- By Mark Ward Sr.-
If you’ve managed a construction company for any length of time, you’ve heard plenty about jobsite safety. So you likely recognize the need for a site-specific safety program that assigns responsibilities, sets documentation procedures, provides employee training, ensures compliance, establishes channels to communicate about safety issues, mandates scheduled inspections, and specifies how to identify and correct hazards and investigate accidents.
Perhaps you’ve also heard the buzzword “safety culture.” As the National Association of Safety Professionals (NASP) explains, a safety program based on regulatory compliance alone is not enough since rules are only required minimums. In fact, employers increase their danger by basing their safety programs on only the minimum legal requirements and thereby “working as close to the edges as possible,” suggests the association. Instead, employers must instill a safety culture based on the conviction “safety is an ethical responsibility.”
These principles are certainly essential — to draw up a safety program and reach not just for regulatory compliance but a safety culture whose ethic is shared by management and workers alike. The rub is: Just how do you go about instilling a “safety culture”? NASP suggests the key is “behavior modification” but concedes this is “defined as many different things, depending upon who is defining it.”
The end result, though, “means changing the manner in which the human element of our organization works.” This is achieved, NASP advises, through training and administrative controls. In other words, people are shown what to do and their compliance is then monitored.
Yet is this the whole story? If people are channeled into safe actions, will safe values necessarily follow? Or do safe values come first and then lead to safe actions?
One builder that has carefully considered these questions is FBi Buildings of Remington, Ind., a post-frame design and construction company that serves agricultural, commercial, and industrial customers throughout the Midwest. Safety manager Stan Virkler has learned through experience that “how your employees perform their work is normally shaped by your values.”
Virkler defines a good safety culture as one in which “everyone performs work safely whether or not anyone is watching.” Yet achieving such a culture is more than just following rules. Because every jobsite — and every day on every jobsite — is different, leeway exists for managers and employees to interpret how rules apply to a given situation.
“Do your people follow safety rules proactively or reactively?” Virkler asks. “What do they decide is worth reporting or not reporting? Does this change when your people are under an accelerated completion schedule? Do they watch out for number-one or for each other? These things all depend on values — in short, on culture.”
That societies and nations have distinct cultures has been recognized by anthropologists 30 years ago in the bestselling book In Search of Excellence by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman. Rural Builder now takes a different tack on jobsite safety by briefly reviewing in plain language what experts have learned about how to change an organization’s culture — and showing how the success of one company, FBi Buildings, illustrates the application of these principles to creating a positive safety culture.
Changing the Culture
In Search of Excellence maintained that companies with “excellent” cultures are distinguished by a preference for action, employees who feel free to voice ideas, positive and respectful internal relations, a commitment to “hands-on” values, a lean operation that avoids too much complexity, and a “loose-tight” quality that simultaneously encourages unity of purpose and diversity of innovation.
The same year Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence made the bestseller lists, another influential book entitled Corporate Cultures was released. Authors Terrance Deal and Allan Kennedy agreed that values are at the center of “strong” organizational cultures. Such companies have heroes (e.g., the founder) who exemplify their values, and rituals (e.g., employee recognition programs) that celebrate their corporate values, plus ways of formally and informally communicating their values to everyone in the organization.
While the two books popularized the idea of organizational culture, scholars also got into the act. Edgar Schein devised what is now a standard theory in the field, defining organizational culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems … [and] has worked well enough to be considered valid, and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”
Much research on organizational culture has focused on how a company can change its culture. Schein discovered the leaders and managers have a large arsenal of tools to accomplish cultural change.
Leaders can create change primarily through what they choose to focus on, how they respond to critical events, how they allocate resources, what behaviors they model, what they reward and punish, and who they select to hire and promote. In addition, leaders sway company culture by how they structure the organization, what procedures they adopt, what rituals they encourage, how they arrange physical spaces, what stories they tell about the company’s history and heroes, and the formal statements they make about the company’s mission and philosophy.
Altogether, Schein observed, an organization’s culture is comprised of three parts: its unwritten rules about “how things work around here:” its publicly stated values about “how things should work;” and its actual behaviors. Further, these three parts interact with each other. Ideally, behaviors should match publicly stated values, and those stated values should reflect what managers and employees take for granted as basic assumptions.
