A Study of Safety Intervention: The Causes and Consequences of Employees’ Silence

A few words could have saved someone’s life or prevented an environmental disaster, we think to ourselves. But hindsight is, as psychologists have told us for decades, biased by our knowledge of subsequent events.¹ Moreover, we know entirely too many good, capable people in oilfield services, drilling, manufacturing and transportation companies (to name a few examples) to believe that industrial organizations are overrun with heartless individuals. This gave rise to some pressing questions, which led us to conduct a large-scale study of safety interventions in the workplace.

First, we wanted to know how frequently employees intervene in the unsafe actions and conditions that they observe. When they see something, do they say something, and if so, what happens?

We then wanted to find out why employees sometimes do not speak up or do so ineffectively. These are critical questions for anyone who believes, as we do, that human interaction is a vital part of an effective safety system; humans are the most adaptive and reactive line of defense against unwanted events. If we better understand why employees do not speak up when they see something unsafe, and why they sometimes fail when they do speak up, we will be in a position to improve both the frequency and effectiveness of employees’ direct interventions in unsafe operations.

Over the course of 2010, we surveyed more than 2,600 employees across industries, in 14 countries and 10 languages. The survey was conducted online with clear response-anonymity, and it sampled a representative cross-section of employees in all of the participating companies.

Consequences of Employees’ Silence

What we learned upon completing the study is that employees directly intervene in only about two of five unsafe actions and conditions (39 percent) that they observe in the workplace. In other words, the frequency of interventions is low. The obvious concern is that a significant number of unsafe operations that could be stopped are not, which increases the likelihood of incidents and injuries²; but this statistic is troubling for a less obvious reason: its cultural implication.

There is considerable research into the impact of organizational culture on employees’ workplace behavior. In fact, the influence of culture on safe and unsafe employee behavior is of such concern that regulatory bodies, like OSHA in the United States and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the U.K., have strongly encouraged organizations to foster “positive safety cultures” as part their overall safety management programs.

Employees are inclined to behave in a way that they perceive to be congruent (consistent) with the social values and expectations, or “norms,” that constitute their organization’s culture. These behavioral norms largely are established through social interaction and communication, and in particular through the ways that managers and supervisors instruct, reward and allocate their attention around employees.³ When supervisors and opinion leaders in organizations infrequently or inconsistently address unsafe behavior, it leads employees to believe that formal safety standards are not highly valued and employees are not genuinely expected to adhere to them. In short, the low frequency of safety interventions in the workplace contributes to a culture in which employees are not positively influenced to work safely.

These two implications – (1) that a significant number of unsafe operations are not being stopped, and (2) that safety culture is diminished – compound to create a problematic state of affairs. Employees are more likely to act unsafely in organizations with diminished safety cultures, yet their unsafe behavior is less likely to be stopped in those organizations.

Causes of Employees’ Silence

The low frequency of direct safety interventions is a clear problem, and the first step in resolving the problem is to understand why employees do not speak up. Importantly, 97 percent of respondents said that their company has a policy allowing them to stop work when they see something unsafe. Nearly all employees formally are encouraged to intervene in the unsafe operations that they observe, yet they actually intervene less than half of the time. This suggests that there is something else keeping employees quiet.