Christian Hughes is Chief Executive Officer of MyPeople. He began his career as a sports psychologist, helping to create environments in which individuals could really perform. Now, he and his team are applying this approach to the rail industry, and have created a new suite of safety profiling products with a focus on behaviour.
When it comes to safety, there’s a phrase I often use: “Rules and processes are only as good as the people who put them in place and the people who follow them.” It acknowledges the impact behaviour can have, either at home or in the workplace. You might create a rule – but whether people observe it is another matter.
And ‘behavioural safety’ is becoming a key focus for the rail industry. At its heart are ‘safety behaviours’ – the attitudes, actions and practices that help to maintain a safe working environment, minimising accidents or injuries.
Over the last year, a range of rail industry clients asked MyPeople to develop tools around behavioural safety. They wanted to identify the safety behaviours that played a key role in their businesses, using this information to shape their recruitment and training programmes.
Matthew Leavis, Group Training Director at Morson Group, explained why he and his team were keen to focus on behavioural safety. He told MyPeople: “It has the single biggest impact on reducing incidents and near misses. As one of the UK’s biggest training providers for rail, utilities and infrastructure sectors, we know that health and safety risk is not a competence issue; it’s a behavioural issue.
“Rail infrastructure personnel and workers in other hazardous sectors are rigorously trained to carry out tasks correctly and to follow detailed safety procedures, but behavioural safety is not a process; it’s a culture.”
We began by conducting some research – and what we found underscored the importance of good safety behaviours. As our team looked back at the last 30 years of recorded rail accidents, two dominant themes emerged – behaviour and communication. We talked to rail organisations, and found that they had usually developed good safety processes and protocols. But they often had little understanding of the safety behaviours their teams demonstrated – how employees behaved and interacted on site. Most had some kind of behavioural safety programme, but no real data to support it.
A new suite of safety profiling products for rail
This research led to the development of three safety profiling products. The first helps organisations to understand their own safety culture – from the factors that leadership teams focus on, to those prioritised on-site and in team environments.
The second product supports recruitment, helping hiring organisations to gain an understanding of a candidate’s behaviours and biases – and establish whether they align with its own approach to safety.
And the third product supports training and development, helping employees to gain and hone skills like safety communication and risk awareness.
These three products have been designed to complement each other – and our clients are using them as part of a joined-up approach to behavioural safety. With the help of our tools, they can blueprint their organisations, improve their approach to hiring, and train and develop their teams more effectively.
Blueprinting an organisation’s approach to safety
The tools are also remarkably easy to use, with each evaluation taking around six minutes. As part of the organisational assessment process, employees will be asked to complete what we call a ‘blueprint evaluation’. This isn’t a test – rather, it’s a questionnaire on their preferences, biases, personalities, and ways of operating. We can then aggregate the data we collect, using it to create an organisational blueprint. Are there any ‘outlier’ teams with risk-taking tendencies? Which safety behaviours are the leadership team prioritising, and is this reflected in the broader safety programme? This exercise builds a picture of an organisation’s safety culture, which can then be fostered and improved.
Hiring informed by safety behaviours
It also creates a behavioural benchmark, against which new hires can be evaluated. Candidates are asked to complete a six-to-eight-minute questionnaire, which provides an insight into their own safety behaviours. Hiring organisations can use this information to establish how well they would fit into existing teams. Factors like personality, values, and behaviour are taken into account. What might the individual bring to the business? Would they benefit from training and development in certain areas? It’s a more balanced, evidenced-based approach, helping to ensure new hires are the right fit from a safety perspective.
And it also benefits candidates. They gain a clearer understanding of an organisation’s safety culture – and whether it might be the right fit for them.
Clients are already using our hiring tool to improve their processes. Gary Smithson, Rail Director at Morson Group, explained: “MyPeople’s tools help the Morson team to enhance decision making and improve hiring decisions based on an objective appraisal of the candidate’s attitude and aptitude. So, in roles where good safety behaviours are critical, we are able to utilise MyPeople to select candidates who are more likely to consistently adopt good safety behaviours on site and align with the employer’s safety culture and goals.”
The right behavioural safety training
Finally, there’s MyPeople’s training and development product, which has been created with the support of organisations like Deploy Recruitment, Network Rail, City and Guilds, and Morson Group. It drives teams towards the right programmes, helping them to gain a shared understanding of required safety behaviours. On large work sites, where your employees might be working alongside teams from other organisations, this shared understanding is key.
The benefits of a behavioural safety approach
Behavioural safety is an industry-wide issue, and we haven’t developed these products in isolation. A range of rail organisations supported us through our pilot phase, which involved research into the attitudes and approaches of around 150 controllers of site safety. Our findings enabled us to develop an eight-factor model of safety behaviour, covering everything from communication and rule adherence to personal responsibility. When I worked as a sports psychologist, we designed training and communication plans around such models. Now, we’re keen to do the same in rail – an industry whose training programmes so often focus on skills rather than behaviours.
And the benefits of this approach are clear. Organisations gain an invaluable insight into their behavioural risk levels. They can then deliver training that creates a shared understanding of required safety behaviours – and in turn, a safer workforce.
Job candidates have a clearer understanding of how they will be expected to operate, as well as the personal biases they might need to address. And, on site, this data can be used to inform interventions and safety briefings.
MyPeople is just one technology platform – but we want to drive change across the whole rail industry, shining a light on the issue of behavioural safety. In sport, there’s a real focus on continuous improvement, with teams striving to gain that competitive edge. Imagine if we could take a similar approach to safety.
And Guy Wilmshurst-Smith, Director, GWS Consulting, Formerly Head of Network Rail Training, agrees that this approach could effect real change. He commented: “MyPeople have developed a really impressive, simple to use method for assessing safety culture. After just a few minutes on a smartphone, rail leaders can glean where their likely behavioural risks are. It’s a game changer!”
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