Safety efficacy – Increasing employees’ self-confidence in safety management

Humans are social beings and we are formed by relationships and are always part of them. Therefore, many of us subconsciously try to become part of a group by adapting our behaviours and values to the group culture. The effect of this process is that the individual feels part of the group. The stronger the relationship between the group and the individual is, the more loyal the individual will be to the group and the more motivated they are to take good care of the group.

By and large the same kind of social mechanism exists in an employee-company relationship. If the relationship between employee and company is strong and positive, employees are more likely to adopt the company’s values and standards and make them their own. Because we subconsciously adapt to and are influenced by the surrounding company culture, it is fair to say that a company with a high and consistent safety standard is likely to have employees with increasing safety-efficacy. But, safety-efficacy can also have an unwanted effect. If you continuously tell yourself and are told by others that you are not good at working safely, or if you work in an environment that does not put safety high on the agenda, then your motivation for working safely drops and so does your safety performance.

Therefore, companies that nurture and manage their employees’ safety skills and behaviours are likely to maintain a high level of safety-efficacy. In the following section we have collected 3 suggestions that can help companies build employees’ safety-efficacy and consequently increase their safety performance.

The maritime industry is very skilled at finding errors. This is positive in the sense of correcting mistakes and errors in the effort to not repeat these. But a negative consequence is that it makes us focus only on the negative stories and when we do something wrong. This has a negative effect on the employees’ safety-efficacy as they unconsciously adapt to the narrative of the company they are part of: if the negative safety stories are predominant, they will appear as the norm to which the employees unconsciously adapt.

If, instead, the companies start focusing on the positive stories they can help building up the safety-efficacy of their employees. When the employees are exposed to positive stories about safety in their company, they will subconsciously begin to think more positively about the company and themselves. This is because the narrative about ourselves and our surroundings has a strong impact on the way we perceive our reality.

But the positive stories need to have a substantial content. Empty words and generic slogans like ‘Safety first’ won’t do the trick. The best effect is achieved when the positive stories are about recognizable situations on board and in the office where best practice safety behaviours are demonstrated. Hereby, the positive stories come to demonstrate “the way we work here”.  Also, prioritising safety and showing best practice safety behaviours become the norm which employees are likely to adopt. In this way, the positive stories influence employees to think of themselves as being good at safety and feel confident in their safety skills. And as concluded in the first article, employees with high safety-efficacy show a better safety performance e.g. take the lead on safety, feel comfortable speaking up, intervening in unsafe situations, being accountable, etc.

Even though it sounds easy, sharing and getting the positive stories to live in the company can be challenging: when people are used to focusing on finding errors, they don’t automatically start focusing on the positive stories. Here follows a couple of examples of how to embed this initiative in the company:

Recent research shows that employees having substantial knowledge about the company they work in demonstrate a higher level of safety behaviour in their work compared to colleagues without this knowledge.

To better understand the link between company-related information and employees’ safety behaviour we can look at it as a process of inclusion; when employees have substantial knowledge about the company they work in they are more likely to see themselves as an important part of the company. The sense of inclusion makes them become engaged in and feel more socially committed to the company.

Employees having this sense of importance often have a high motivation for contributing to the company – especially, if they know how they can contribute. Therefore, it is important that management not only informs the employees about the company’s business status, but also do it in an understandable manner; how the business status affects the employees and how employees can contribute to the business. In this way, inclusion and active contribution are important ways to achieve a positive effect on employees’ safety-efficacy.

In addition to the positive stories shared in the company, it is recommended to also inform employees about company goals/objectives, current business status, main costumers, etc., as this information provides a relation between the company’s overall direction and own behaviour. And together with a high safety standard this has a positive effect on employees’ safety efficacy.

Concrete initiatives that can increase the employees’ knowledge about the company are:

As a maritime consultancy company, we talk to a lot of office personnel and managers all around the world. In these talks, we sometimes see a tendency to a somewhat discouraging perception of the seafarers’ ability to manage safety: “They don’t understand that”, “If they are not told to do it, they will never do it”, “I don’t think they can handle that without being pushed”.

These examples indicate a negative and critical attitude in the maritime industry that many are unaware of. Unfortunately, we often meet this negative attitude: Vessels are controlled by the office staff via systems and procedures and responsibility is rarely delegated. The same tendency is also seen among ranks, where some superiors refrain from delegating responsibility to subordinate ranks which leads to a growing distrust and a negative working environment.

When office staff and superiors control, micro-manage and refrain from delegating responsibility, they signal a lack of confidence in the seafarers’ ability to manage safety. When seafarers directly and indirectly are met with negative attitudes and lack of confidence in their safety skills, they subconsciously start to adopt this attitude. In such environments, seafarers are rarely given the opportunity to show their ability to manage safety, hereby they miss the chance to show their safety abilities to themselves and their surroundings. Therefore, they continue to have a limited perception of their own ability to manage safety and the seafarers’ safety-efficacy is not built up, their safety performance remains on a low level and the working environment is poor.

However, there are ways to break this negative tendency, and here it is worth revisiting the Chief Officers’ quote presented in the first article:

The quote shows that when seafarers are given the opportunity – and are encouraged to take it – they get the chance to build up own confidence in relation to their safety skills. As a result, they become more comfortable helping others, intervening in unsafe situations, suggesting new ways of doing, etc.

Companies gain a great benefit from empowered seafarers who believe in themselves and has a high safety-efficacy. Therefore, the value from trying to break the negative tendency is significant, for example by sharing positive stories as mentioned previously. Other ways to empower the seafarers and employees are:

To sum up these two articles about safety-efficacy we can say that: