Driving culture change is key to improving safety in the workplace

Friday, 01 August, 2014

Global consultants DuPont Sustainable Solutions warns that too much attention is being paid to ‘ticking the box’ with regulations and not enough time and effort is being invested in driving cultural change across the workforce.

“The ‘she’ll be right mate’ attitude is prevalent in our work environments,” says Graeme Iggo, safety advisor for DuPont Sustainable Solutions across Australia and New Zealand.

“As a societal norm, that culture can be incredibly detrimental to the way a workforce operates. While constantly reviewing and updating regulations and processes is certainly important, the reality is that those are short-term fixes and they aren’t going to be effective on their own.

“Unfortunately, it’s taken some major tragedies and a concerning track record of workplace safety for employers and employees to realise our safety record should be a lot better than it is,” he said.

“So how do we drive cultural change across sectors?

“First we need to do an audit - be that at an industry-wide level or just on an individual company level - and identify the issues, gaps and concerns.

“Then, one of the most important parts is implementing tangible change to rectify the issues. We need to ensure workers understand the current situation and the vision for the future, and that they are then educated, trained and communicated with on an ongoing basis to achieve that. It’s also about developing a culture that employees value; why they want to be there and why they want to work efficiently to achieve goals on time and on budget.”

CBH Group, one of Australia’s leading grain organisations, has recently undertaken some major work to drive culture change and improve safety across the workplace. When CEO Andrew Crane joined in 2009, he informed his team that he could no longer accept workers being hurt as an accepted part of doing business.

Through a conscious decision to change, CBH shifted its mindset from a production-focused organisation to one with the belief that business performance and productivity can be improved through a high-performance safety culture.

The end goal is a workplace wherein employees take direct ownership and responsibility for their own and others’ safety. This kind of leadership nurtures trust, engagement and relationships among employees, shareholders and the wider community.

DuPont started working with CBH to help it integrate safety into the organisation’s business culture, institute training and coaching for CBH leaders, and quality incident investigations. Almost 40,000 hours of field training occurred in the first year alone and the business increased its investment in safety, team resources and a dedicated safety capital budget.

The result has been significant improvement in injury and incident rates, as well as CBH business performance. They’ve also achieved a 62.5% reduction in their lost time injury frequency rate since 2009 and have been able to sustain that.

“The key to achieving a safer workplace is setting best practice processes in place and encouraging workers to not only meet those regulations but understand how and why they work and encouraging them to be the champion of enforcing them. We want them to openly and proudly value their own and their workmates’ safety and on a daily basis be doing everything in their power to ensure they keep safe.

“At the end of the day it’s these people who are at the coalface. If we can’t drive change in safety awareness and behaviour through to the people on the ground, then this reform will ultimately fail.”

Graeme Iggo is a consultant for DuPont Sustainable Solutions (DSS). Having a career of nearly four decades with DuPont, it is inevitable that safety awareness and focus becomes very much part of his everyday life - both at and away from work. He is passionate about safety, and has helped industries such as forestry, airlines and engineering improve their safety culture.