Changing Attitudes Toward Workplace Safety: Why the Resistance and How to Address It

Workplace safety is a critical aspect of every organization, but despite its importance, many employees actively resist or dislike safety measures. Understanding why this resistance exists—and how we can shift these attitudes—is crucial to creating a safer, more supportive environment for everyone.

In this insightful webinar, we'll explore the underlying reasons why employees may feel disengaged from safety initiatives. Through psychological and behavioral insights, we'll uncover the factors that contribute to safety aversion and discuss actionable strategies to transform these attitudes. By tackling the root causes of resistance, we can create safety programs that not only meet compliance standards but also engage and motivate employees, fostering a true culture of safety and well-being.

Q&A from the Webinar

Answers provided by our Domain Analysis Manager.

1. What is an effective way to positively influence the need of occupational safety to high risk organizations such as Police?

This is such a great question and a really important topic!

Let’s face it, where occupational safety is concerned, jobs in law enforcement are a bit of a contradiction. The job requires a great deal of selflessness mixed with an abundance of mental and physical strength, but it also requires putting one’s own safety at risk to help those in need. This situation is sometimes compounded by decades of generational attitudes which often lean towards championing the ultimate risk takers who shake off injuries and scoff at safety protocols while quietly stigmatizing anyone who doesn’t. To complicate things a bit more, I really can’t think of another time in modern history when police officers were less safe doing their jobs and when a focus on occupational safety was more important.  

There are a lot of approaches one could take to positively influencing the need for occupational safety in these environments but I think the most practical one is probably to tap into the team dynamic. In a law enforcement agency, each person’s safety is a combination of their own choices but also the choices being made by their fellow officers. If one person isn’t taking care of his or her mental or physical health, eventually it’s going to affect the others on the team—and the effect it has may be catastrophic. The same thing can be said if someone on the team is being routinely negligent with their own safety by forgoing safety protocols (which are in place for a reason).

In other words, approach things by talking about the team as a whole and how it’s success is dependent upon everyone doing their part. To make this more real for people, identify situations that have taken place either internally or externally on other departments where one person’s choices affected the entire team. Ask people to participate by providing ideas about what could have been done to improve the outcomes. It may be a painful task at first but eventually, people will begin to really feel the positive value of occupational safety.

2. What have your experiences found works better, the carrot or the stick?

I’m going to assume by “stick” you mean the use of discipline and by “carrot” you mean rewarding safe behavior. In my own professional experiences, what’s worked better has been completely dependent upon the condition of the safety culture at that time. I’ve often found that less mature safety cultures exist because of a lack of discipline, accountability and enforcement of the rules.

In these environments, the use of the proverbial stick has been necessary to move the culture forward. However, discipline by itself is not something anyone should rely on if they want to invoke lasting changes. Discipline only works if it’s used in the right way but it generally isn’t effective as a long term strategy. At the same time, approaching things with the carrot (e.g., rewarding safe behavior) is also not a long term strategy because it doesn’t perpetuate the right type of thinking. When people make good safety choices, it should be because they value their own lives and not because they will get some sort of monetary or physical reward.

3. How to overcome management resistance to change?

This question comes up a lot. When management is resistant to change there’s usually a reason and overcoming the resistance will require understanding that reason. Many times management’s aversion to change is because they don’t fully understand the change and why it’s needed and/or because it’s not been introduced in a way that fits into the operation and instead feels like extra work.

When introducing change, it really needs to be a collaborative event that includes input from those who will experience the brunt of that change.

When it comes to management, if their workers are included in the impending changes and if they feel good about that change, management will often be less resistant to it.

4. How to handle Multi-cultural work force? How to deal with language barriers?

Multi-cultural workforces are becoming very common in a lot of industries and countries and when the workforce is comprised of people from different countries, it’s highly likely there can be a bit of a language barrier as well.

First and foremost, if companies want multi-cultural and multilingual workforces, they need to be able to properly support them by making sure they can accommodate the various different cultures and languages of the people being hired. Many companies will simply create policies, notices and training content in multiple different languages and consider that sufficient. But in reality, it’s not sufficient because it doesn’t meet the day to day needs. When a supervisor is tasked with managing people whose cultures they don’t really understand and with whom they cannot communicate, it can affect the entire team. It’s also unsafe and unfair to everyone on the team.

One thing companies can do to improve this situation is try and identify people within the workforce who can serve as cultural ambassadors.

These would be people who understand the cultural differences because of life experiences or some such who also speak more than one language and can help ensure nothing is lost in translation.

5. Have you ever developed a program with performance metric that supports brief, regular (e.g., monthly, quarterly) Supervisor-employee conversations on safety (e.g., hazards, recent safety training contents, adequate PPE, etc.)?

Yes, and when rolled out with some boundaries and when expectations have been set and fully understood, it was a successful program.

The key to this kind of program is making sure it’s manageable by those who have to perform the one-on-one conversations and by those who have to calculate metrics from it and that there are very clear boundaries and expectations set for how it should be completed.

For example, to get started you’d want to determine things like how many conversations need to be had, what constitutes a valid “conversation” and how it can be documented without causing a tremendous amount of work for either party.

My suggestion is to create a document that provides examples of conversations to have and where to find additional resources/ideas that includes a place to document the conversations and who they were with—where BOTH the employee and the supervisor can initial as verification