When you introduce a safety program to work site, you are actually looking for a change in behavior and a change in culture. Changing the culture in any organization requires the introduction of special tools and techniques, changes in the style of management, changes in the social structure and changes in the way training is designed and delivered.
All these changes are interrelated and some people would say that you should introduce them one at a time. Unfortunately, you will not get your desired result if you introduce them piecemeal because they are all related to each other.
Before any change can commence, there are three areas to be addressed and clarified.
- An awareness of the need to change.
- A clear vision of the objective.
- A program of change to reach the objective.
An awareness of the need to change has to be communicated and discussed with every member of staff on site. Promoting a clear vision of the objective and everybody's contribution can often be quite difficult. These two first points are often the stumbling point for many organizations. This is where their communication fails miserably.
They try and communicate boardroom values in executive language to people who are hourly paid. Their interests are different to those people who inhabit the boardroom. Therefore it stands to reason, that the language used to try and communicate the need to change and their vision for the future must be understood by the people who are going to change and aim for the vision.
The secret of making this communication worthwhile is to look at the whole situation through the eyes of an hourly paid worker. And remember, these are the people who make the profit for your business. The question which every hourly paid worker will ask is, What's In It For Me? Unless this question is answered in terms which they can understand, your safety program is doomed.
The hourly paid worker is interested in their immediate work area, their immediate work relationships and themselves. The terms in which leaders discuss the need for change has to reflect the values of the people who are listening. If their values are ignored, at worst, any changes will be resisted by every means at their disposal. At best, you will have created passive resistance.
If leaders tell their people to change, they can expect resistance, they cannot expect co-operation. It is human nature. To change the way a person behaves, it is necessary to work with that person and coach them through changes to the processes that they use in their work. During this personal development positive reinforcement should be used at every possible opportunity.
Introducing changes to the workplace can be difficult if the people introducing the changes do not have a clear understanding of human behavior.
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