The Participation Factor: How to Increase Involvement in Occupational Safety

The key to preventing more work-related injuries is to get more people involved in programs and processes designed to improve health and safety. This is not profound; it is obvious. Yet in so many situations, safety is managed in such a way that involvement is actually inhibited rather than facilitated. This presentation specifies factors that increase versus decrease participation in safety-related activities. The principles and techniques reviewed are not based on common sense but on research-tested and practical applications. It doesn’t take major complicated change to turn current situations around and get more employee involvement in occupational health and safety. But it does take a paradigm shift. We need to perceive the problem of workplace injuries differently, and intervene differently with regard to the people aspects of safety. Two of the three “E” words for industrial safety are still appropriate and critically important – Engineering and Education. However, to get more participation, we need to replace the third “E” word of traditional safety – Enforcement – with another – Empowerment. This presentation offers a number of basic strategies relevant to cultivating a work force that feels empowered with regard to safety improvement and does something about it on a regular basis. In other words, this paper suggests ways to get more people actively caring for the health and safety of themselves and others. The principles and techniques presented are not based on common sense but on research-tested theory and practical applications. Let’s start with the most basic strategy, one that defines culture and therefore determines whether all my other suggestions can be accepted, implemented, and sustained. Watch Your Language Words shape our feelings, expectancies, attitudes and behavior (Hayakawa, 1978). How you talk about something influences how others feel about it, especially yourself. In other words, our verbal behavior affects our attitudes and beliefs, and these in turn determine more behavior. Question: Does your safety-related language increase or decrease employee involvement? “Accident investigation” is a common phrase in industrial safety and health. What does it mean? Or more to the point, what does it imply? Safety pros use this phrase to define one of their basic job requirements, and they attend professional development workshops with this label to improve their skills. But, really, what’s your assignment when investigating an accident? Let’s look more closely at this language. The word “accident” implies “a chance occurrence” outside your immediate control. When a child has an “accident” in his pants, we presume he was not in control. He couldn’t help it. And what about the word “investigation?” Doesn’t this term imply a hunt for some one thing or person to blame for a particular incident, as in “criminal investigation?” How can we promote fact-finding over fault-finding with a term like “investigation” defining our job assignment? To learn more about how to prevent injuries from an analysis of an incident, we need to approach the task with a different mindset. It’s not “accident investigation.” It’s “incident analysis.” This simple change in our language suggests the following shifts in perspective, leading to more participation in the process and greater preventive impact. From One Root Cause to Many Contributing Factors There seems to be a common myth in the safety field that injuries are caused by one critical factor – the root cause. “Ask enough questions,” advises the safety consultant, “and you’ll arrive at the critical factor behind an injury.” Come on, do you really believe there’s a single root cause of an incident, whether a near hit, damage to property, or personal injury? Consider the three sides of “The Safety Triad” (Geller, 1994) depicted in Figure 1 as a framework for defining the challenges of injury prevention. One side is for environment, including tools, equipment, engineering design, climate, and housekeeping factors. Another side of this triangle stands for behavior, the actions everyone did or did not perform related to an incident. And the third side represents person factors, or the internal feeling states of the people involved in the incident, including their attitudes, perceptions, and personality characteristics. Given the dynamic interdependency of environmental, behavioral, and personal factors in everyday events, how can anyone expect to find one root cause of an incident? Instead, take a systems approach and search for a variety of contributory factors within the environment, behavior, and person domains. Then decide which of these factors can be changed to reduce the chance of another unfortunate incident. Environmental factors are usually easiest to define and improve, followed by behavioral factors. Most difficult to define and change directly are the person factors, but many of these can be benefited indirectly with proper delivery of a behavior improvement process (Daniels, 2000; Geller, 1998, 2001c; McSween, 1995). From Avoiding Failure to Achieving Success Interpersonal conversation is key to finding and correcting the potential contributors to an incident. People need to engage in open communication about the various environment, behavior, and person factors related to a near hit, injury, or damage to property. But, this won’t happen in an atmosphere of loss or failure. If the focus is on finding a single reason for failure, people will resist admitting any personal involvement. It’s human nature to deny personal influence in a loss. As kids we blamed the other kid – “he made me do it.” As adults we just keep our mouths shut. To get people to open up, we need to approach incident analysis as an opportunity for success. Let’s get away from the perspective incident-equals-failure. The focus should be on how an incident gives us the chance to learn and improve. This can lead to more reports of personal near hits and property damage. The more we report and analyze, the more opportunity we have to correct the factors that can contribute to a major injury to a fellow coworker. From Top-Down Correction to Bottom-Up Involvement You can expect more participation in the reporting and analysis of an incident if you involve workers in the actual correction phase of the process. People will contribute more if they have a say in the outcome. Of course, management needs to approve and support the corrections recommended by the workforce. But workers know more than anyone else about what it will Behavior Person Environment Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Intelligence, Motives, Personality Equipment, Tools, Machines, Housekeeping, Heat/Cold, Engineering, Standards, Operating Procedures Complying, Coaching, Recognizing, Communicating, Demonstrating "Actively Caring" Figure 1. A Total Safety Culture requires continual attention to three factors. Safety