Join us for a special episode where we navigate the intriguing world of safety professionals viewed through the lens of literature. Today, we celebrate Dr. David Provan’s first published paper, “Bureaucracy, influence and beliefs: A literature review of the factors shaping the role of a safety professional” by David J. Provan along with Sidney W.A. Dekker and Andrew J. Rae.
David and Drew share insights into Dr. Provan’s PhD research journey, exploring the scarce guidance and fragmented views within academic research on safety practices. They discuss the challenges of painting a clear picture of the day-to-day responsibilities of safety professionals and how this prompted an in-depth investigation into the profession. As we peel back the layers of existing literature, we touch on the difficulty and complexity of condensing a vast array of theories and studies into a cohesive academic narrative.
The varied titles and the global patchwork of research that span numerous fields are explored, and although David’s search through databases and beyond revealed a trove of about 100 relevant articles, more insights may remain hidden. The discussion culminates with a look at the strategies employed by safety professionals to wield influence, foster trust, and align safety objectives with organizational goals. David's firsthand experiences and academic findings paint a vivid picture of the complex identity and influence that safety professionals must navigate in their pivotal roles.
The Paper’s Abstract
Safety professionals have been working within organizations since the early 1900s. During the past 25 years, societal pressure and political intervention concerning the management of safety risks in organizations has driven dramatic change in safety professional practice. What are the factors that influence the role of safety professionals? This paper reviews more than 100 publications. Thematic analysis identified 25 factors in three categories: institutional, relational, and individual. The review highlights a dearth of empirical research into the practice and role of safety professionals, which may result in some ineffectiveness. Practical implications and an empirical research agenda regarding safety professional practice are proposed.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
“I went into this going, what has been published on the safety profession? And to do that, went to a couple of the key databases and used very deliberate keyword searches…” - David
“That was probably one of the first challenges- is that this role gets called so many different things in one country, let alone globally.” - David
“The included pieces were all in peer-reviewed publications, but there's a range of quality to those publications.”- David
“This connection between the bureaucratic activities of safety professionals and the value that the people who are exposed to the risk see in having a safety team was one of the most stark research findings in the literature.” - David
“Don't learn how to do your job from a TED Talk regardless of how inspirational a new view that talk is.” - Drew
Resources:
The Paper: Bureaucracy, Influence, and Beliefs
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
Drew: You are listening to the Safety of Work podcast, episode 120. Today we’re asking the question, what does literature say about safety professionals? Let’s get started.
Hey everybody. My name’s Drew Rae. I’m here with David Provan, and we are from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to the Safety of Work podcast.
In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and examine the evidence surrounding it. But every 10 episodes or so, we indulge ourselves by talking about some of our own work. We have a special treat for you today, which is Dr. David Provan’s very first ever published paper. David, what’s this paper about?
David: Thanks, Drew. I only just realized, as we were looking through a potential future episode that built on some of this research, that we’d never spoken about my original PhD literature review into the safety profession. I was really keen to talk about this because it was one of the larger pieces of work that I did as part of my PhD to try to get across this field of the literature. Yes, like you said, it was very exciting to have my first academic paper published.
Maybe just a little bit of background to the research and my PhD on the role of safety professionals. What was prompting it for me at the time was I was seeing this significant shift in theoretical perspectives about Safety and Safety Differently, Safety II, resilience engineering, and HRO. I was trying to make sense of it in respect to the things that myself and my team should be doing potentially differently to the traditional roles of safety professionals.
I was also curious about trying to make sense of this quite widespread negative attitude towards a safety profession as seeing in some ways the safety profession is a necessary evil as opposed to a real enabler of improved operational outcomes. That was the contact with yourself and Sydney, and then I spent about a year trying to read everything that I could find on the safety profession.
Drew: That sort of existential crisis is not unusual for safety professionals, but most people don’t go and do a whole PhD exploring it. What dragged you into thinking that a PhD was the solution to making sense of what your job was?
David: I was seeing so much good work come out of the safety academic area around 2012, 2013, 2014. There were quite a lot of books being published. I wanted to be someone who contributed to potentially charting a really positive future for the safety profession.
I’d spent almost 20 years as a safety professional, and through all of that I really thought that the profession could be adding a lot more value than we were. I thought academic publications, academic credibility was the way to have the most influence on that.
Drew: One of the things I remember thinking at the time was that we had all of these big picture ideas about how we should be doing safety and how we should be reforming safety, but none of it really closed the loop down to, okay, if you are doing safety as your job specifically, what should you do differently?
There were suggestions for some particular activities. Do your investigations differently, do more learning activities. But it seemed that theories were saying, okay, you should do your whole job differently, but without saying really what that job was.
David: You’re right, and we’ll talk about the literature obviously today. But the literature hadn’t really spoken too much about the safety profession in all of these approaches. The HRO literature, the resilience engineering literature, very rarely had the literature touched on the role of safety professionals in relation to all of this. I felt that it was quite a neglected part of the theories. It was fun to play around with different conceptualizations of the role and what it might mean at a day-to-day activity-to-activity level for safety professionals.
Drew: Did it surprise you, David, as you got into the literature, how little of Safety Science actually speaks to the role of the people who are supposed to be doing safety?
David: It did in some ways. The literature was talking a lot about safety leadership, a lot about the frontline workforce, even to some extent about regulators and other parties involved in safety management. There was a lot more than I expected.
