optimising human performance requires a proactive system that generates high levels of employee engagement and emotional buy in.

Some of the key insights we gained included:

Attitudes drive behaviour and safety performance
Where management show active, genuine and continuous support this encourages employees to be involved, resulting in lower injury rates
Job satisfaction positively reduces injury rates
A positive, trusting and co-operative relationship between workers and management improves results
Safety is an output not an input

This intervention has reinforced our understanding that change of this scale and nature takes time and ongoing effort. It is clear from follow-up discussions with our client that the desire to create a fresh discussion and new memories has helped with daily operational discussions where the consideration of getting home safely to your loved ones has become part of the daily conversation.

Would you like to read more about change in the mining industries? Read our partner Isaac Kruger’s experience

read and Change

Change management: A matter of life and death?

Background

Responding to the challenge

An innovative approach to facilitating change

How we leveraged theoretical insights in the development of the programme

What did we learn