Paula Monteiro: Changing people’s attitude to safety culture
With a strong background in industry and an initial role in production, quality, environment and new developments, Paula was drawn to health and safety. Here she explains why making the move from products to people was a natural progression, why safety behaviour is a major challenge and how conversation is the key.
Paula Monteiro
Health and Safety Corporate Coordinator, The Navigator Company
Q.
What inspired you to move to a health and safety role, and what do you see as your key challenges?
When working on the plant and production side, I was always drawn to ensuring my teams were happy and motivated. So when the opportunity to move across to health and safety came up, it felt a natural progression. Knowing that I now care for people on a full-time basis makes me really happy. I’ve now been in the role for over ten years, and during that time you get to see first-hand the complexities of the job. From the outside, it looks like keeping people safe is not that difficult, but it’s never that easy. It’s not simply about removing hazards, it’s about behaviours. One of the role’s biggest challenges is changing people’s attitude to safety culture.
Q.
What makes the most significant impact when it comes to improving the safety culture?
If I had to define safety culture in one word, it would be behaviour. Changing behaviours is critical to establishing a good safety culture. A simple and effective way to do this is to have friendly conversations about safety more regularly. This moves away from a blame culture to conduct feedback conversations. These feedback conversations can be used from praising good behaviours to having more constructive discussions about possible improvements. It’s a two-way discussion that invites people to remember what it is that made their actions unsafe and encourages commitment to change. By raising awareness in this way, we gradually see better safety behaviours develop. For our part, talking helps us understand good and bad behaviours to adjust and keep on improving the safety culture for all. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure employees go home to their families safe and healthy. Simple messages can be powerful tools in achieving this.
"One of the role’s biggest challenges is changing people’s attitude to safety culture."
– Paula Monteiro, Health and Safety Corporate Coordinator, The Navigator Company
Q.
How important is the role of leadership in terms of getting this safety culture message across?
Whether it’s board level or those leading a team in the field, you need to be as equally mindful of your own safety actions as you are of the safety actions of others. It’s essential you lead by example. You need to set the tone and show that safety is a core value and as important an indicator as productivity and performance results. Transmitting safety data in a transparent and easily understood way can help to emphasise its importance as a company value to improve the safety culture. Again, feedback conversations are a great way to push safety out into the open and broaden it from focusing on the everyday practicalities of signage or avoiding hazards on the floor, to one where the focus is on behaviours. The results are evident. Since feedback conversations have been implemented more widely and frequently, we now have a better understanding of why specific safety actions are taken. We learn, and when we learn our solutions are improved. It’s a win-win situation.
Q.
COVID-19 has been challenging for health and safety professionals. What emerging operational risks are you now having to deal with?
We have four plants in Portugal, and keeping employees and clients safe was a priority. Now a pattern is emerging whereby we are beginning to see the effects of not seeing colleagues in person on a regular basis. Having those small unscheduled conversations with colleagues highlighting potential risks and prompting solutions is essential to keep our safety culture on track. So not having that ability for so long now is a worry. New protocols of keeping socially distanced and wearing masks add to the general anxiety and fear of the situation for those working in the field. Then there are those working from home with different yet important issues to deal with that are also causing emotional stress. These psychosocial risks are beginning to emerge, and it’s important they are dealt with at an early stage. There’s a saying, “Give a man a fish, and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” So our emphasis is to work with the occupational health team, which also integrates psychologists, on developing tools that help people deal with these situations independently, particularly over the long term. We plan to ramp up support activities in April, which is safety month, through more webinars and additional communication initiatives.
"Transmitting safety data in a transparent and easily understood way can help to emphasise its importance as a company value to improve the safety culture."
– Paula Monteiro, Health and Safety Corporate Coordinator, The Navigator Company
Q.
Are you a fan of using technology in a health and safety capacity? If so, how?
I’m a real fan of using new technology to support health and safety, and I see it being used in several ways. We have a young workforce, and their ability to understand and use equipment and other technical aspects of the job is a bonus in removing the need to front-load safety programmes with a heavy focus on how the technology works. This means we can focus much more on behaviours and safety culture. New digital tools to perform remote Gemba walks are also increasingly valuable for health and safety training. A further development is how technology is helping us to analyse data more accurately and quickly. It means safety data in one plant can be used to help predict potential safety gaps in other sites. This is truly exciting as it will help us avoid future accidents. It’s about using technology to move health and safety from reactive to proactive.
"Visible leadership that leads by example has to be key, as does having those feedback conversations. Both have to be underpinned by operational excellence based on rules, protocols and standards that people can easily understand and follow."
– Paula Monteiro, Health and Safety Corporate Coordinator, The Navigator Company
Q.
What would be the key pillars needed to create a good safety culture and ensure its sustainability?
I think visible leadership that leads by example has to be a key pillar, as does having those feedback conversations. Both have to be underpinned by operational excellence based on rules, protocols and standards that people can easily understand and follow. These three pillars need to work in harmony to promote a good safety culture. But to ensure that safety is sustainable, requires having a good mix of both analytical and caring skills within the profession. Encouraging more diversity of background, gender and thought can only improve our ability to do this and make health and safety more sustainable. If an approach works, the results will back it up and that’s a powerful advertisement for having a wider variety of skillsets within a team.