There was quite a lot of commentary, not as much empirical research as we would both like. But the literature was so fragmented and in some ways contradictory that it actually took—maybe you recall the time—quite a lot to make sense of this range of literature. And we’ll talk today about how we tried to structure it and frame it, but it was actually quite difficult.
Drew: I do remember a couple of first drafts that were up above 30,000 words worth of summary of the literature that had to be wrangled back into some reasonable scope and form.
David: That was pretty scary when you started writing. It was originally written as an introduction chapter for my thesis, so you can’t be too stressed about word limits because you’ve got a hundred or a thousand words to play with. You just write and write and write.
Then when we went to publish it, journals don’t really like things longer than about 10,000 words. I remembered handing it off to Sydney Decker and putting my hands over my eyes. Then he sent it back with about 20,000 words removed and I think it was you at the time, Drew. I’ve actually still got a file of all of the things that ended up on the editing room law, because you’re right there that to be published, you can’t always. Journals don’t really want something that’s 30,000 words long.
Drew: Should we get into the paper itself?
David: Yeah, let’s do that.
Drew: Authors of this paper, hopefully fairly well-known to people who regularly listened to the podcast, Dr. David Provan, Dr. Drew Rae, Professor Sydney Decker, all at the time from Griffith University. The title which, David, I might get you to explain in a moment, is called Bureaucracy, influence and beliefs: A literature review of the factors shaping the role of a safety professional, published in the flagship journal Safety Science in 2017.
That title, the factors shaping the role, was that something that you went into the literature review with, or is that something that you decided as sort of like organizing theme after you’d been into the literature for a while?
David: It was definitely an early intention of the PhD to understand the role in the context of what are the things that shape the role of the safety professional, both internal and external factors. Why is the work of safety being done the way that it is and what are the forces shaping that? It was definitely a directional intention to try to understand what the literature is saying about the role and why the role is the way that it is. It was definitely purposeful.
But as all titles, and I’ve said a few times on the podcast, I think you’re one of the best at coming up with interesting journal articles. This idea of bureaucracy, influence, and beliefs, we’ll talk shortly about three big categories that we use to categorize the shaping factors from the literature.
These were three of the really big influences shaping the role. This idea of bureaucracy, this idea about how the role gets performed through influence, and this idea about what are the beliefs that safety professionals hold about safety in themselves. Three of the big takeaways made their way into the title there.
Drew: In terms of method, this is a systematic literature review. I think we’ve mentioned on the podcast before, but I’ll just say briefly, the difference between a systematic and a narrative literature review is really about how precisely you bound the search that you’re doing.
A systematic review tries to basically pick a very well-defined scope right down to the search terms, and then talk about every paper which is covered within that scope. As opposed to a narrative review, which tries to take an idea and to explore that idea as it moves into various parts of the literature.
David, would you still say this is a systematic one that you were trying to basically find every paper written about safety professionals?
David: That was the intent. I went into this going what has been published on the role of the safety profession. To do that, I went to a couple of the key databases and used very deliberate keyword searches like safety manager, safety practitioner, safety professional, safety officer, safety advisor, OHS manager. That was probably one of the first challenges is that this role gets called so many different things in one country, let alone globally.
For example, in France the roles are more referred to as preventionists, if you look at the translation. I found some great research that had been done by research just in France. In some ways I stumbled across that research. While I tried to make it as systematic and comprehensive as possible, I’m still convinced that there’s quite a bit of research out there that didn’t make it in or I didn’t find. I found about 100 relevant peer-reviewed published articles, but I’m sure there were more.
Drew: I imagine there are lots of work that touches on the role of a safety professional, that the paper title is about culture or climate or organizations or structures or systems, and they’ve got a subsection on professionals. There’s always going to be stuff that gets missed. But you were mainly looking for papers that the paper itself was specifically about safety professionals.
David: Yeah, and as we know in Safety Science, even though this is published in Safety Science and we regularly reference papers on this podcast from safety journals, there are things about safety that are published in a whole range of different places in the academic literature.
I’ve had some great stuff in management journals and a whole bunch of other places. I’ve used Google Scholar as a bit of a cheat for trying to find things that were published outside of some of the core databases. That was just endless searching, just query after query after query, until I kept seeing the same papers over and over again again. I felt like I’d saturated the search, but I’m sure people will point out things that I’ve missed.
Drew: I remember you found one really good paper in administrative science that I’d never seen before, and they’d just decided to publish it there instead of in any of the safety journals.
One of the interesting decisions that you made was this is not just empirical research. A lot of these papers are commentary or not quite opinion pieces, like somewhere between theory building and opinion pieces about what their role is, a lot of people talking from personal experience and observation rather than more well-defined methods. You didn’t put any quality bounds on the papers, did you? It was just anything that talked about it, you were willing to hear what they had to say?
David: That’s a good point. We didn’t do it as we’ve talked about in some previous podcasts where you might try to look at the quality of the publication. Definitely the included pieces were all in peer review publications, but there’s a range of quality to those publications. Some of the professional associations around the world have their own journals, and the peer review quality of some of those are very different to some of the more mainstream academic journals.
But really, I was just interested in what people had to say and what had been published, and then to try to thematically categorize those things. Obviously, this literature review was largely used to form some of the open questions that I’d then go on to explore further during my PhD.
Drew: After lots of effort trying to wrangle it into shape, you eventually did find a quite neat structure for describing all of the different factors that influenced the safety professional’s role. Do you want to talk us through that structure that you came up with?
