Traditional Behavioral Based safety systems have been implemented in organizations and industries across the globe, with some success. Yet across organizations safety performance has reached a plateau and in many cases incidents and injuries are again on the rise. A key part of the reason is that a purely behavioral approach to safety is based on an incomplete understanding of human psychology. To truly influence people and impact on the way people behave and engage with safety processes requires a deeper understanding of the motivations that drive our behaviour and more than that, an understanding of how to influence individuals and groups toward safety. This paper explores how current literature and research in the areas of cognitive psychology, social psychology, the psychology of change and neuroscience can add greatly to refining how we apply psychology to our safety systems, and go beyond the simple reward and punishment paradigm of behavioural based approaches. The presentation will shed light on what these theories mean for behavioral safety systems and provide safety leaders with insights to build an intrinsically motivated workforce who value safety. The use of psychological theories and concepts can provide a wealth of opportunity for improving safety performance and culture, if we move past a purely behavioral approach to one that embraces a more broad understanding of individual and group psychology.

Traditional Behavioural Based safety systems have been implemented in organizations and industries across the globe, with some success. Yet across organizations safety performance has reached a plateau and in many cases incidents and injuries are again on the rise. A key part of the reason is that a purely behavioural approach to safety is based on an incomplete understanding of human psychology. To truly influence people and impact on the way people behave and engage with safety processes requires a deeper understanding of the motivations that drive our behaviour and more than that, an understanding of how to influence individuals and groups toward safety.This paper explores how current literature and research in the areas of cognitive psychology, social psychology, the psychology of change and neuroscience can add greatly to refining how we apply psychology to our safety systems, and go beyond the simple reward and punishment paradigm of behavioural based approaches. The presentation will shed light on what these theories mean for behavioural safety systems and provide safety leaders with insights to build an intrinsically motivated workforce who value safety.The use of psychological theories and concepts can provide a wealth of opportunity for improving safety performance and culture, if we move past a purely behavioural approach to one that embraces a more broad understanding of individual and group psychology.

The current thinking in the field of workplace safety distinguishes between process safety and person safety (i.e., the human factors). In actuality, people and their attitudes and behaviours are critical for process safety. If a process safety initiative is conceptualised similarly to other organisational interventions, people play a significant role in determining the success of a process safety initiative. To illustrate this concept, this presentation demonstrates how applying key concepts from the disciplines of Organisational Psychology (e.g., change management), Social Psychology (e.g., team dynamics), and Neuroscience (e.g., thinking patterns and habits) can make process safety initiatives more effective. Process safety is an important piece of the workplace safety jigsaw puzzle. By integrating this piece with the people piece, the effectiveness of process safety initiatives can be improved. This presentation will challenge attendees’ current assumptions about the role of people in process safety.

Safety culture refers to the implicit assumptions, values, and beliefs that employees hold about workplace safety. Essentially, it is "the way things are done around here when it comes to safety." This is a simple definition for a complex concept that has been the focus of decades of research within Occupational Health Psychology. This presentation focusses on the sound research methods and measurement strategies that can be used to more effectively design and evaluate safety culture interventions. Organisations spend significant resources implementing initiatives with the goal of improving the safety culture. Too often, critical steps of the intervention, namely diagnosis and evaluation, are not thoroughly considered or completed with the necessary rigour. For instance, an organisation may design an intervention based on the assumed cause of a debilitating safety culture, rather than going through the proper due diligence to diagnose the cause. Furthermore, organisations often scramble after the intervention to identify what safety metrics, most notably global lag indicators, are available to demonstrate that the intervention had an impact. This presentation offers solutions to these challenges by providing attendees with the knowledge and skills to engage in more thorough diagnostic and evaluation practices when trying to improve an organisation’s safety culture. The following specific topics will be addressed in this presentation: Defining and modelling safety culture Qualitatively and quantitatively diagnosing safety culture challenges Developing an efficacy framework to evaluate the effectiveness of safety culture interventions To illustrate these topics, the presenters will use findings from applied safety culture research projects focussed on diagnosing the areas for improvement within organisations’ safety culture and evaluating safety culture interventions. Although safety culture is often seen as a "soft" concept, there is a significant opportunity to use more structured processes and sophisticated measurement techniques when designing, implementing, and evaluating safety culture interventions.

During the past decade, the oil and gas industry has experienced frequent disasters. As evidenced by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil well disaster, safety excellence is yet to be achieved. In response to these events, various investigations have led to the publication of recommendations, both for the involved parties and for the wider industry. A key recommendation from the Texas City Refinery disaster highlighted the need to distinguish carefully between process safety and personal safety, and to manage these two types of safety differently (Hopkins, 2011). While it is acknowledged that personal safety systems are far from the silver bullet for managing risk, from the events of the past decade, it is clear that processes and systems are only as good as the people who run them and that there is a need to integrate person and process based safety approaches. We need to consider how the person component interacts with the processes for safety and the ultimate role that individuals and groups within organisations play in the success of our safety interventions. If a process safety initiative is conceptualised similarly to other organisational interventions, people play a significant role in determining the success of a process safety initiative. To illustrate this concept, this presentation demonstrates how applying key concepts from the disciplines of organisational psychology (e.g. change management), social psychology (e.g. team dynamics), and cognitive psychology (e.g. thinking patterns and habits) can make process safety initiatives more effective.