Understanding your culture to unlock high performance and greater safety
“Australian utilities organisation seeks culture deep dive to uncover key performance and safety drivers”
Picture this. You’re one of Australia’s utilities organisations, providing and maintaining the infrastructure that delivers our modern necessities. A careful balance of two key components underpin your aspired culture – high performance and safety.
In a workplace where each hazard is potentially lethal and workplace safety is core to the promise that you have made all employees, contractors and the community – how do you continue to accelerate high performance work, whilst strengthening the wellbeing and safety of your people in the process?
Our client’s organisation already had a strong heritage of safety and care built-in to their business, with high-vis PPE, careful signage and thorough training all contributing to decades of driving a safe and secure workplace. To find that extra edge and elevate their approach to both safety and performance, it was time to start thinking more holistically about the role of workplace culture.
We proposed our unique and tailored approach for measuring organisational culture. This would not only uncover how to guarantee sustainable high-performance well into the future, it would also direct an organisation-specific culture model to identify which aspects of organisational culture delivered safety outcomes.
We partnered with the People Analytics, Engagement and Safety teams to comb through months of safety reports, identifying all the safety incidents that resulted in injuries. At the same time, we ran our organisation-wide cultural diagnostic survey, measuring the current experience of culture across 60 cultural spectrums and six cultural archetypes.
We then combined these two datasets, allowing us to develop a statistical model through machine learning that identified the right combination of cultural traits to reduce the likelihood of an individual being injured on the job.
Our results revealed that the unique cultural recipe for safety in this organisation was one of communication and psychological safety.
If an employee identified they worked in a culture of:
Transparency
Openness to feedback
Information sharing
Then they were up to 37% less likely to be involved in a safety incident.
While embedding a culture of psychological safety and open communications won’t eliminate risk entirely, we were able to equip our partners in the Safety team with the tools they needed to make targeted, lasting change to their safety culture.
At the end of the day, that means that more people are going home safe to their friends and families every day – all simply enabled by a better understanding of culture.
If you’d like to use a data-driven approach to uncover opportunities to achieve your own aspirational culture, get in touch with our team for advice today.