David: I was trying to think of a way because we were talking about the factors that shape the role of a safety professional. I was trying to think about how to lay out and talk about what was in the literature.
I was also lost for a long time in the field as you might remember the fields of institutional work and institutional logics, and trying to even go all the way down to social theory, how do people make sense of the situation they find themself in, what are the different worldviews that people hold, like positive worldviews to constructivist worldviews.
I thought using a social theory framework was one of the best ways to think about this in three areas. What are the structural factors that shape the role? This is what’s outside the direct control of the safety professional, what’s external to the organization, and what’s external to the role and the team within the organization. This is a little bit like you might think of determinism where it’s like, what are the external out of the control of the safety teams type of factors.
Then the second was more about agency. If we think about determinism and free will, we think about what are the things in the ways that the safety organization performs its role or acts as agents within the organization. There were really interesting factors there. Then at individual things, what are the things that are internal to the safety professional, more of an identity type perspective.
I took structure agency and identity, and we term those what are the institutional factors? What are the relational factors in the way that the safety team relates to other people and other things? And then what are the individual factors to do with some of those things like the expertise and the beliefs of the individual themselves. And try to find out how these three categories of factors combine together to shape the way the role’s performed.
Drew: Let’s talk through some of the details within this framework. If you’re okay, let’s just go through an order. We’ll talk about institutional then relational then individual factors, keeping in mind that this is what the literature says the role is. Often you’ll have one particular author who will focus specifically on one part of this. Some authors talk across multiple parts of it. But these are not so much universal truths as the various ideas that people have come up with.
Starting with institutional. One of the big institutional things is regulation. The role of a safety practitioner is shaped by the legal environment in which they operate. David, do you want to talk us through some of the…?
David: There was a lot of commentary in the literature about the impact of regulation on organizations and safety and the safety profession, suggesting that one of the primary roles of safety professionals is to support their company to comply with laws. Then the increasing regulation in safety over the past decades has coincided with a significant increase in the demand and the number of safety professionals inside companies.
Maybe just to empirically validate some of that, one of the largest empirical studies was a survey study initially performed by the European Network of Health and Safety Professional organizations, where they surveyed almost 5500 professionals from 12 countries with a 173-item questionnaire. This study was actually then further extended in places like Australia and Singapore to incorporate more than 9000 health and safety professionals.
David: They actually listed 22 tasks that more than 60% of professionals across all of these countries were suggesting were taking up significant portions of their role and their time, including things like checking compliance with policy and law, performing risk assessments, conduct developing job safety analysis, developing company policy. The top four or five tasks were all tasks that were very clearly linked to organizations wanting to demonstrate legal compliance.
The other thing I’d like to say is this paper’s now seven years old. The things that we’re talking about now were in 2016–2017 directly relevant, and it may not be still the case today.
Drew: And that is something that we’ve both observed before, that there’s very little research just tracking who is out there, being a safety practitioner or being a safety professional. We can use things like census codes in Australia, but it really doesn’t give a view of even the size of the profession, let alone what those people are doing.
David: I remember we talked recently about some safety professional census, and just preparing today’s episodes got me a little bit more interested in some of the things that we could go and maybe try to find out. If there’s a potential PhD candidate out there who wants to do a PhD in the safety profession, update a whole bunch of this stuff, give us a shout. I’d love to come back eight years later and try to dig deeper and see what’s changed.
Drew: Then we’ve got some topics that seem really important, but not actually a lot of literature talking about each topic. Those include things like education and academic certification, as well as professional certification, although there was a whole bunch of research on professional certification that came out after your PhD.
David: There was quite a bit about professional associations in the literature. One of the big tensions was the fact that while professional associations think the American Society of Safety Professionals was established in the 1930s, so it’s almost 100 years old, even though these professional associations exist, most of the commentary and the literature was about how unvalued they are by industry.
We know somewhere in most of the developed countries in the world, membership to the professional association by safety professionals is less than 10%, certification of professionals by their professional association certification bodies is less than 1%.
Then there were these studies that showed that certified safety professionals organizations with certified academically qualified safety professionals had a better management of technical issues. One particular study found they had poorer overall hazard management than organizations without the academically trained and certified safety professionals.
The academic literature is really inconclusive on how the extent to which the professional associations and academic qualifications positively shaped the role of safety professionals.
Drew: And none of it really dives into the detail of how it shapes. It’s just evaluating whether it’s positive or negative.
Then there’s a whole bunch of organizational factors, and this is something that you really started to explore later in the thesis. There was already literature out there talking about the structure of organizations, the structure of systems in those organizations, who the safety people reported to and through. Is there anything you want to highlight in that?
David: This is where it started to get really interesting because external regulators and professional associations are important and interesting, but the actual institutional factors inside companies became very fascinating to me. We start with financial objectives and how to balance safety objectives and financial objectives.
There were some studies showing that only about one-third of safety professionals believed that the safety goals in the organization get the same consideration as financial goals of the organization. Because our safety targets and measures don’t fit neatly into the organizational models of competitive profit and so on, that organizations really stumble to talk about their safety goals. They really struggle to connect safety to their broader business objectives.
That made for quite a confused role of the safety organization in terms of delivering the core objectives of the organization, and left safety just to the side to try to deal with the safety objectives alone, not try and support the broader business objectives. We limited the things that safety people were invited to be a part of inside the organization.
Drew: And this is something that David Woods and Haddon-Cave talked about in the Nimrod investigation. The challenge between having independent safety professionals and involved safety professionals, is that it seems like we really value independence, but the result is often structural separation where the safe professionals are not closely involved in the work that they’re supposed to be dealing with.
What I think is actually quite still an open question about how do you manage that balance of being involved enough that you can actually influence the work without being captured by the way everyone else is thinking about it.
David: That came through in the literature. Following on then the safety bureaucracy—and we talked about this a lot with safety work, safety of work, administrative safety requirements and so on—this idea that safety creates a whole lot of safety bureaucracy and then is incredibly constrained by that safety bureaucracy that we’ve been part of creating.
The literature safety professionals really decried the amount of bureaucracy that existed around their role, yet that bureaucracy was created and sustained by the way they’re performing their tasks. This was a real challenge that it felt.
The literature suggests that safety people didn’t want all that bureaucracy and compliance activity going on, but had become administrators of these big bureaucracies. That was what influenced a lot of the safety clutter research that we then went on to do when we saw this pattern repeating.
Drew: That’s something that I personally found really interesting was the very same people who complain about being trapped within a bureaucracy are working very hard to maintain and expand that bureaucracy that they’re working with.
David: One of the interesting studies in the paper in 2012, there was a questionnaire study, survey study done in the construction industry. They listed 15 safety management practices like risk assessment, incident investigation, audit, these types of things, and gave it to frontline workers.
What they were testing was the extent to which all of this safety bureaucracy and the role that safety people were performing, how valuable that was seen on the frontline. Out of 15, the respondents ranked having a formal safety organization, like actually having a dedicated safety officer was the second lowest out of 15. The lowest was safety promotion.
The workers were basically saying, if you’re going to have a safety organization, the only thing that’s better is putting up posters around the work site. But even things like accidents, statistical analysis, and safety audit was actually ranked as more useful than having a formal safety organization.
This connection between the bureaucratic activities of safety professionals and the value that the people who are exposed to the risks see in having a safety team was one of the most stark research findings in the literature.
Drew: I think one of the things that came out of this that needed to be explored in the rest of your thesis was this couldn’t just be explained as that external legal compliance obligation. Safety people weren’t doing this work because the law said the company needed to do them and to comply with it. A lot of it was bureaucratic structures that were not strictly legally required.
David: Exactly right. Then I think that you touched on structure before, Drew, and the last institutional factor that was important was the number and location of safety professionals inside the organization. Like you mentioned, do safety teams be functionally organized?
As Professor Andrew Hopkins would say in his book and research about structures should create cultures because safety is an operational accountability, should operational management have their own safety resources to discharge that accountability?
There are lots of conflicting views around that, but one of the key findings here is that where a safety professional reports into a manager who is responsible for an operational line manager, then it’s really hard for them to do what you say, Drew, to really challenge the thinking of that leader and that leadership team.
Sometimes the best or the safest course of action for that professional is to stay silent on their own professional opinions because they don’t want to expose the line manager that they report to.
The more that we promote this, going back to the previous conclusions about what the workers see when safety professionals report to line managers, they align their goals and activities to activities protecting their line manager from the organization’s bureaucratic and social threats. This takes priority over engaging with and protecting the workers who work with the safety risk every day. It might not be that the safety person isn’t doing anything valuable. They’re just not seen to be a useful resource for the frontline workforce.
Drew: But on the other hand, the whole reason we did that is we were concerned about having these central safety teams that were so separate from how operations happened. Lots of organizations deliberately broke up those central teams into a more of a business partner structure to try to get that operational involvement and get that relevance.
David: I think structures can definitely help, but maybe not as helpful as some of the things we’ll talk about now in terms of some of these relational factors, which is how the safety professional goes about their role to influence action in the organization.
Drew: That sounds like a transition to me. Shall we? You’ve got a really neat diagram that unfortunately our listeners can’t see, describing the relational factors as a neat set of four quadrants based on these two dimensions. Do you want to just describe those dimensions and then what the quadrants are?
David: I’d forgotten about this figure that we’d drawn. I even remember us drawing this on your whiteboard in your office, Drew. I’ll paste it in the comments on LinkedIn or something.
These four quadrants are really how safety professionals relate to others. There are two spectra of dimensions. It’s how firm or flexible the perspective or opinion of the safety professional is, and then whether or not the safety professional has the decision rights, so gets to decide, or whether the safety professional doesn’t have the decision rights and others have to have to decide.
It’s important that we think about these four areas we talked about challenge. When the safety person has a pretty strong view about something and doesn’t have the decision rights, then they’ve got to challenge another person. When they have a flexible view and no decision rights, then it becomes all about influence. I’m really trying to encourage, shape, support, and enable through influence.
On the other side of the diagram where I actually do have some decision rights and have a firm view that I’m actually exercising formal authority, which is like this is the audit criteria, this is what we found, this is what you now need to do. I get to decide what goes in the audit report, and what goes in the audit report should be this. That’s really formal authority.
The last quadrant there is when we’ve got the decision rights, but we’ve got a flexible view, which is I get to decide what we do next, but there might be some different ways of actually achieving that outcome. I don’t mind how we do it. My course of action here is to align what I’m trying to achieve with other mechanisms in the organization, other roles in the organization, and other processes.
I know that’s probably been a very difficult thing to imagine a diagram being explained verbally, but hopefully you get a sense of the things we’re going to talk about now in this section.
