Failed Safety Initiatives.  You’re Just Not Motivated

By Simon Renatus – HSE Adviser, 30 years

References:

Tory Higgins E. (2012).  Beyond pleasure and pain.  How motivation works.  Oxford University Press.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The what and why of goal pursuits. Human needs and the self-determination of behaviour. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

Failed Safety Initiatives.  You’re Just Not Motivated

In the never-ending quest to ‘ensure safety’, organisations and employees seem forever trapped on the hamster wheel of supposed ‘new’ safety system initiatives.  Whether undertaken in-house or through consultants, the effort, financial cost and change fatigue is significant.  But we know these initiatives often fail to achieve the desired outcomes.  Why, in corporate speak, don’t they gain traction?  Why doesn’t the dial move?  This paper is written in the context of a meeting I attended last week to support a struggling new safety initiative.  A version of critical risk management (CRM), which is very common in high-risk industries.

One participant had a very clear view of the problem, and it quickly became the consensus.  “Our people just aren’t getting it.  Going home alive should be motivating!”  they stated, and I found that interesting.  Not the hyperbole of ‘going home alive.’  I work in safety; that’s everyday dogma.  I mean the reference to *motivation*.  If we talk about motivation, shouldn’t we understand what it is and how it works?  What are we assuming to know?

In this paper, I will argue that the litany of failed initiatives are, in significant part, due to a lack of understanding by safety system architects of how people, both as individuals and in social groups, are motivated.  Why the caveat in significant part?  Misunderstanding motivation is one aspect of why safety initiatives fail.  Not the only aspect.  Non-consideration of linguistics and semiotics also contribute to failure, but I will focus on motivation in this paper.

I’ve also purposefully chosen the term ‘system architects’ to describe safety system designers, facilitators and senior managers.  Similar to architects in the built environment, system architects provide a broad, ambiguous form at a distance and leave others to interpret, construct and maintain.  Misunderstanding of motivation as an all-purpose energy, the pervasiveness of the hedonic view of motivation (behaviourist) and the failure to acknowledge the significance of value, truth and control in goal pursuit supports my thesis.

System architects misinterpret motivation as an all-purpose energy at the expense of new programmes.  I return to the comment, “Our people just aren’t getting it…”  What is the speaker referring to?  What is it?

In the context of this particular meeting, the participant viewed motivation as energy.  Something to be expended in pursuit of a goal.  To define all-purpose, I refer to Tory Higgins:

…by putting in fuel or a battery or winding a spring – and this energy provides the power that can be directed toward some destination.  From this viewpoint, it does not matter where the energy comes from, – fuel, battery, wound spring – as long as it can be directed.  It is all-purpose energy.

However, if the intent is to energise the workforce, to motivate people to a desired destination or level of performance, then all-purpose energy creates a problem.  It follows that system architects can use any type of fuel, any type of incentive, any type of carrot or stick to achieve the desired end state.  I’ll expand on the fuel metaphor.

I once accidently put unleaded in a diesel work vehicle.  A mismatch that had extremely negative effects on the engine.  Similar mismatches occur in motivation.  People can experience a promotion focus (accomplishment, advancement) or a prevention focus (safety, security), and just like fuel types, it matters.  There must be a fit.  Tory Higgens:

…the same goal… can be experienced in promotion of hope or aspiration (something you ideally want to happen) or experienced in prevention as a duty or responsibility (something you believe you ought to or must make happen)…

This plays out often in new safety initiatives, and it certainly applies to the programme I’m currently involved with.  In an attempt to boost participation, serious consideration was given to a reward structure for the most control verifications submitted in a month.  This presents another problem.  If the desired state of CRM is a safer work environment, a prevention focus is a fit.  There’s a consistency between the group’s assessment of the importance of the work and the increased vigilance and thinking about what’s required to avoid failure.  Motivation benefits from this consistency.

Conversely, a reward scheme is a non-fit.  An increase in eagerness and thinking about reward is inconsistent with the group’s same view of importance, to motivation’s detriment.  You have to understand which fuel matches the engine.   By considering motivation an all-purpose energy, and without a deeper understanding of the trajectories created by the mismatch of promotion and prevention concerns, new initiative success is undermined.

Carrots and sticks are worth closer investigation.

System architects have relied on hedonic motivation (movement toward pleasure and away from pain) for a long time.  It’s become so pervasive that it’s considered the only form of motivation, and to make matters worse, the misuse of rewards and punishments create motivation’s opposite; amotivation.

