• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Safety Risk .net

Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk

Discover More on this Site

  • Home
    • About
      • Privacy Policy
      • Contact
  • FREE RESOURCES
    • FREE SAFETY eBOOKS
    • FREE DOWNLOADS
    • TOP 50
    • FREE RISK ASSESSMENT FORMS
    • Find a Safety Consultant
    • Free Safety Program Documents
    • Psychology Of Safety
    • Safety Ideas That Work
    • HEALTH and SAFETY MANUALS
    • FREE SAFE WORK METHOD STATEMENT RESOURCES
    • Whats New In Safety
    • FUN SAFETY STUFF
    • Health and Safety Training
    • SAFETY COURSES
    • Safety Training Needs Analysis and Matrix
    • Top 20 Safety Books
    • This Toaster Is Hot
    • Free Covid-19 Toolbox Talks
    • Download Page – Please Be Patient With Larger Files…….
    • SAFETY IMAGES, Photos, Unsafe Pictures and Funny Fails
    • How to Calculate TRIFR, LTIFR and Other Health and Safety Indicators
    • Download Safety Moments from Human Resources Secretariat
  • PSYCHOLOGY OF SAFETY & RISK
    • Safety Psychology Terminology
    • Some Basics on Social Psychology & Risk
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk – Prof Karl E. Weick
    • The Psychology of Leadership in Risk
    • Conducting a Psychology and Culture Safety Walk
    • The Psychology of Conversion – 20 Tips to get Started
    • Understanding The Social Psychology of Risk And Safety
    • Psychology and safety
    • The Psychology of Safety
    • Hot Toaster
    • TALKING RISK VIDEOS
    • WHAT IS SAFETY
    • THE HOT TOASTER
    • THE ZERO HARM DEBATE
    • SEMIOTICS
    • LEADERSHIP
  • Covid-19
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Covid-19 Returning to Work Inductions, Transitioning, Safety Start Up and Re Entry Plans
    • Covid-19 Work from Home Safety Checklists and Risk Assessments
    • The Hierarchy of Control and Covid-19
    • Why Safety Loves Covid-19
    • Covid-19, Cricket and Lessons in Safety
    • The Covid-19 Lesson
    • Safety has this Covid-19 thing sorted
    • The Heart of Wisdom at Covid Time
    • How’s the Hot Desking Going Covid?
    • The Semiotics of COVID-19 and the Social Amplification of Risk
    • Working From Home Health and Safety Tips – Covid-19
    • Covid-19 and the Hierarchy of Control
  • Dr Rob Long Posts
    • Learning Styles Matter
    • There is no HIERARCHY of Controls
    • Scaffolding, Readiness and ZPD in Learning
    • What Can Safety Learn From Playschool?
    • Presentation Tips for Safety People
    • Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts
    • It’s Only a Symbol
    • Ten Cautions About Safety Checklists
    • Zero is Unethical
    • First Report on Zero Survey
    • There is No Objectivity, Deal With it!
  • Quotes & Slogans
    • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
    • When Slogans Don’t Work
    • 77 OF THE MOST CLASSIC, FAMOUS and INFAMOUS SAFETY QUOTES
    • 500 BEST WORKPLACE HEALTH and SAFETY SLOGANS 2020
    • 167 CATCHY and FUNNY SAFETY SLOGANS FOR THE WORKPLACE
    • COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Health and Safety Slogans and Quotes for the Workplace
    • Safety Acronyms
    • You know Where You Can Stick Your Safety Slogans
    • Sayings, Slogans, Aphorisms and the Discourse of Simple
    • Spanish Safety Slogans – Consignas de seguridad
    • Safety Slogans List
    • Road Safety Slogans
    • How to write your own safety slogans
    • Why Are Safety Slogans Important
    • Safety Slogans Don’t Save Lives
    • 40 Free Safety Slogans For the Workplace
    • Safety Slogans for Work

Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures

April 29, 2020 by Mark Taylor Leave a Comment

imageWhat do Sir James Dyson, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Vincent van Gough and Stephen King have in common?

They are of course all famous people, but what many people don’t know is that they had far more failures than successes before they reached eventual stardom.

The very key to their success is that they all had approach mindsets who acknowledged their trials not as failures, but just part of incremental learning which led eventually to successful creations in the future.

Unfortunately, in safety circles the opposite mindset is often adopted, where managers try to avoid risks at all cost, stifle innovation using binary systems and promote a zero-harm philosophy.

Every task we engage in involves an approach or avoidance mind-set. An example of both mindsets can be found at your local gym. People who have approach mindsets exercise to get fitter, while those with avoidance mindsets exercise in order to stop gaining weight or to prevent high cholesterol levels. In each case the action can lead to the same result, but the mindset or emotions which people feel when they are exercising, will have a significant influence on whether they will achieve their goals in the long term.

Research shows, when people are energized by the possibility of gain (approach mindsets), they adopt a flexible cognitive style that allows them to be more creative, to see the forest instead of the trees and explore a wider array of new ideas. Whereas avoidance mindsets try to evade negative outcomes and narrow their focus on what they know, instead of looking outside the box for alternative solutions.

Research has established that when people focus all their attention on one topic such as staying safe, work can become a lot more stressful and harder to do. And, over time mental strain can take its toll, resulting in less innovation, burnout and sometimes serious accidents.

A study conducted in the 1990s by Amy Edmondson of Harvard University, established that the more errors nurses made in hospital, the better the relationship they had with their managers and co-workers. But, when the consequences of reporting failures were too severe (when helping doctors treating patients with serious illnesses), the nurses avoided acknowledging mistakes altogether. The same often happens in safety, when people avoid reporting accidents instead of becoming the scapegoat for blemishing a zero-harm injury rate.

When work environments are psychologically safe and mistakes are viewed as a normal part of the learning process, employees are less prone to covering them up. The fascinating implication is that people with avoidance mindsets often avoid examining the causes of their blunders, making it more likely that their mistakes will be repeated in the future. Their natural action is one of self-preservation rather than innovation.

Having a team that’s afraid of reporting failures or blemishing a five-year safety record is a dangerous problem, particularly because the symptoms are not immediately visible. What appears good on the surface can easily blinkered by what lurking underneath and has led to many disasters such as Piper Alpha and Deepwater Horizon.

The challenge for businesses is that the pressures of avoiding failures is so strong that hardly anyone bothers establishing the root causes of incidents and merely put them down to a lack of training or not following the procedures. And, when failures and non-conformances are tarred with the same brush all learning and creativity grinds to a halt.

However, people who freely admit their errors are better able to learn from one another’s mistakes, take the steps to tweak their process and ultimately stop accidents occurring. Encouraging employees to acknowledge mistakes is therefore a vital first step to improving cultures and developing newer and better safety systems in the future.

So, what do managers need to do in the future?

Create a framework for effective reporting

Framing the work by ensuring that everyone is “on the same page about the risks that lie ahead,” invite engagement by asking good questions, and respond productively by not just appreciating employees’ input but by acting on it.

Get managers to acknowledge human fallibility

Managers can be the catalyst for this by acknowledging their own fallibility. Explain that most people are not inept or deficient, but complex and error-prone animals that make mistakes from time to time and don’t deliberately cause accidents.

A thoughtful manager will proactively invite input with good questions that signal he or she is genuinely interested in what people have to say. Managers of psychologically safe teams are generally seen as accessible and approachable.

Show civility

Being polite is the most available contribution people can make to creating and sustaining psychological safety. Attending to what others contribute and responding with consideration not only reduces anxiety but encourages creative thinking.

Reward the attempts, not just the outcomes.

Incentivise employees for trying new approaches and taking controlled risks. The only way to promote safety is to reward the attempts, reinforcing behaviours you want to encourage.

Dig deep for failures and opportunities.

Failure often contains powerful clues for improvement, especially when the focus is on what can be improved in the future. Be careful, however, not to turn post-mortems into witch hunts by fixating on who made the mistake. Far better to ask future-oriented questions like, “What’s one thing we can do better next time?”

Challenge ideas but show respect for others

Contrasting ideas are the greatest source of creativity.  It is important for team members to learn to be tolerant of other viewpoints.  Agreement should not be a mandatory value but agreeing to respectfully disagree should be.

Stay the course

Think like Google. It is not about safety performance today or tomorrow; it is about what you want the organisations culture to look like in five to ten years. The relationship between creativity and progress is messy and not straight forward with difficult challenges and setbacks along the way. Anticipating early struggles makes it easier to stick around for later gains.

Get workers to ask, “What have I failed at today?”

Developing workers skills is like waging a negotiation. If the opposition says yes right away, it might mean you’ve aimed too low.

  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
  • More about Mark
Mark Taylor

Mark Taylor

Director at Safety Matters (NZ) Ltd
Mark Taylor

Latest posts by Mark Taylor (see all)

  • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures - April 29, 2020
  • Enculturing Safety - January 17, 2019
  • Groundhog Safety Day - February 28, 2017
  • Counter Intuitive Safety - August 15, 2016
  • Under Par Safety - April 23, 2016
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor is a key note speaker and trainer who has spent the majority of his career educating and helping people to take health and safety seriously. Over a period of twenty years he has worked across a broad spectrum of industries around the world and has developed a number of innovative safety tools that are now common in many workplaces. Mark continues to see things differently and push the boundaries in safety management beyond traditional systems and approaches, which he feels are dated and limited.

Please share our posts

  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Psychological Safety

Reader Interactions

Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below Cancel reply

Primary Sidebar

How we pay for the high cost of running of this site – try it for free on your site

Visit Count – Started Jan 2015

  • 21,329,406 Visitors

Never miss a post - Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address and join over 30,000 other discerning safety people who receive notifications of new posts by email

Please take our 2 minute zero survey

Recent Comments

  • Rob Long on Intuition and Safety
  • Serge Massicotte on Fire Pit Safety
  • Bernard Corden on Intuition and Safety
  • Rob Long on You Can’t Believe in Zero and Learning at The Same Time
  • Bernard Corden on You Can’t Believe in Zero and Learning at The Same Time
  • Jason Robertson on Are You a Safety Clown?
  • Rob Long on You Can’t Believe in Zero and Learning at The Same Time
  • Rob Long on Zero Vision Creates Mindless Gobbledygook
  • Michael Dale on You Can’t Believe in Zero and Learning at The Same Time
  • Wynand on Zero Vision Creates Mindless Gobbledygook

FREE eBOOK DOWNLOADS

Featured Downloads

  • Covid-19 Work From Home Safety Checklist (4648 downloads)
  • Safety-Backronym-Poster.pdf (360 downloads)
  • Real Risk by Dr Rob Long (836 downloads)
  • Manual Handling Risk Assessment Template (400 downloads)
  • Zero-to-HRO.docx (796 downloads)
  • Driving Safety (6297 downloads)
  • Public-Event-Risk-Management-Checklist-HD.doc (958 downloads)
  • How To Make Your Own Cloth Face Mask (187186 downloads)
  • Preventing Heat Exhaustion (14772 downloads)
  • Lessons-I-Have-Learnt.docx (1875 downloads)
  • Risk-Homeostasis-Target-Risk-3.pdf (1884 downloads)
  • Hazardous Substances Risk Assessment Form (342 downloads)
  • Vehicle Visual Inspection (7450 downloads)
  • Envisioning Risk (95 downloads)
  • Health and Safety Risk Assessment Checklist (8179 downloads)

Recent Posts

  • Intuition and Safety
  • The Linguistics of Zero
  • You Can’t Believe in Zero and Learning at The Same Time
  • Poisoning the Professional Waterhole
  • Zero Vision Creates Mindless Gobbledygook
  • The Seduction of Slogans in Safety
  • Certificate, Diploma and Masters Studies in SPoR
  • Measurement Anxiety in Safety
  • Are You a Safety Clown?
  • The Quantitative and Qualitative Divide in Safety