Drew: David, one of the very strong claims you make is that you say that safety professionals do not make decisions that manage day-to-day operations, which at first glance seems a little bit at odds with this idea of when safety professionals hold decision rights. What’s the idea there? Is it that safety professionals hold decision rights but not over things that manage day-to-day operations?
David: That’s the point there about managing day-to-day operations. The decision rights that safety professionals hold relate to the safety work. We might be able to decide what goes in an incident investigation if we do the investigation, what goes in an audit report, the content of a training program. We might be able to decide what goes in a policy or a standard for the organization.
But when it comes to decisions about day-to-day operations about the team, the time, the task, the equipment, the contractor, the schedule, how work is happening, that’s determined by the line. The line makes all of those decisions.
We don’t get to decide that today this task is done by 10 people, not 5 people. We might not even get to it even. We don’t have decision rights over which equipment is used for what. It’s that whole, yes, safety professionals have decision rights inside an organization, but those decision rights aren’t directly related to the tools, the task, the people.
Drew: When it comes to managing the day-to-day work, you’ve really given safety professionals only two options here, although you’ve got a number of different options under each of these things. You’ve said that where the safety professional has a very strong view about what should be done, then they can influence through some form of challenge. When they’ve got a fairly flexible or weak view of what can be done, they can try to influence the work by influence. Could you maybe start with challenge and expand out a little bit about what sorts of tools are available?
David: Even just listening to the way that you described that model—all models are wrong and some are useful—there’s definitely a lot of gray area across those quadrants. Even if I’ve got a firm view, perhaps influence might be a good approach. But the way we talked about challenge was, and we used the word constructive challenge a lot, which is a really solution-orientated challenge, because the literature talked quite a bit about things like whistle-blowing.
The literature was suggesting that that’s a key role of the safety professional to put the hand up inside and outside the organization and shine a light on things that we saw that were big problems. But the literature also went on to talk about how whistleblowing rarely ends well, damages relationships, lowers your ability to influence others, and gets you marginalized and sidelined.
Under the idea of challenge, we looked at things like whistleblowing. Then we ended up around these ideas of constructive inquiry and speaking up. This idea of challenge starts with the safety professional being confident to raise an issue. Just speak up.
We know from all the research into psychological safety and speaking up that all of the same challenges apply to the safety profession. Reasons not to speak up constraints on this discretionary sharing of ideas and information in the organization. There’s quite a bit in this paper around this challenge and how we do that constructively and do it more interpersonally as opposed to formally.
Drew: When people think of the stereotype of a safety professional, they’re imagining someone who is operating in this space, trying to wield a challenge about the way work should be done, speaking up, pointing out people doing things wrong, and telling them to do it differently. Or exerting authority and telling people to do the safety work, do risk assessments, do toolboxes, do inductions.
But you actually found a lot of literature that talks beyond that onto the more flexible side of things. You’ve broken that up into alliance and influence. Do you want to talk through each of those?
David: Maybe just before we go there, in terms of challenge, one of the interesting things in the literature was safety professionals very much saw themselves as part of this role. I’m there to be the conscience of the organization. I’m there to make sure that the right decisions are being made for safety. Safety professionals themselves saw this as a core part of the role.
But interestingly, so did others, so did managers and workers. They would say things like what’s the safety team there to do? And it would be like, to keep us honest, or to make sure that we’re not compromising on safety, or to make sure the risks are well managed.
It was very much a consistent view, not just with the safety team but of other stakeholders, that this is a key part of the role. You would say, Drew, I like the way that you always say having a function that keeps the thumb on the scale of safety, and most of the stakeholders really saw that as the role.
Drew: We won’t go too much into your later research, but one of the interesting things that came out of your ethnographic work was this idea that people seem to simultaneously hold this view that safe professionals have no decision-making authority. But then they also talked about the right decision and the wrong decision, and how it was their job to make sure that the right decision got made. It was this real tension between what they thought their authority was and what they thought their job was.
David: I don’t have the number of off-hand that the episode title, but there is an episode titled, What Do Safety Professionals Believe About Themselves? which was that identity research. I did find that in the back catalog. It was this idea that leaders make the decisions unless we disagree, then it’s our job to draw the line in the sand and get that decision overturned.
Safety professionals, even though we realize that those decisions are not ours, we still want to closely pay attention and be comfortable with the decisions that others are making. And I think that’s okay. It really comes down to this next piece around how you go about doing that is the most important thing.
Drew: Are you right to move on to alliance?
David: Yeah, let’s talk a bit about alliance. You came up with this word, Drew, because a lot of the literature talked about how safety professionals find ways to initiate and follow through on actions by creating alliances with people, with programs, with objectives of the organization, and positioning safety advice and safety programs in ways that contributes to the needs and the wants of others.
I remember in my own career that an organization I was part of was having a really big cost reduction program, really wanted to reduce the amount of cost in the organization. I used that really clear goal in the organization as a way of getting a very significant safety decluttering project to be supported by the business because it aligned with this big cost reduction process, which is let’s remove some of the fat out of our safety system and the stuff that’s taking time and money and not adding any value to safety.
That was my own experience of seeing how a safety advice or a safety program can get a lot of traction in an organization if it aligns with another objective or another system or another program.
Drew: Was there any particular research within this that stuck out to you?
David: There were a few things around how we go about trying to align ourselves with others. There was some work that was done on the practical strategies about how we recognize the agenda and interest of other people so that we can find these opportunities to align our safety advice or programs with others, with what other people want, find these opportunities to goal hook, which is what I said then, which is how can we hook our goals into other people’s goals, and then how can we implement organizational arrangements to advance certain agendas as well as tools and management processes. There was quite a bit there.
The biggest challenge around this in the research was the limited extent to which safety professionals saw themselves as needing to align with the core objectives of the business in terms of financial. The things that I’ve just mentioned then would strongly encourage safety professionals to be very close to the financial and operational objectives of the business, and find ways for safety to complement those objectives.
But then there was a survey, a 24-item questionnaire sent to safety professionals, about what they spend their time on and what they found important. What they rated as the lowest importance and the lowest time spent was around developing methods to evaluate the cost effectiveness of safety programs.
It meant the conclusion from that research was like safety people throw up their safety programs based on the safety merits of what they’re doing, and have a complete, in some ways, disregard for what it means for the financial and operational objectives of the organization, which things we’re talking about now is maybe not making those things as effective as they could be if they aligned better with other aspects of the business.
Drew: It’s easy to see how people could be worried if it’s put in simplistic terms. The business is going through a cost reduction exercise. As part of that, we are cutting back on safety. It doesn’t really look good in an accident report in a couple of years’ time.
David: You’ve also got this rhetoric in an organization that that safety people take seriously, which is we don’t have a budget for safety. We’ll spend whatever we need to spend. The safety organization can take that as permission to not be prudent with understanding cost and operational implications of safety improvements.
Drew: Are you right to move on to influence?
David: Yeah, let’s keep going. Influence has become maybe a word that’s almost most associated with safety professionals today. There’s been a lot of follow-on work. I see Cassie Madigan at University of Queensland did her PhD in safety professional influence.
This is one that even myself personally has got more and more interested in as I get more and more involved in the professional development of safety professionals around the world. Just knowing what it takes for influence, for trust, for credibility, and how safety professionals go about shaping the ideas, the decisions, the actions of other people inside a company.
Drew: As you mentioned, Cassie Madigan has done a fair bit of work on this, but I still think this is one of the big open opportunities. There’s a particular piece of research, this is the one I mentioned that you found in administrative science. It talks about this relational legitimacy building. It really resonated with me a few years later when Andrew Barrett was doing his masters on organizations adopting learning teams.
The way safety professionals have to be really quite strategic and adaptive in how they bring ideas from outside the organization into the organization and how they established the legitimacy of both those ideas and of themselves as a purveyor of ways of doing things, drawing on external experts or theories or language, all sorts of different ar arguments and framings of issues in order to do safety in a particular way.
David: This study you mentioned, [...] was one of the professors of management at University of Grenoble, from memory in France. I only accidentally found this paper. They were looking at just influence inside organizations. They just happened to decide on the safety profession because they found it an interesting profession, a topic for organizations, but didn’t have safety professionals in the title of the paper. It was only, as you got down, that they did it. This was one of these things that had been referenced.
One of the things I also did that I didn’t mention at the start, Drew, is that when you find a good paper, just go through the reference list of the paper and find where this work is building on the work of other people. I don’t know, what is that, like a backward… you can do forward citations or backward citations? I’m not sure.
Drew: You go forward, people who’ve cited it, and backwards, people that they cited and build on.
David: This was one that I just came across because it had been referenced in another paper, and I actually said, I want to go back and read this original study.
He talked about how safety professionals create this influence in a couple of ways. He talked about this relational legitimacy building, so actually saying references from other organizations, this idea of presenting something to your organization based on best practice of what other people are doing.
Safety professionals get an opportunity to externally network. Their organization knows that they’re externally networked. Part of their role is to bring ideas from other organizations. They use this to build legitimacy based on their relationships with outside the organization.
Then they’ve got this idea of what they called unobtrusive influence tactics. This is, like you said there Drew before, about the adaptive framing of issues by selectively using managerial, administrative, accounting, legal, technical, or moral arguments, which is like, we have to do this because the law says, or we have to do this because our system says this, or the CEO wants this to to happen.
It’s this indirect influence of the safety professional saying, we need to do this because of something else. Not necessarily because I think it’s what we should do, but there’s a very clear reason that we need to do this. Someone or something says that we should do this.
Then the last is the use of symbolic enablers, which is creating an enabling environment. One of the most prominent ways of doing this is to talk in favor of the practice by promoting the actions of other people.
This idea of building local heroes, which is like this person in this part of the organization is doing this and it’s going really well and everyone thinks it’s really good. Perhaps you should do it as well. This study was really cool and it really spoke specifically about the mechanisms of influence and the arguments that safety professionals try to build to get their point across.
Drew: I found it fascinating just how strategic some of this could be in terms of you picking different framings when dealing with different people or different situations. The safety person can’t just bang on we should do it because it’s the right thing to do. If you’re talking to someone who you think will get influenced by a technical argument, you make a technical argument. Talk by someone who cares about the law, you talk about the law. Talk about someone who cares about finance, you talk about efficiency.
David: I think you’ve painted a very strategic approach to influence there. The paper did go on to say that safety professionals in some ways are quite lazy with these tactics, and rely very heavily on legal and moral arguments, which is we need to do this because the law says, or we need to do this because we care about safety or it’s the right thing to do. There was definitely an overweight reliance on legal and moral arguments.
Drew: The final bit of research that you surveyed that I’d like to mention is the work by Pam Pryor. This gets beyond influence on an individual issue versus influenced by building trust as an important part of the safety practitioner’s role. Pryor looks at a whole lot of things that make a line manager trust a safety professional.
