With these new fundamentals, worldsteel establishes common ground to talk about culture and leadership in the steel industry. They are a tool to create safer workplaces by enabling positive changes in the existing operating contexts.

Ensure the organisation at all its levels has the right mindset about safety and health.

Safety and health systems and people’s interpretation of risks and opportunities need to be rooted in a mindset that allows the organisation to create more effective improvement actions.

The following statements exemplify the evolving mindsets for our industry leaders and workforce:

Educate organisational leaders on how to create a safer working environment.

Organisational leaders are the people who create and sustain organisational culture; they range from executive leaders who are part of the company leadership team to the supervisors that are in the frontline interacting with the workforce on a daily basis. They all define and promote the organisational attitude towards risk.

Education and situational awareness are essential if leaders are to take effective decisions to solve complex problems. The following are key areas to consider:

Teaching leaders how to respond to failure is vital to creating psychologically safer environments (where people will share mistakes, errors, challenges and ideas).

Instead of searching for where people went wrong, ensure leaders understand the constraints, pressures, and adjustments that caused undesirable events. Leaders understand that context drives behaviour. Ensure leaders understand that language is key in their response to failure. Interviews, discussions and reports should avoid judgmental or blaming language.

There will always be polarities that challenge leaders’ decisions; one clear and old example is safety versus productive output. This can be seen as polarity to be managed instead of a goal conflict to be resolved. Organisations need both, not just safety (or just production).

The following sequence provides an overview of polarity management (safety systems versus productive output):

1. Favouring productive output very often leads to an increase in failure events (accidents or near misses).
2. Leaders often respond to this by increasing the focus on safety systems (managing or implementing effective safeguards).
3. If there is too much attention to safety systems, this can result in excessive bureaucracy that very often compromises productivity.
4. Leaders often respond to this by favouring productive output and giving people flexible procedures and liberties while releasing some boundaries. This cycle repeats itself all the time.

Managing polarities needs clear and actionable indicators. These will inform organisational leaders whether they are starting to move towards the downsides, as well as the actions required to gain or maintain the positive benefits from the upsides.

Example of polarity management:

Psychological safety is about creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, or to admit to making mistakes in the workplace.

Psychologically safe environments have the following advantages:

• People feel safe to contribute new ideas to improve safety and health.
• People feel involved in the relevant decisions about the activities they execute. They have a strong sense of inclusion.
• People feel safe to challenge current practices and work methods.
• People feel the need to constantly learn, improve and apply innovation to all safety and health risks and opportunities in the
  workplace.

Everyone in the steel industry should take ownership and create psychologically safe environments through everyday actions.

Psychological safety promotes and enables a trust environment.

Foster reliability through proactive learning and involve workers in all safety and health activities.

Operational Learning is a technique to learn from those closest to the work. It has been proven to lead to the development of improvement actions that increase system resilience by addressing deviation prone rules, identifying error traps, and improving or adding defences that reduce the consequences of human error. It also fosters engagement and builds connection between people.

A Learning Team (a form of operational learning) is a facilitated means of engaging with workers to understand and then learn from the opportunities that are presented by everyday successful and safe work as well as learning from events or incidents.

Organisations in the steel industry should create a continuous programme to implement Learning Teams or other means of operational learning and incorporate these as part of everyday dialogue.

The following case study provides an example of what adopting a Learning Team means:

1. Using traditional approaches

2. Applying Operational Learning

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is one approach to organisational change; it is an easy way to engage with groups of people and ask powerful questions. It focuses on what’s working (what is contributing to success) rather than what’s not working (failures) and leads to teams co-designing safer workplaces. Below is an example of AI in practice:

Build upon organisational successes and strengths.

In practice, identifying success and leveraging learnings from it can be challenging. Therefore, organisations should rely on integrating the fundamentals into existing structured processes.

Examples of operational learning and evolving mindset applied to foundational safety and health processes: