Organizations can help keep workers safe by understanding and leveraging the unique cultural habits and drivers of what it means to be Canadian.
Canadians are a different breed as a nation. Call it being a polite Canadian or other cliches if you like. We have a sense that everyone should be given the chance to 'fit in'. But how does our unique national culture play out in the ways we think about safety at work in comparison to employees from around the world?
A 2013 research project carried out at Fonterra highlights the differences between the attitudes of Canadian based workers in comparison to their overseas peers. The research combined a model of national culture with a safety cultural survey of the Fonterra workers and the results were quite startling.
Canadians and Safety
The first finding was that while Canadian workers ranked below Australia, New Zealand and the US in relation to the way we accept unequally distributed power (known as power distance). Essentially, Canadians generally value instruction from an authority figure when compared with other people from around the world. But what does this look like in terms of our behaviour? For instance, Canadian workers are more likely to obediently follow procedures just because management has instructed us to do so, even though there is still a need to cognitively understand the reason or purpose of those procedures on some level before actively decide that it should be obeyed.
The research also showed that when it comes to safety requirements atwork it’s important for Canadians to be emotionally engaged. In other words the health and safety message needs to affect the hearts and minds of employees to have the desired impact. Consultation was also a significant requirement to engage Canadian workers with health and safety. Also a growing majority of Canadian workers expect to be consulted in relation to health and safety changes in the workplace or else they’re less likely to buy in to what those changes are. The Kiwis, for example however, expected a much higher level of consultation then Canadians, preferably on a one to one basis.
Another concerning finding was that Canadians still aren't as willing to report near accidents or unsafe situations as much as their international counterparts. If this doesn't change it will continue to prevent us from building a strong culture of health and safety reporting in Canada. To a greater extent this was seen with Fonterra employees in China and Chile where cultural considerations means that there are greater challenges to build a reporting culture. Employees in these countries were less inclined to health and safety issues while at work as they could feel responsible or feel that they would lose respect for doing something wrong.
An area where Canadians shared similar cultural traits with other western countries such as New Zealand, Australia and the US was our value for ourselves and our immediate family (known as Individualism). In terms of safety, this means that what is important to us as Canadians are the loved ones that we go home too, and the activities we do outside of work. In Canada we can customize our safety messaging so that we know what our personal benefit in being safe is. Within some other countries such as Sri Lanka or Vietnam, they had a similar value to Kiwi’s which was about the importance extended family, religion and the wider community (known as Collectivism). For these workers Fonterra customizes safety messaging to focus on looking out for each other as a collective team and as a community.
How to Change Habits
All of these factors work together and we can create a stronger safety culture by focusing on the habits of individuals as a lever for behaviour change. All of our habits are made up of three key components: Cue, Routine, and Reward.
The cue is the trigger that gets our brain to automatically start the habit. The routine is the activity that you carry out after your brain has been triggered and could be a mental, physical, or emotional activity. The reward is the thing that helps our brain to understand if the habit is worth repeating the in the future.
The research identified a habit loop for workers from non-western cultures. These workers have a national culture which has a higher level of power distance and is more collective. Because of this, setting injury reduction targets can drive an unintended result of under reporting injuries as there is a great desire to achieve performance targets. What this means is that a setting a target to reduce injuries each year, might not be appropriate for workers in these cultures and there might be more useful metrics such as increasing near accident reporting.
For Canadians to keep safe at work and at home, we need to relentlessly pursue an emotional engagement to start the cue of working safely. We also have to continually reinforce the personal benefit to our workers which could be getting out on the ice with the hockey team on the weekend or playing with the kids at home after work.
It is important to keep in mind that Canada is continually becoming more diverse and we can have populations of workers that might not reflect the prevailing Canadian culture. The key here is to understand the micro culture of your workforce, and use this as a lever to drive safety programmes. We might be an unique breed up here in Canada, but we can all be safer workers by understanding what our uniqueness is, and using it to our advantage to keep our people safe.