Some of them are a little bit obvious, but then some of them are not necessarily counterintuitive, but you wouldn’t necessarily think of. Some of the more obvious ones are just being upfront and honest, straight talking. But then also someone who is good at separating out what matters and what doesn’t matter, or someone with a really high emotional intelligence. Able to read the room, work out when to say and what, when to draw hard lines and when to draw soft lines are really important not just in the particular issue, but in building up the long-term trust that helps across multiple issues.
David: And Pam’s master’s thesis on trust was really good. There are two separate papers. Like you said, Drew, she went and spoke to a whole bunch of line managers, and also their safety business partner or their safety manager who supported them, really tried to understand this trust issue, because trust between two people is really critical to shaping ideas, decisions, and actions.
Some of the things that you mentioned there, about things like taking control in a crisis and showing initiative, even things like having a can-do approach, like managers would trust their safety professional more, knowing that they were trying to get solutions on the table.
I had this one play out in my own career. A manager appointed a senior safety person to be their safety manager for a very large project. It wouldn’t necessarily have been the person that I would’ve appointed. I just curiously asked the manager why do you want that person? I’m not sure. I’m using inverted comm here, but I’m not sure that’s the best person for the job.
The project director at that time said to me, this is a really big, complex project. We’re going to have some significant safety challenges. I know that when we have one of those challenges, that this person is going to be standing right beside me and helping me lead through it.
That was his number one. I could see the trust there and I could see the influence. It was more about the extent to which that manager felt the personal character of the person was one that was going to be able to take control in a crisis, call the shots, and come up with solutions. It validated in my own experience a lot of this work that Pam had done.
Drew: Final category is the individual attributes of the safety practitioner. Surprisingly little here, both in terms of research and the variety of stuff. A lot of it gets captured in the influencing and leadership rather than in personal. But we are talking here about (for example) what are the safety theories that safety practitioners subscribe to? And then what are their particular skills and knowledge that contribute to the role?
David: This idea of the individual characteristics is underweight in terms of the literature. This is what led for us to then go and do the next study in the PhD, which was the professional identity research project, which was actually just dig deeper into these beliefs about what do safety people actually believe about themselves and safety and their role in the organization, because it was quite sporadically addressed in the, in the literature.
We thought beliefs were important enough to actually put it in the title of the publication. What was interesting here, and I do want to put a qualifier on this because like I said, this paper was published in 2017, but a few things that I’m about to say, 2012 and earlier type of research, and this is one thing that I’m really curious to know how much has changed.
At the time, the literature suggested that safety professionals predominantly believed in traditional approaches to safety, so focusing our advice on systems and compliance, as well as focusing on the behavior of line managers and frontline workers. Because we believe in these approaches to safety, then we’re constantly seeing in our organizations non-compliant with these systems, unsafe behaviors, uncommitted leadership, core frontline safety culture, and so on, this reinforcing loop between we believe these things are important for safety and we’re seeing the problems with them in our business.
Just for example, there was one survey done in the United States that asked safety professionals, what would you like to have for improved safety in your organization? They were saying things like more training, better management support, more safety resources because we need to respond to low worker competence, cost constraints, and a lack of management commitment. These were the types of things that safety professionals were seeing as critically important and critical gaps in safety management.
Drew: I’m equally curious how that’s changed, David. I often find it difficult to gauge because you go along to (say) a safety conference. All of the speakers at that conference will be very much up-to-date in terms of safety ideas and safety theories, to the point that it seems like everyone’s drunk the Kool-Aid of a particular new flavor of safety.
Then you take a step back and realize, okay, a lot of the attendees are hearing these ideas for the first time. These are just the people who show up to conferences. What about all of the rest of the people? It’s hard to gauge where everyone is at in terms of what they understand and believe about safety.
David: If you look at the amount of safety professionals and the attendance of conferences in a particular country like I mentioned earlier, that somewhere roughly 10% of safety professionals are part of their professional association by estimates.
That might be the same proportion of people who go to conferences. We might still have 80% of safety professionals that aren’t connected to their association, aren’t connected to conferences, and very likely don’t have formal safety qualifications either.
The things that we’ve got in this section of the paper around being a knowledge worker and the extent to which safety professionals have an empirical narrative around their role actually understand what the literature says and what it doesn’t say.
Some of the examples in the literature that we saw was this idea that safety professionals are the ones continuing to do things like report accident statistics using Heinrich Safety Triangle inside their own organization. Even though the literature says don’t do that within a single company, the inspiration for this podcast was one of the conclusions of my PhD, that safety professionals very rarely reference the academic literature when determining their priorities and programs in an organization.
Again, that’s another one that I’d love to see whether it’s shifted or not by what I think I see, which is a much closer connection between the safety academic world and industry practitioners. There’s quite a bit in here about just the diversity of individuals in the profession.
Drew: Although as you would later find out in your empirical work, maybe we don’t need to worry too much because it seems that these individual factors have the least influence over how a safety professional actually goes about their job compared to the institutional and relational factors that determine their work.
David: Absolutely right. Drew, what I’m continually fascinated by is the plight of the global safety profession, that you could be a safety person in a mining company in Africa, or an electrical utility in the US, or manufacturing business in Europe, and eerily similar the shaping of the role and the tasks that you perform and the experiences you face as a safety professional no matter the industry, the country or the organization. Definitely there are those institutional factors and those relational factors are having the lion’s share of the impact.