Considering carrots first, it’s common to see new initiatives created in a specific attempt to reduce lost time injuries (LTIs).  Billboards are installed to display how many days since the last LTI and a bonus scheme attached.  There’s a seductive simplicity to this idea.  Surely workers are drawn toward rewards for consistent safe performance (pleasure) and move away from being injured (pain)?  Surely that’s motivating?  Unfortunately, there’s a dark trade-off.  In a social context, who would enthusiastically report an injury when they knew it would void the team’s bonus?  How motivated would you be?  It could be argued there’s an obligation to report; it’s in the rules.  That’s a reasonable position until it’s extended.  Would the dollar value have an influence?  What if you had a young family and the bonus was paid at Christmas?  What if your boss was part of the same bonus scheme?  These are all scenarios I’ve experienced in my career, and I can assure you the end result is always under reporting.  The event ‘never happened’.  The injury occurred ‘at football practice’.  Everyone gets their bonus and all the underlying conditions remain in the shadows, waiting to emerge again.

Sticks land you in the same under reporting hole.  If you know you’ll be given a written warning for a safety infringement, and the third warning means you’re fired, just how motivated are you to report?  Note the similarities to the previous example.  You may be obliged because it’s in the rules, but you have a young family and it’s coming up Christmas.  You guessed it.  The event ‘never happened’.  The injury occurred ‘at footy practice’.  Everyone gets to keep their job and all the underlying conditions remain in the shadows, waiting to emerge again.

So, despite the altruistic goal of implementing an injury-reducing initiative, the statistics remain the same (zero injuries) and the real-world occurrences at best remain the same, at worst increase.  In both scenarios, a state of non-movement is created and that fosters amotivation.  Tory Higgens:

…a condition of amotivation is likely to occur when people lack a sense of efficacy or control over making something happen or not happen, as when they feel helpless because their actions have no effect on what happens to them.”

A sole focus on hedonic motivation (and the amotivation it can conversely create) sets the stage for initiative failure.

The motivational building blocks of truth, value and control effectiveness are weakened by the distance between system architects and those who are tasked to ‘live’ their creations, and by extension, make them successful.

There’s a lot invested in designing and launching a new initiative.  There’s also the accompanying scrutiny as to whether ‘it works’.  Usually, measurements are proposed to gauge success.  “What gets measured gets managed!” is the mantra.  In the case of CRM, the number of checklists submitted, the number of critical controls absent, the number of corrective actions generated etc.  Lots of colourful dashboard reports.  But cracks start to appear when you consider how differently the three key components of motivation (truth, value and control) can be interpreted according to an individual’s or group’s world view.

For example, truth effectiveness is establishing what’s real, being consistent and genuine.  From a system architect’s point of view, truth is established at a distance through a technical solution; procedure, checklist, audit, measurement.  However, that doesn’t hold true at the work face.  The procedure is buried somewhere deep in the operations manual, the checklist represents another tick-and-flick exercise, “The auditor always needs to find something to ping us on!” and there’s a consensus the key performance indicators (KPIs) are unrealistic.  The architect’s measurements don’t mean anything in this place and space.  Truth has not been established.

Value effectiveness is realised when actors successfully achieve desired outcomes, including success in collaboration with others (a “we” effectiveness).  Consider the same technical solution; procedure, checklist, audit, measurement.  At the ‘doing’ level, “we” gets bypassed.  The initiative was designed by others at a distance with ‘structured’ consultation, and the KPIs still can’t be achieved, so neither can success.  Value not established.  ‘We-ness’ wasn’t considered a meaningful component of motivation in one world view (too hard to graph perhaps?) yet holds currency in the other.

Control effectiveness occurs when actors experience success at managing what’s required to make something happen (or not happen).  Having control means exercising direction, having power to guide, manage or influence; a level of autonomy.  In the framework of procedure, checklist, audit, measurement, control is removed from the people doing the work.  They’re told what form to use, how and when to use it and the measure that must be achieved.  There’s no room for discretion or discernment.  Don’t forget the work group are highly aware measurements can be weaponised.  “Who’s not participating?  Who’s missed the most critical controls?”  Like truth and value, control also hasn’t been established.  The distance between system architects and ‘do-ers’ has an underappreciated effect on motivation’s key components of truth, value and control effectiveness.  This in turn influences a safety initiative’s ultimate or failure.

There’s more to motivation than carrots and sticks.  More than “Going home alive!”  The singular view of motivation as an all-purpose energy, combined with an all-consuming hedonic interpretation and a failure to acknowledge the significance of value, truth and control in goal pursuit traps organisations in a never-ending cycle of failed safety initiatives.  A lack of insight into how motivation works is at the core of the problem.

There’s good news though.  An antidote is available.  It starts with safety initiative architects asking better questions of themselves.  “If I’m talking about motivation, do I really understand what it is and how it works?”