The survey shows many companies to be lamenting the lack of innovative approaches to workplace safety. Is that really the case and what can companies do to kick-start plateauing workplace safety performance?

The market overview paints a qualitative picture of the current workplace safety status quo. Drawing on interviews with safety directors of multinational blue chip companies based in Europe, Asia, North and South America, as well as the Gulf region and Africa, the findings are indicative of views from a wide range of industries. 

Motivators and challenges

Safety performance in approximately half the companies is driven by the desire to reduce injuries and fatalities through a zero harm concept. A third of respondents see this as their moral duty and want to meet stakeholder and industry peer expectations. Penalties in the form of regulation and fear of enforcement are only a relatively small motivator. 

Asked for their top three challenges, the majority of safety leaders (60%) named lack of sufficient capability by senior leaders to take on a guiding role in safety or their inability to provide middle management with the right tools for safety improvement. About half struggle to maintain consistent levels of safety performance across a large, multi-national organisation. 

So how do organisations feel they can use motivators and tackle the challenges they face? Among the solutions named in the survey, the one cited most frequently was the psychology of safety. Various approaches were mentioned, including Nudge Theory and Heuristics. 

More than 60% of respondents use networks and peer-to-peer forums to find out about new developments in workplace safety. More than half read online blogs and articles, and use Twitter for information from thought leaders. 

The survey also asked safety leaders about their views on different areas of workplace safety, their assessment of their own company’s safety competency and planned future workplace safety efforts. Many mentioned the intention to focus on psychology, new behavioural safety models, human error reduction and culture (40%).

Over-used / over-thought?

The companies interviewed have all built a strong safety culture within their organisations, but feel it needs an invigorating impetus. They are – almost without exception – casting around for inspiring, innovative ideas. As one safety director put it: “We need some leading-edge innovation in modern safety philosophy – (something from) occupational psychology and (helping people in) knowing what do to do, because it is ‘the right thing to do’.”

What the companies surveyed want is ‘real, helpful, practical, experienced and well-focused advice… as there is a dearth of this in regulators, standard setters, researchers, academics, consultants and professional bodies.  We don’t want to just reuse or recycle something tried in the ’80s; we want to find new novel and inventive solutions to culture change’.

New approaches

Although behaviour is still key to changing workplace safety performance, safety professionals are ready and willing to try innovative ideas. 

The findings of the survey validated some of the hypotheses that DSS had developed, as well as providing input and validation for the solutions the company is developing.

When I asked Mieke Jacobs, global leader of Employee Safety at DSS, about her experience, she said: “While the DuPont Bradley Curve is still valid, companies in many markets have reached the point where their safety performance is at a crossroads. In order not to stagnate, they now need to cross the cultural bridge from a dependent state to becoming independent and interdependent. That is where psychology-based safety approaches, such as the DuPont Integrated Approach (DNA) for Safety, come in. They use holistic psychology and cognitive science to focus on the intrinsic motivators that determine behaviour. That’s why we at DuPont are now focusing on three psychological aspects of safety: the cognitive (how we think), the affective (how we feel) and the behavioural (what we do).” 

Solutions like these can help companies understand what drives employees’ risky actions and allow them to approach safety from a new angle. Safety practitioners need to think outside the box to find out what triggers unsafe actions and to find solutions to changing behaviour. An awareness of the cognitive, affective and behavioural aspects of psychology is likely to be key. This may well be the new frontier of safety.