Drew: It’s one of the things I find most fascinating doing safety research, is just how the same challenges and problems occur over so many apparently diverse types of work, but the safety professional is facing the exact same challenge with even right down to some of the specific details seeming to be the same.
David: Are we ready to move on to practical takeaways?
Drew: Yes. Some kind person included practical takeaways in the paper. It’s almost like practical takeaways is something that you like doing in your work, David.
David: I think we said from the start of the PhD one of the opportunities or one of the mindsets for mid-career or mature-age PhD students, is that having done a lot of practical work potentially in the field, you’re constantly thinking about so what does this do? But I was very pleased when I opened this paper again and saw that there was a whole section called Practical Implications and a dozen or so points in there around that. I just pulled out four that I thought were particularly relevant for the things we’ve discussed today.
Drew: Take it away.
David: The first was avoiding demonstrated safety work. Demonstrated safety work from our safety of work model was this regulatory compliance activity, what executives and boards require to be done, all this controlling activity—systems, reporting, auditing, investigation.
It negatively impacts our time available to spend understanding work and the risks associated with that. It negatively impacts our relationships in many levels of the organization. It focuses on what management wants achieved as opposed to what the frontline workforce needs.
The perfect takeaway from this literature is be very mindful just how much this regulatory and compliance activity is going to shape your role and some of the unintended negative consequences of that type of work.
Drew: I think demonstrated safety work hits the perfect sour spot in the independent versus involved, in that it’s neither independent nor involved. If we’re looking for what’s going to be most effective in the role, spending time and effort on demonstrated safety work isn’t going to achieve it from either angle.
David: I think it’s peripheral work.
The second one there is about alliances, how safety professionals align their safety objectives and activities with other organizational strategies, targets, business processes, and how we’re effective at sustainably stewarding improved safety. If we want to do something with our contractors, how do we align what we’re doing with the supply chain department?
If we understand the operational and financial objectives of the business, how can we find ways to use that to goal hook our safety objectives too? Something that has not just our own support as safety professionals, but the support of another function, another team, another process, another group of stakeholders is likely to be more successful and more sustainable, rather than just going it alone, a safety program for safety sake alone.
Drew: Something that I never understood while I was working for industry or consultancies myself, was just how important the social side of this is, that alliances within an organization, aligning objectives matters, but sometimes just actually being seen as reliable, being seen as a good person to work with is actually just as effective as making sure that you are in that meeting where the decision is made.
David: People listen to people they like and they seek out people that they know are going to be helpful to them.
The third one here is around influence not authority. Safety professionals that rely on authority derived from I’m the safety manager, or the CEO wants this done, or the safety system requires this to be done. Actually not genuinely connecting and influencing, but just relying on the authority of yourself, of others, or of the safety management system. It’s less effective with both line management and the frontline workforce. Then these relational strategies where you connect with the person and what they need, what they want, what they think, and solve problems, work out ways forward together.
Formal authority is really only ever going to give you compliance activity. People will do it because you said, or do it because the CEO said, or do it because the system said, but it’s unlikely to deliver on the intent of what you’re trying to achieve. The only way to deliver on that is to get the person to be a more willing participant because they think what you are suggesting is a good thing to do.
Drew: Something important that your little diagram with the dimensions made clear is that even in the best case, authority only applies to those decisions that the safety person has decision authority over. If those are the compliance safety work activities, even if it works as a form of getting people to do things, you’re still only getting them to do the safety bureaucracy. You’re not getting them to do the safety of the work.
David: As a safety professional role, yeah that’s the limits of formal authority. But there are these Hail Mary calls that say we need to do this because the board said we need to do it, or we need to do this because our safety management system said to do it, or the regulation says we have to do it. I would describe that as very lazy influencing tactics on behalf of a safety professional.
Drew: I’m thinking there may be times when it’s a last resort, but it probably should be your last resort when you’ve tried the other influence. You’re drawing a line in the sand before you try to influence people probably isn’t the best way to go about it.
David: Maybe not. The fourth one there was about up-to-date knowledge. If safety professionals do believe in traditional approaches to safety focusing on human behavior of line management, the frontline workforce and so on, then safety professionals really require expert level domain safety knowledge. So need to be very literate in the Safety Science, the latest findings and theories in Safety Science, and really have a critical understanding of the technical and social nature of risk.
This is one of the biggest takeaways, and like I said, one of the things that we were hoping to influence through this podcast, which is that it's fine for academics to tell practitioners to read journal articles, but those articles aren’t really written for practitioners. This finding literature review that was reinforced in my main research study, which I also realized we haven’t spoken about on the podcast either. It was the inspiration for us to go and then do this podcast in 2019.
Drew: One thing I’m increasingly becoming aware of the importance of is that up-to-date knowledge isn’t just about knowing the latest fads and fashions and ideas in safety. Don’t learn how to do your job from a TED Talk regardless of how inspirational and you view that talk is. Those things should be challenges to go and become an expert level understanding of the ideas.
David: Great point, Drew.
Drew: So David, the question we asked this week was, what does the literature say about safety professionals?
David: My short unhelpful answer is that it actually says quite a lot, more than a hundred papers here, but it also says not a lot at the same time because of the lack of really empirical work in this space. Again, like I said, still an area of Safety Science that is a prime candidate for more PhD and postdoc research.
Drew: Excellent. That’s it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought-provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. You can catch us with ideas and comments on LinkedIn or on The Safety Exchange, or send us an email at feedback@safetyofwork.com.