Another influential theory was devised by scholars Harrison Trice and Janet Beyer. They found that leaders and managers can change an organization’s culture by encouraging certain company rituals, discouraging others, or introducing new ones. Organizational rituals can be broken into six types including those that transition employees into new roles, enhance their power, reduce their power, resolve conflict, reaffirm the company’s hierarchy, and bond employees to each other and the company.
The last aspect of company culture — bonding employees to the organization — is called “organizational identification” and is much studied by researchers. Why is it that people often identify so completely with a company that they automatically, without being told and even when nobody is watching, act according to company values? Clearly, no organization can effectively accomplish work unless employees “buy into” the company vision.
Two European researchers, Matts Alvesson and Hugh Wilmott, observed that employees must do “identity work” to gain a sense of “who they are” and how they fit within a company. Management, however, determines the assumptions that guide employees’ identity work. This occurs as leaders and managers define each employee (e.g., by job title), define what are acceptable grounds for taking action (e.g., what values are approved, what skills are required), define how people should relate to one another (e.g., by praising “team players”), and define the overall company context (e.g., by stressing the competitiveness of the market).
Applying the Lessons
A construction company with a positive safety culture, therefore, should display a number of traits. Such a builder should be proactive and “hands-on” about safety, encourage and affirm employee input on safety concerns and solutions, and have a safety program with clear guidelines. Crews and individuals who maintain safe jobsites are celebrated and held up as examples, while managers use daily reminders, weekly toolbox talks, bulletin board postings, and other means to communicate safety as a value.
A safe jobsite would become the unwritten assumption of each manager and employee. Over time, crews would have discovered that an effective safety program is the best solution to jobsite problems and, thus, its values are transmitted to newcomers as the correct approach.
Executives, managers, and foremen would instill a safety culture by focusing on safety as an ethic, hiring and promoting those who share this commitment, generously funding safety programs and expecting compliance, rewarding safe behaviors and disciplining offenders, incorporating the safety ethic in the company mission statement, reinforcing this ethic through policies and directives, giving safety management its own place in the company hierarchy, and affirming safe practices even in critical situations.
The result would be a company whose culture is marked not only by the outward appearances of safe behaviors and “safety first” pronouncements, but an organization of people whose basic mindset is that a safe jobsite is a given. Thus all three levels of the company’s safety culture are in sync: actions, words, and assumptions. Further, this safety culture is perpetuated through company rituals from new employee orientations and manager trainee programs to yearly performance evaluations and the annual awards luncheon. Such rituals are instigated by management as a way of bonding employees to the safety culture.
Indeed, management pays careful attention to maintaining a “safety first” reputation so that employees can identify with the company only by identifying with its safety commitments. As employees go about their daily tasks and gain a sense of how they fit into the organization, management sets the ground rules: a safety ethic is an essential component of being a “good” employee; safe practices are the primary basis for “good” actions on the jobsite; looking out for each other’s safety is the only “good” way for crew members to relate; jobsite safety is integral to what is “good” for the company overall.
One Builder’s Experience
That these principles work, not just in theory but in practice, is illustrated by the success of FBi Buildings. Stan Virkler explains that, in his role as safety manager, he starts with five simple questions: What is a “good” safety culture? What prevents it? How can we improve it? How do we know when we have achieved it? In trying to maintain this culture, what resistance can we expect?
As to the first question about the nature of company culture, Virkler believes it is the basis “for why we do what we do. Culture is more than your mission statement or company brochure, it’s the values that shape how everyone performs their work.”
Virkler next puts his finger on a problem that has attracted much attention among experts. Even within the same organization, he asserts, “You can have different subcultures. The staff in the main office has one subculture and the construction crews on the jobsite have another.” Researchers over the past 20 years have increasingly recognized that an organizational culture may not be a single unified entity; rather, a company’s culture emerges as different subcultures within the organization negotiate how to cooperate. In this process, affirms Virkler, leadership plays a key role in getting different groups on the same page.
To get an idea of the cooperation needed by different subcultures, continues Virkler, consider what a “bad” safety culture might look like. At the jobsite, construction vehicles are parked close to power lines; crewmembers ride around in truck beds with the tailgate down; a ladder is perched atop a raised work platform; the storage shed is a jumble; construction debris litters the ground. Crews have a mindset that their interests lay in taking the easy road, while management’s mindset assumes that speedy completion is the highest good.
