How to engage senior

leaders in driving the

right safety culture

Driving the right

safety culture
About Tribe Culture Change
In various guises, Tribe Culture Change has been helping companies improve behaviour and
culture for the last 30 years. We have a unique approach that combines the science of
culture change with the art of engaging audiences with creative, ‘outside the box’ solutions.

Because of the work Tribe does with clients, lives have been saved, incidents minimised and
workplaces have become healthier and more productive.

Tribe Culture Change makes a difference on construction sites, telecommunications towers,

power plants and oil rigs; in shops, airports and factories, cruise ships, railways and even
submarines, all across the globe.

tribeculturechange.com

01
How to engage senior leaders in
driving the right safety culture
When embarking on a safety culture change it’s vital that commitment of the senior
leaders of the organisation is achieved at an early stage. Without their support the
change programme will fail through lack of resources or the focus of the organisation
will continue to be primarily on traditional business needs rather than safety.

Key Challenges
• Establishing with the senior managers that they’re responsible
for the safety culture of the organisation
• Motivating senior managers to change
• Providing guidance on how senior leaders must change
• Sustaining the change.

Recommendations
• Initiate the change in senior management attitudes via a fully interactive,
evidence-based workshop or series of workshops
• Use the legal, business and moral dimensions as necessary to convince
the senior management team of the need for change
• Use a relevant injury case study coupled with the results of a Culture Assessment
to demonstrate how senior managers influence the safety of the workforce
• Construct a framework of principles and behaviours for senior managers
to commit to in order to move the culture forwards
• Sustain the change by introducing a series of senior management-supported Safety
Key Performance Indicators that middle managers are measured against.

02
Contents
04 Introduction
04 Questions that affect engaging senior
leaders in culture change
05 Analysis
14 Further case studies illustrating
other learning points
15 Summary
15 List of figures
15 List of case studies
15 References

03
Introduction
Any effective change in an organisation as a whole must occur from the top. This is true of any
aspect of a business such as productivity, quality, customer service and, of course, safety. It’s
possible that an individual site may have a world class safety performance in an organisation
with an otherwise mediocre safety performance but the commitment to safety improvement
will be driven by the senior management of that site. To rely on the change initiating ‘bottom up’
alone is unrealistic in most cultures, although in more developed safety cultures the management
role may become only one of enabling and resourcing. Therefore, gaining the support of senior
leaders for a Culture Change Programme is essential and must be achieved at an early stage.

Questions that affect engaging

senior leaders in culture change
Q: H
 ow can we motivate senior managers to change?
Q: How can we encourage the senior management to understand
that they’re responsible for the safety culture of the organisation?
Q: How can the senior management group change the safety culture?
Q: How can the change be sustained?

04
Analysis
Introduction
Initiating the change in senior management mindset is often accomplished through a fully
interactive workshop, or series of workshops, structured to facilitate the senior group understanding
the need for change and how to bring it about. The need for interactivity and ‘discovery learning’
cannot be overstressed. As a general rule, trying to impose change on a senior management
group will fail. The workshop must be strongly evidence based, senior groups respond to hard
data and logic, the results of a Culture Assessment will contribute strongly in this respect.

A senior management safety Culture Change Programme is likely to follow this agenda:
• Establishing the need for change (where we are now). Drawing on Culture Assessment
results (if available), injury/safety statistics and a variety of other motivational
data. An injury-based case study should also be employed at this stage
• Establishing responsibility. It’s not unusual for Senior Management groups to be unaware that
they control the safety performance of the organisation in the same way that they control other
aspects of business performance. If this is the case, then this agenda item will be relevant
• The vision for safety improvement (where do we want to be). It may be appropriate to include
a section to consider what the senior management group wish to accomplish in safety.
Establishing a safety improvement vision is covered elsewhere in these insight documents
• How the senior management group can initiate the change (the vehicle). This should cover
a number of behaviours and principles that the group are willing to commit to in order to
progress and possibly proposing some Key Performance Indicators for the business.

Establishing the need for change

The first step on the way to change is to persuade the senior management that there is a
need to change. As long as leaders are comfortable with the status quo they will not see
the need.

