How can Sir Alex Ferguson help you with health and safety?

Francesca Reason of Birketts Solicitors’ Regulator & Corporate Defence, looks to the tactics of sports psychology to change the way we implement Health and Safety, turning it into a culture – not the rules!

For a time, health and safety was viewed by many as an afterthought, a box to be ticked for insurance purposes. 

In some quarters it was felt to be an inhibitor of efficiency or productivity, driven by misleading press articles and ultimately, because deep down, none of us expect the worst to happen.

Thankfully, there has been a significant evolution in recent years. Business owners understand that safe work-place behaviours and attitudes, do directly correlate with financial improvement. 

Businesses care about their workers, ensuring that they have the right policies and procedures in place to facilitate safe working.

This begs the obvious question: how can you ensure that your business remains compliant, productive and your people work safely? Thankfully, I don’t believe the answer is to bury your Quality, Health, Safety, and Environment (QHSE) team in more paperwork.

On the contrary, the biggest challenge for most companies is not establishing the paperwork that they need to show ‘compliance’ but rather translating what is written on those pieces of paper into a second-nature workplace culture.

Changing behaviour

Perhaps, at this stage, you might be inclined to instigate a one-off but well intentioned training session, or send a group email reminding employees where on the intranet they can find the health and safety policies. However, as little as five per cent of what we learn at work comes from formal training, compared to a staggering 80 per cent which is learned from our peers.

And this is where the lessons of Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Clive Woodward and Ole Gunnar Solskjear come in.

Teamship

Sir Clive Woodward’s methods, most famously credited for securing the England rugby success of 2003 and since employed by British military leaders, feature what he calls his ‘Teamship rules’. 

Woodward approaches his leadership from the angle that rule-based culture does not evoke loyalty and almost always results in some form of rebellion.
Instead, he asked his team to agree a collection of non-negotiable behaviours to which they would all consistently adhere, ranging from what time they agree to get on the coach for an away game, to how much they would divulge about colleagues in a press interview.

The method is powerful not least because not only do the people expected to follow the rules understand the reasoning behind them, they were the ones who had devised them in the first place.

Now, putting aside any admiration for Sir Clive for a moment, you might be wondering how his methods, arguably aimed at a group of 15 men, could practically be disseminated to potentially hundreds of workers.

Cultural Architects

For the answer, we turn to Sir Alex Ferguson who championed the importance of small trademark behaviours in driving success. Reportedly, when a new player stepped onto the ground they rarely, if ever, were told what to do by the boss himself. Rather, the other players set the tone for what was acceptable and more importantly, unacceptable at Old Trafford.

Is this not the holy grail of safety culture in the workplace? That rather than senior figures dusting off the old risk assessment folder in the aftermath of a major event to refresh the memory as to what they cover, your workers actually exhibit safe working practices so engrained that they have become second nature having learned them from their peers?

If this sounds appealing, Ole Gunnar Solskjear recommends identifying who your ‘cultural architects’ are. These are the employees with the confidence to influence others and thus shift the company culture, by extending company values when you’re not around because as most of us know, ‘culture is what happens when your leader isn’t in the room, which is of course, most of the time.’

So, if you want to effect change in your health and safety practices maybe the wisdom of sports psychology is a good place to start.

Begin with crystal clear health and safety objectives that your team can buy into then create conditions for the team members that will reinforce your desired behaviours to emerge, thrive and disseminate those objectives, and recognise, reward and respect the small habitual changes that will ultimately lead to a safer environment.

• If you would like to discuss any issues concerning health and safety matters or how best to communicate health and safety messages to your workforce, please contact Francesca Reason in the Regulatory and Corporate Defence team.

E: francesca-reason@birketts.co.uk. Tel: +44 (0)1473 921701.