Footer

AUTHORS

  • Alan Quilley
    • Heinrich–Industrial Accident Prevention
    • The Problem With ZERO Goals and Results
  • Bernard Corden
    • AHH$ Covid$afe Chri$tma$ New$letter
    • Paradise by the dashboard light
  • Bill Sims
    • Employee Engagement: Chocolate, Vanilla, or Strawberry?
    • Injury Hiding-How do you stop it?
  • Craig Clancy
    • Task Based vs Activity Based Safe Work Method Statements
    • Safety And Tender Submissions
  • Daniel Kirk
    • It’s easy being wise after the event.
    • A Positive Safety Story
  • Dave Whitefield
    • Safety is about…
    • Safety and Compliance
  • Dennis Millard
    • Are You Risk Intelligent?
    • Honey they get me! They get me at work!
  • Drewie
    • Downturn Doin’ Your Head In? Let’s Chat….
    • How was your break?
  • Gabrielle Carlton
    • All Care and No Care!
    • You Are Not Alone!
  • George Robotham
    • How to Give an Unforgettable Safety Presentation
    • How To Write a Safety Report
  • Goran Prvulovic
    • Safety Manager – an Ultimate Scapegoat
    • HSE Performance – Back to Basics
  • James Ellis
    • In search of plan B in workers’ recovery
    • What and how should we measure to support recovery from injury?
  • James Parkinson
    • To laugh or not to laugh
    • People and Safety
  • John Toomey
    • Who is Responsible for This?
    • Who Are Your People?
  • Karl Cameron
    • Abby Normal Safety
    • The Right Thing
  • Ken Roberts
    • Safety Legislation Is Our Biggest Accident?
    • HSE Trip Down Memory Lane
  • Mark Perrett
    • Psychology of Persuasion: Top 5 influencing skills for getting what you want
  • Mark Taylor
    • Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace by Taking Risks and Analysing Failures
    • Enculturing Safety
  • Max Geyer
    • WHS Legislation is NOT about Safety it’s about Culture
    • Due Diligence Is Not Just Ticking Boxes!
  • Matt Thorne
    • It was the SIA until someone wanted to swing from the Chandelier
    • Common Sense is Remarkably Uncommon
  • Peter Ribbe
    • Is there “Common Sense” in safety?
    • Who wants to be a safety professional?
  • Phil LaDuke
    • Hey Idiots, You’re Worried About the Wrong Things
    • Misleading Indicators
  • Admin
    • Certificate, Diploma and Masters Studies in SPoR
    • Merry Covid Xmas–2020
  • Dr Rob Long
    • Intuition and Safety
    • The Linguistics of Zero
  • Rob Sams
    • I’m just not that into safety anymore
    • Social ‘Resiliencing’
  • Barry Spud
    • Barry Spud’s Hazard Control Tips
    • Researchers Reveal the Top 10 Most Effective Safety Slogans Of All Time
  • Sheri Suckling
    • How Can I Get the Boss to Listen?
  • Safety Nerd
    • The Block isn’t portraying safety as it should be
    • Toolbox Talk Show–PPE
  • Wynand Serfontein
    • Why The Problem With Learning Is Unlearning
    • I DON’T KNOW
  • Zoe Koskinas
    • Why is fallibility so challenging in the workplace?

FEATURED POSTS

The Sacred Bra Tree

Something’s gotta give..

Challenges and Opportunities for Learning in a Crisis

An Social Ecology of Resilience

How I Feel About Risk

The Reason Safety Has Gone So Crazy

Disrupting the Methodology in Safety?

Human Factors Factors

Focus on ‘Meeting’ people, not legislation – a path to risk maturity

Tensions and Faultiness in Risk

Social Sensemaking–New Book Release

The Shock of Homeostasis

Safety – Learning by Doing and Learning by Theory

Managing the Unexpected

The Tension of Opposites and Binaries in Risk

Psychology and safety

OnLine Learning Modules with CLLR

Critical Thinking At Risk

Is Risk and Safety Perfectionism a Disorder?

Adverse Events: Eliminate or Anticipate?

More Posts from this Category

Paperwork

https://vimeo.com/162034157?loop=0

Due Diligence

https://vimeo.com/162493843?loop=0

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.