Every aspect of our world, our communities and our personal lives is driven by how people behave. The current financial crisis, global warming, MRSA, traffic congestion and our inability to stick to our New Year’s resolutions, are all determined by human behaviour. The problem is that the majority of people are poor at changing other’s (or our own) behaviour in a sustainable way.
When it comes to workplace safety, the same applies. For example, the biggest factor that determines accident statistics is not just the size of the safety policy, the safety training programme, the number of safety signs, or how recently the health and safety manager reinforced the need to follow procedures – it’s simply determined by the behaviour of everyone working in the building.
Unfortunately, most of us have no systematic and consistently successful way of influencing people to change their behaviour. We typically use our favourite methods – verbal persuasion, a presentation, memo or policy – and when this doesn’t work, we resort to threats or punishments or simply learn to cope until we find ways to deal with the consequences of the bad behaviour. Increasing the level of compliance (through audits and form filling) is like parking the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff and dealing with the casualties, rather than stopping people jumping off in the first place.
How does this apply to safety in the office?
How do you get staff to consistently follow the safety procedures? You can train them in the procedures, get them to sign a contract that confirms they’ll comply (and absolve you of responsibility), or place signs across the building warning of the consequences of not following the safety rules. It turns out that when implemented individually, none of these approaches work. However, companies that have zero accidents focus on changing two behaviours. This means everyone:
1) must follow the safety rules.
2) holds everyone else to account for following the safety rule.
All we want people to do is to follow the safety rules. What could be easier? Out comes that memo that asks everyone to ‘be safer’ followed by an invitation to a mandatory safety training programme. The months pass but people continue to disobey the rules and make up excuses – and accidents continue to happen.
And here’s the problem. We think people don’t follow safety rules because they don’t want to – we think they’re lazy, unmotivated, or simply don’t care about safety. We make what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error - we incorrectly attribute people’s behaviour to their motive.
So why do we do what we do?
Two factors determine our behaviour. We behave in the way we do because we either want to, or because we can. We are either motivated (or unmotivated) or able (or unable) to do that behaviour. To influence behaviour, we need to look at this motivation and ability from three perspectives:
1) Personal motivation and personal ability. Do we gain pleasure or pain from the behaviour? Do we have the skills to do the behaviour?
2) Social motivation and social ability – The people around us have a huge influence on our behaviour. This is referred to as peer pressure and social capital (the help, information and resources that others provide).
3) Structural motivation and structural ability – Non-human factors in our environment that motivate or enable us to behave in the way we do.
The first thing we need to do is understand why people aren’t following the safety rules. What ‘forces’ are driving them to act in this way? To help with this diagnosis, stop thinking there is one root cause behind people’s actions and consider six different sources of influence (see figure 1). These six sources identify the many causes behind people’s behaviour. These sources are often overlooked because we live in a ‘quick-fix’ world that leads us to believe there are ‘silver bullet’ solutions to our complex behaviour problems.
Figure 1: The six sources of influence
® 2009 VitalSmarts LC
Only by looking at all six sources, and developing an influence strategy for each one, will we succeed in changing behaviour in a sustainable way.
The six sources of influence
- Source 1: Personal motivation. No matter how important, many safety rules we ask people to follow are boring, tedious, painful or time consuming – it’s all so ‘inconvenient’. Influence experts know that you cannot motivate people directly, but you can help them find there own personal source of motivation. The best way to motivate people is to get them to care and value the change they’re asked to make. By linking new behaviours to the personal values and human consequences that already mean something to them, you’re tapping into a source of motivation that is stronger than any speech, memo or sign.
- Source 2: Personal ability. Not only do we need to be motivated to do this new behaviour, but we also need to have the skill and knowledge to do it. Too often, our strategy is to send people on a safety course where we assume they’ll walk away with all the skills or knowledge they’ll need to follow complicated safety procedures. Or, worse yet, we think the skill is obvious and training isn’t needed. To enable people to perform new behaviours, focus on precisely what you want them to do and invest time and resources in deliberate practice sessions to ensure they’ll have the personal ability and skills to do what’s required.
- Sources 3 and 4: Social motivation and ability. No matter how personally motivated and able we are, we’ll fail at performing our new behaviours if we encounter huge social influence to not follow the procedures. Long-standing bad habits and behaviours are almost always supported by other people around us who encourage/enable the wrong behaviours or discourage/disable the right behaviours. To gain social support for new behaviours, enlist the help of formal and informal opinion leaders – people that others respect or admire. If opinions leaders demonstrate the right behaviours, others are more likely to follow suit. Let these ‘early adopters’ lead the way, get them involved in designing safety procedures and enlist their support to follow these rules. This peer pressure and social capital will support change rather than stifle it.
- Source 5: Structural motivation.Having started with personal and social motivation, you’ll need to reinforce these with a well designed incentive system. It is vital to link the rewards and incentives to the behaviour itself and not just outcomes. Link a proportion of managers’ incentive pay to meeting their targets for behaviour change. Openly praise people for following the rules or give them a reward. Equally important, is holding others accountable who fail to follow the rules.
- Source 6: Structural ability. We frequently overlook this final source of influence, which is about changing our environment – altering those physical ‘things’ which that make the behaviour easier or more difficult. For instance, make it easier to follow the rules by locating safety equipment close to where it’s required. Use safety metrics data and safety signs to remind people about the safety practices. Before you work on changing people, first look at changing the space, data streams, systems and machinery.
It’s the combination that works
It’s important to stress that any one of these sources will not change behaviour on its own but it is the combination of actions across all six sources of influence that will result in changing behaviour. In fact, research shows that if you use four or more sources of influence, you’re ten times more likely to achieve the change you want.1
So, the next time you are struggling with a seemingly impossible problem, a persistent safety violation, projects that are late or over budget, or issues that have resisted prior attempts at change, remind yourself that the key to achieving results is influencing new behaviour. Don’t make the mistake of simply implementing policy, process or technology solutions, or bringing in quality checkers or introducing another form. Identify those few key behaviours that you need people to do and then use these six sources to profoundly influence people to enact those behaviours every time, all the time.
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For more detail on strategies for changing behaviour, a PDF article is available from the author: ‘How to 10x your influence’.