To rectify — or better yet, prevent — these conditions requires cooperation by all. “And that happens when every group in the company has a culture that takes safety as a given—so much so, that people act safely even when nobody’s watching,” says Virkler. When such a culture is in place, then all groups cooperate. Thus for example, the storage shed is neatly kept; items are shelved, labeled, and inventoried; personal protective equipment is worn and fall protection used; lift equipment is properly and safely utilized; dangerous areas such as trenches are coned and cordoned off; construction debris is daily removed.
Although a safe jobsite benefits everyone, Virkler’s construction industry experience points up several factors that can prevent a safety culture from emerging. At FBi Buildings, he notes, “We take steps to make sure there’s no culture of fear, so that employees aren’t worried about retaliation if they report safety concerns or incidents. We follow through on any reports so that crews don’t develop a ‘they don’t care’ culture.’ And if someone must be held accountable for an unsafe practice or incident, we do that too. Otherwise, an ‘unaccountability’ culture can develop.”
Other cultures that can trump a safety culture, adds Virkler, include a “just get it done” culture that puts efficiency above safety, or a “not my responsibility” culture in which crews figure that safety is management’s job and not theirs.
The role of company and jobsite leadership in setting the right tone is clear from a list Virkler has made of seven “safety culture toxins.” The list includes leaders who prioritize deadlines over safety, seldom visit jobsites, fail to encourage input and agreement on safety rules, are lax about employees’ welfare, respond slowly or not at all to hazards and accidents, condone failure to report “near misses” and first-aid injuries, and allow or engage in blame-fixing and finger-pointing.
Believing that “workers are not the problem” and “a good safety culture is the solution,” Virkler has instituted several steps at FBi Buildings to instill “safety not just as a priority at our company, but as a value.”
FBi Buildings engages its crews in developing jobsite safety programs. “We ask them what the hazards are and for ideas on safety improvement,” Virkler affirms, “and then we involve them in implementing the rules and in choosing any new safety equipment and personal protective equipment we buy.” The company likewise has a Safety Committee in which workers and management are represented. And employees are annually surveyed about their impressions of the company’s commitment to their safety and welfare.
Communicating safety begins with a SafeStart orientation for new employees, a course developed by ElectroLab Training Systems of Belleville, Ontario. The safety culture of FBi Buildings is further communicated through weekly jobsite safety meetings. These “toolbox talks,” in which attendance is taken, center on single-sheet handouts from the Safety Meeting Outlines service of Frankfort, Ill.
FBi Buildings takes a proactive approach to gathering and documenting safety data. Forms are faithfully filled out for daily jobsite hazard inspections, comprehensive weekly site inspections, and individual and team safety performance by quarter. When unannounced audits discover violations of personal protective equipment and fall protection requirements, these are written up and tracked. Other forms document housekeeping on the jobsite and in trucks and trailers. Most forms are single sheets which are easy to complete and whose information is easy to read. Required signatures ensure accountability.
Through its safety initiatives, Virkler says, his company conveys two basic principles.
“Foremen are management,” he explains, “and are held accountable for safety, and praised for good safety performance. And employees are encouraged to ‘own’ their safety. They’re told to watch out for each other and know that management will support them if they confront unsafe acts and behavior.”
Once achieved, however, a safety culture requires constant maintenance. Crews will complain about safety glasses that fog up, gloves that restrict hand movements, hardhats that feel hot in the summer, personal protective equipment that is uncomfortable, and fall protection that slows them down. For their part, owners and managers can grouse about the cost of safety equipment and presumed losses in efficiency and productivity.
Yet once a construction company’s safety culture is fully in sync — not only in word and deed, but at the level of internalized values — Virkler has observed several results. “How do you know that you have a good safety culture?” he asks. “You’ll get more safety suggestions from crews. They’ll even volunteer for the Safety Committee. You’ll see crewmembers stretching out their muscles before starting work. And they’ll report those ‘near misses’ that previously went unreported. They’ll have the expectation that the job should be shut down until critical safety hazards are abated. And your foremen will take responsibility for disciplining safety violations by their own crews. Best of all, accidents will decrease.”
Mark Ward Sr. is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Houston-Victoria. He has authored a book on organizational culture and recently coauthored a new textbook on organizational communication.