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Case Study: Striving for excellence apart from in safety
This anecdote concerns a European logistics company. The safety performance of the organisation
varied from division to division, the better performers’ safety tended to be driven by the requirements
of ‘safety excellent’ clients. The safety performance of the organisation as a whole was quite poor.
In order to motivate senior managers to change their priorities and to provide guidance on how
to improve, a workshop had been arranged, led by a specialist culture change consultant.

The consultant informed the senior management of the poor safety record and the effect on
the lives of the injured parties. Many of the participants realised that this was an unacceptable
way to do business but one individual asked how their safety performance compared with
the average safety performance for that industry sector, and shouldn’t they strive to just meet
that. This was in a training room which featured posters and pledges striving for business
excellence in delivery, speed of turnaround and customer satisfaction… but the average
might be acceptable for safety? The unspoken subtext here was a concern that safe working
might slow down the work rate and adversely affect delivery and customer satisfaction.

There are generally three ‘hot buttons’ to persuade senior managers to make a change:
1 T
 he legal requirement. The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007
facilitates prosecution of an organisation for safety failings resulting in the death of an
individual 1. However, under the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974 (HSWA) section 37(1),
company directors, managers and officers can be personally prosecuted for offences
committed by a body corporate if their involvement can be proven. The HSE are increasingly
willing to bring personal prosecutions against those in control of businesses. 46 directors and
senior managers were prosecuted under section 37 in 2015 and 2016. Legal responsibilities
may act as a motivator for some individuals but will generally result in a mediocre safety
performance, effectively meeting the minimum standard to avoid prosecution.

2 F
 inancial/business. ‘Poor safety is poor business’. Often the cost of poor safety is a hidden cost
and it can be useful to make senior management groups aware of the sums involved, which can
be very substantial in large organisations (refer to the case study below). This is especially true
when the sales requirement to compensate for the losses is taken into account. The challenge
lies in calculating the cost of safety failures. The HSE estimate that the cost to an employer
of a workplace fatality is £99,700. The average cost to the employer of absence over 7 days
due to injury is £5,100, to the individual £19,000 and to society £30,100 2. These figures will vary
significantly depending on rates of pay and so on. It should be reiterated that the extra sales
required to compensate for these losses must be taken into account. Estimates vary but the
ratio of insured losses to uninsured losses is generally considered to be between 1:8 or 1:10.

It may also be worth examining business performance generally. If safety behaviours

are wanting, it’s quite possible that ‘at risk’ behaviours may be being pursued more
generally, leading to a poor product quality performance or equipment damage.

It’s increasingly the case that ‘blue chip’ organisations who are potential clients will
not engage with organisations having a poor safety record. The reasons for this
may well be: moral, avoiding association with ‘unsafe’ organisations, concerns about
continuity of supply, and/or a view that an organisation with a poor safety record
is ‘out of control’ in a way that may even put their own organisation at risk.

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Case Study: The cost of poor safety
This example concerns a large US based construction and maintenance materials
supply company. The organisation had a ‘cost of injuries algorithm’ in place which
indicated that the cost of injuries for 2018 and 2019 was $19,000,000.

To compensate for this loss, an 8% trading profit $37,500,000 of sales was required.

These figures do not cover the loss of productivity, the cost

of training replacement labour, or the impact on morale.

3 M
 oral. ‘Our people shouldn’t get hurt as a result of working here’. Use of the moral imperative
requires careful management to avoid accusations of ‘emotional blackmail’ or being patronising
but it’s frequently the most effective approach for motivating senior management to change.

Senior managers are very busy people, working in high pressure environments and dealing
with a variety of different challenges on a day to day basis. If safety has a low profile in
given organisation, then it’s likely that the senior managers will fail to engage with safety
to the required extent. In these situations, the senior group may well need reminding
that poor safety means pain and suffering to people that they’re responsible for.

