91ÊÓƵ

In February 2011, our company experienced its first serious accident in our 27-year history. I won’t recount the tragic details, but it prompted us to embark on a major overhaul of our entire safety program.

Our investigation into the causes and circumstances around this accident produced several revelations about our approach to safety. One of these revelations was that our safety program functioned at a very high level when workers were exposed to what they perceived as a high-risk situation, yet it did not effectively address activities perceived as lower risk. A revamped safety program was implemented with an emphasis on comprehensive planning for all tasks, not just high-risk elements. With the accident fresh in everyone’s mind, our new program was fully embraced by all employees.

This worked very well initially, but as time passed it took more and more effort on the part of company ownership and few other highly committed individuals to sustain this level of detailed planning. I began to have concerns about the long-term viability of this approach.

I had used the concepts of “creating a safety culture” as a model to develop our new safety program. We followed the recipe as we understood it, yet it wasn’t working as we had envisioned. Why was the safety program still being championed by just a few individuals? Why weren’t all of the front-line workers embracing these concepts without being prompted on a regular basis?

I revisited all of the safety culture literature I had originally referenced. I still couldn’t pinpoint what was missing. I continued to research, and it wasn’t until I began reading about “cultural bias” that I began to understand the root of the problem.

I had heard the term cultural bias and had always associated the term with prejudicial views about ethnicities, religious affiliations, sexual orientation and other views that are considered politically incorrect in today’s society. This is true, but I was surprised to learn that cultural bias goes much deeper than that.

I am certainly not an expert on the subject, but as I understand it, a person’s cultural bias dictates how everything heard and seen is subconsciously classified in the brain. There are many degrees of classification, but in general everything is given either a positive or negative classification.

The natural tendency is to gravitate toward the positive. People can, and do, embrace negatively categorized concepts, but this requires a conscious override of natural tendencies. A crude example to illustrate this point might be to imagine a right-handed person forcing himself to write with his left hand; it can be done, but it requires a very deliberate effort. Eventually, the person will get tired and go back to what feels natural.

Each person is shaped by culture. We are shaped by our national culture, racial culture and religious culture. Regional cultures and company cultures help to define what our cultural biases are. We have our own unique cultural biases, but what is one cultural bias that most Americans have in common? The American work ethic, of course.

The American work ethic is drilled into us from the time we are children. It is a source of national pride. Productivity is king, and the American cultural bias says that anything viewed as nonproductive is negative. We have names for things like this. Does the phrase “red tape” sound familiar?

Safety program elements that people view as nonproductive will always require a conscious override in order to be done. We may or may not be able to change our cultural bias, but we can change our views on safety. If we can get people to view all safety program aspects as productive, we will overcome a huge barrier to making safety a natural part of everyday work activities.

We are employing a number of strategies to achieve this goal, but one idea that is showing promising results is to not view safety as a productivity drain or expense. We are promoting a view of the resources we dedicate to safety as business enhancers and showing the positive effects safety have to the health of our company. This reinforces the positive outcomes of safety and helps break down some of the negative perceptions.

There are many elements to a successful safety program, but overcoming cultural bias should not be ignored.

Brian Butterfield is the production manager at DeaMor and a member of SafeBuild Alliance – a nonprofit organization working to achieve incident-free construction projects through the transformation of workplace cultures. For more information or to join, visit www.safebuildalliance.com.