This is an adapted excerpt from the article “Safety From the Shadows: The Problem of Informal Social Power in Industrial Safety” originally published March 2016 on Occupational Health & Safety.
Every safety professional has had to deal with at least a few troublesome employees. They’re the folks who sit at the back of the room during safety training, make derisive comments in the break room, and otherwise undermine one initiative or another. At best, their presence is a nuisance. But if they are able to gather enough influence, then they can de facto govern your safety program by signaling which rules and procedures are worth following and which ones they consider pointless regulation.
Whenever we talk about employee engagement and safety culture, what we’re actually discussing is the informal networks of social power. And as every safety professional quickly learns, social power can have a potentially devastating corrosive influence.
Identifying the problem is easy, but solving it is much more difficult. The landscape of social influence is constantly shifting, and there are no exact rules of engagement. However, one thing is for certain—exerting more power from the top down will only make things worse. Consider the common objections to any safety protocol: A rule is stupid or ineffective, a new safety procedure is unnecessary, or management won’t make the budget available to pay for actually useful safety equipment. There’s also the insistence from employees that they’re already safe enough, they know what they’re doing, they’re adults and they can take care of themselves.
These are all signs of disenfranchisement. They stem from feeling neglected, marginalized, unlistened to, and powerless. And they’re all symptoms of power being centralized. If this sounds like political talk, that’s because it is—the original definition of politics is the relationship of influences between people. And at heart, that’s what safety is all about: guiding people to behave in a way that improves their safety and reduces their risk of injury.
The most effective way of minimizing the damage caused by employees governing safety from the shadows is to shine a spotlight on it. If you have a problem with your safety culture and employee engagement—that is, if informal networks are exerting negative social power on your safety program—then look for ways to give these informal networks more power, not less. Build a bigger and more inclusive safety institution at your company. Include employees in both formal and informal safety committees, discussions, and plans. As counter-intuitive as it seems, the reason giving them more power is so effective is that bringing oppositional employees into the fold makes it much harder for them to complain about the company’s overall safety functions—because now they’re part of it.
J Kevin Cobb is a senior SafeStart consultant and the author of “Quit Feeding the Monsters”. He has delivered human factors training across North America, including the Arctic and the jungles of Mexico, and around the world. When not speaking at conferences or training you can find him at home in north Texas where he lives with his family. Learn more at safestart.com/kevin.