Most human beings are engaged on a very fundamental level by emotions, and indeed,
emotions are strongly linked with memory. This means that telling the story of an injury (an
‘injury case study’) and particularly the human impact of that injury, can be a powerful motivator
for change. This is evidenced by the large number of short films that are commercially
available of an individual telling the story of their own injury. Also, there are many conference
speakers that will deliver their story in person to groups, which can be extremely motivational.
However, if possible, to maximise the benefit, a filmed or personal delivery to the senior group
involving an injured member of the organisation’s own workforce, or their manager, should
be used. The narrative must cover how the actions of people from all levels contributed
to the incident, including the injured party, but significantly, how the prevailing safety
culture contributed and the senior management messaging that fostered that culture.

Summary
Issues to consider when motivating senior managers to change include: legal
considerations, business drivers, the moral imperative, or a combination of
these factors, depending on the Safety Culture Maturity of the group.

Establishing responsibility
The safety Culture Maturity of an organisation will inform a senior management team’s level
of understanding of their responsibilities for safety. In comparatively under-developed safety
cultures, the senior management team may see themselves as so distant from the workplace
that their influence on safety is minimal and that incidents are due to poor supervision
and/or poor worker behaviour. However, they will recognise their influence on profitability,
productivity, quality of delivery and so on, all of which are dependent to some extent on worker
behaviour. In organisations having a well-developed safety culture the senior management
team will be well aware of their considerable influence on the safety performance and they
will manage safety much in the same way as they manage other aspects of the business.

Experience suggests that generally, if they don’t realise it already, senior management
groups will react poorly to being told that they have ultimate responsibility for the safety
performance. Changing the mindset of a senior group (any group?) must be based on a
combination of persuasion, evidence-based learning and emotional engagement.

Assuming that training workshops are to be used as the vehicle for promoting a change
in attitude and behaviour in the senior team, then a section designed to establish
their responsibility for the safety culture must be an early part of the agenda.
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A number of ‘tools’ can be used for establishing responsibility:
1 A
 n incident case study. As detailed above, an incident case study can be used to motivate
senior managers to change and, when properly constructed, can establish senior management
responsibility too. If an incident case study is to be employed it must meet a number of criteria:
• Ideally, the incident should be a real occurrence. Failing this it should be based on a real
occurrence, or at least represent a plausible occurrence in that organisation
• The narrative must cover how the life of the injured party was changed
and the impact on their family. The emotional ‘hook’
• There must be sufficient information to judge why the individual adopted an ‘at risk’
behaviour. This should establish that the prevailing culture enabled/tolerated/encouraged
such behaviour based on productivity, convenience or other business drivers. This will
enable a facilitator to establish that senior managers control the culture and therefore
carry responsibility for the injury no matter how remote they were from the incident.

2 T
 he Culture Assessment. Assuming a rigorous Safety Culture Assessment has been carried out,
the report should contain enough material to establish senior management responsibility. If focus
groups have been hosted as part of the assessment exercise there may well be comments that
were given which may be drawn on to provide upward feedback on the senior managers.

3 In a workshop setting a skilled facilitator might even challenge the group to detail an
actual incident that could not have been prevented by senior management action.

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Case Study: Establishing management responsibility
This example concerns a waste management group. A safety Culture Assessment revealed a
disconnect between the management’s perception of safety and that of the workforce. The principal
challenges were that senior management needed a better appreciation of the adverse conditions
that the workforce had to deal with and trust between the two groups needed to be improved.

A number of approaches were employed to resolve this situation:

• The CEO was filmed spending a day with a refuse truck crew getting an
appreciation of their daily tasks. The film was subsequently used as part of the
agenda for Management Culture Based Safety Workshops that followed.
• A filmed case study was produced involving an injury to a member of a refuse truck crew. The
film featured several scenes showing the build up to the incident and clearly demonstrated
the cultural and managerial influences. The film was used as one of the items of evidence for
an accident investigation exercise which was the centrepiece of motivational workshops.
• These approaches gave management an appreciation of the challenges faced by the
workforce and helped to consolidate trust between the two groups. The ‘Safer together’
programme culminated in a safety behavioural pact between management and workforce.

Figure 1: The principles of ‘Safer together’

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Summary
Encouraging senior management groups to recognise their influence on the safety
performance can be challenging. The principle tools for raising awareness are an
incident case study and/or the findings of a safety Culture Assessment.

How senior managers must change

Building behavioural frameworks is covered elsewhere in this sequence of research documents.
However, the desired behaviours of senior managers warrant specific consideration.

The first point to make is that Key Safe Behaviours cannot be imposed on any group but
especially not on senior managers. Senior management groups must be positioned to
propose their own behavioural standards, which must be concise, practical and specific.

The support for safety by middle managers and supervisors is directly visible to all in the way that they
behave and the things that they talk about. However, the support by senior managers is generally less
immediately visible. The Key Safety Leadership Behaviours applying to senior managers are more
concerned with their decision making, how they allocate resources and what safety metrics they value.

When developing a framework of principles and behaviours with

senior managers the following areas should be explored:
• What is the senior management group’s real priority here: delivery or safe delivery?
• How safe is your own behaviour?
• What leading safety KPIs are in place? How are they communicated?
How seriously do people take them?
• How would a member of the workforce feel about the commitment of senior management to safety?
• How would the people that report to you feel about your commitment to safety?
• How closely do you monitor the safety performance of individual managers?
• How do you encourage reporting of hazards, risks and safety failures?
• How often do you visit the workplace for safety reasons?
• How well resourced are safety improvements, or are there always more important priorities?

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Case Study: Senior management Key
Safety Leadership Behaviours
This example concerns a multi-national services and facilities management company. In 2018 the
organisation embarked on a comprehensive programme of safety culture improvement. A significant
part of the programme was the development of personal safety behaviour standards for people at all
levels in the organisation. These were developed in consultation with the various groups concerned
and were then introduced to the wider population via a series of interactive ‘discovery learning’ based
workshops. The leaders’ workshops featured self-assessment where people judged their performance
against the behavioural standard and committed to make improvements where necessary.

Figure 1: Senior management self-assessment grid

The figure shows the self-assessment ‘grid’, the options being:

1. I always behave in this way
2. I sometimes behave in this way
3. I rarely behave in this way

The candidates were asked to select the behaviours that they felt they needed to improve upon
and to complete a commitment action plan detailing how they would make those improvements. An
established ‘buddy system’ was used to facilitate monitoring of progress on the commitments made.

The self-assessment grid is part of a comprehensive guide which was drawn up to act as a
reference document detailing the principles of safety culture change in the organisation.

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Apart from the senior management behavioural framework, the workshop
also equipped the senior team with two other tools for change:
• Storytelling. Telling a story which illustrates a principle or learning point is an effective
mechanism for ensuring that the learning will be remembered. However, the stories
must be delivered in a specific style to activate the various areas of the brain associated
with memory, this was accommodated with a practical exercise in the workshops.
• Safety conversations. The traditional way of managing unsafe behaviour is to tell people to
change their behaviour and how to do it. This traditional approach, instead of reinforcing safe
behaviour through recognition and praise, ignores safe behaviour. Safety conversations are
one-on-one, informal, non-threatening discussions about the safety of a task. This is a proven
technique for making sustained change in individuals and, eventually, in the whole
organisation.
Summary
The Key Safety Leadership Behaviours at senior management level are concerned with
their decision making, their allocation of resources and what safety metrics they value.

Sustaining the Change

Just as with every other aspect of business improvement, safety improvement requires a
strong and respected set of Key Performance Indicators to allow progress to be measured
and to facilitate the setting of improvement goals. The classic measure of safety performance
is Lost Time Injury and unfortunately this will have to be part of the portfolio of measures
as it’s generally an industry standard. The drawback with this as a measure is that it’s very
lagging, is a negative measure and is all but meaningless for small organisations which
may have a poor safety performance and yet have the occasional LTI-free year.

In order to really measure progress, a portfolio of measures is required,

many of which must be leading indicators. These might include:
• Near miss reporting rates and resolution rates
• Hazard reporting rates and resolution rates
• The number of safety audits/inspections carried out and closures of actions arising
• The number of safety conversations undertaken (see case study above)
• The number of safety toolbox talks carried out
• The number of safety training courses attended (used as an
upstream safety metric by some organisations).

It’s not unusual for organisations to repeat Culture Assessments to measure progress,
although realistically these can only be repeated every two years or so.

It’s important that the safety metrics are taken seriously by the senior management and
that the performance of their reports is regularly reviewed against these criteria. Some of
these leading indicators must appear on managers’ personal performance appraisals.

Workplace safety visits are an essential part of the portfolio of activities required to sustain
the change. These are variously known as safety visits, safety tours and so on, but are
distinct from safety audits or inspections in so far as they’re informal and preferably not
scheduled. The visit should definitely involve talking to members of the workforce about
their safety, preferably in a coaching style. Visits/tours of this nature send a strong message
to the workforce that safety is important to the top management of the organisation.

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Case Study: Safety Key Performance Indicators
Figure 2: Leading and lagging safety KPIs

The figure above shows the safety KPIs for a large organisation produced by the senior
safety management. Although some metrics are in place, because the process of safety
culture change was only just starting, the performance against them is poor.

There are several lagging indicators related to injuries. However, the potential consequences
of incidents are being considered whether injuries result or not. Numbers of near misses
are featured as a measure, although uptake is nil because people are yet to be educated
on how important these are. Leading indicators include workplace safety visits, safety
observations and initiative status which primarily features training progress.

Summary
Change is sustained through senior management setting upstream Safety Key
Performance Indicators, showing an interest in these KPIs, holding managers to
account for their safety performance and visible presence in the workplace.

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Further case studies illustrating
other learning points
Relevant aspect of senior
Organisation Details Learning points
leadership engagement

Commitment to change A major UK based The organisation was subject Good audit results can induce
confectionery to regular safety audits by a false sense of security in
manufacturer a reputable inspection and senior management. This can
verification house. The audit be dispelled by carrying out a
results for the past several rigorous Culture Assessment
years had been very favourable
when a fatality occurred. The
incident dispelled complacency
and prompted the senior
management to seek change

How must senior UK division of a power The starting point was a large If the safety culture is
managers change generation company workshop comprising 80+ mature enough then:
with an already senior management attendees
quite advanced centred around a case study • Senior managers will commit
safety culture presented via VR headsets. to a pre prepared behavioural
framework provided extensive
The framework of desired ‘sense checking’ has been
senior management behaviours carried out beforehand
had been constructed prior • Large workshop groups will
to the workshop through be effective, but this is not
extensive consultation with true in less mature cultures
many stakeholders. Managers
assessed themselves against
the framework and detailed
the improvement areas
they would focus on.
The workshop was a success
with senior managers committing
to the framework with no dissent

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Summary
In order to engage senior leaders in driving the right safety
culture, the following issues should be considered:
• Motivate. Has adequate consideration been given on how to motivate the senior team
to change, and what are the ‘hot buttons’ that will prompt the desire to change?

• Establishing responsibility. To what degree do the senior team recognise their

influence on the safety behaviours of the workforce? Can a relevant case study
be sourced if needed? What is the business cost of poor safety?

• How must the senior team change? Has adequate consideration been given to the
senior management team Safety Leadership Behaviours that are required? What ‘tools’
can they be equipped with to assist them in promoting the safety message?

• Sustainability. What are the Safety Key Performance Indicators required to

sustain the change? How much of the focus is on leading indicators? How will
middle managers be held to account for their safety performance?

List of figures
• Figure 1: The principles of ‘Safer together’
• Figure 2: Senior Management self-assessment grid
• Figure 3: Leading and lagging safety KPIs.

List of case studies

• Case Study: Striving for excellence apart from in safety
• Case Study: The cost of poor safety
• Case Study: Establishing management responsibility
• Case Study: Senior management Key Safety Leadership Behaviours
• Case Study: Safety Key Performance Indicators.

References
1 www.birketts.co.uk/insights/legal-updates/prosecutions-of-directors-more-than-doubled
2 www.hse.gov.uk/economics/eauappraisal.htm

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