The Power of Teams in Workplace Safety: Insights from Peter Berry | Scratchie Safety Podcast | Episode 9

In this episode of the Scratchie Safety Podcast, host James Kell sits down with Peter Berry, Managing Director at Peter Berry Consultancy and a global leader in workplace safety and engagement. With decades of experience in organisational psychology and safety management, Peter shares invaluable insights that could change how we approach safety in the workplace. The conversation covers topics such as the link between employee engagement and safety performance, the impact of leadership on workplace culture, and the often-overlooked importance of teams in driving safety and performance.

Peter emphasises that safety is not an isolated concept but a critical component of overall workplace culture. He shares fascinating case studies, including his work with Shell, demonstrating how engagement directly correlates with improved safety performance and reduced turnover. The discussion also delves into the use of personality assessments in hiring for safety-conscious traits, explaining how characteristics like adjustment (ability to handle stress) and prudence (rule-following tendency) are strong predictors of safe behavior.

James shares how these insights align with Scratchie's innovative approach to safety, particularly their on-the-spot, categorised rewards system for safe behavior. The potential for evolving the Scratchie platform to focus more on team-based rewards emerges as a key takeaway from the conversation. Peter emphasizes that prioritizing safety and engagement isn't just about avoiding accidents – it's good for business, pointing out benefits including increased productivity, lower workers' compensation costs, reduced employee turnover, and enhanced reputation.

This episode offers valuable insights into the interconnected nature of safety, culture, leadership, and team dynamics in the workplace. It underscores the potential for innovative approaches to drive meaningful improvements in safety outcomes. Whether you're a safety professional, a business leader, or someone interested in workplace culture and performance, this episode provides thought-provoking ideas and practical strategies for improving safety and engagement in your organization.

Ready to take the next step? Visit https://www.scratchie.com/book-a-demo to see how Scratchie can help you recognise and reward safe behaviour on your projects. The future of construction safety starts here.

Transcript

Scratchie Podcast Transcript: The Power of Teams in Workplace Safety - A Conversation with Peter Berry

February 2024

James Kell: Hello, this is James Kell, co-founder of scratchie.com, the world's first on-the-spot categorised safety rewards platform. I'm speaking this morning with Peter Berry, who's the managing director at Peter Berry Consultancy here in Sydney. Peter is a global leader in safety and in fact spoke at the Global Safety Congress late last year. I listened to him talk about engagement, the importance of it in the workplace, not just with safety, but overall metrics. And it sort of rhymes with what we're doing. So we invited him to come here today. Peter's been really generous with his time in speaking with us. He has huge experience in the industry. So listen up to Peter and his stories and advice and his wisdom from decades in the industry. Peter Berry.

All righty. Really happy to have you here. I think Peter, we met at the Global Safety Congress late last year. Am I right?

Peter Berry: That's correct. Yeah.

James Kell: Now, I'd love for you to share your background and what sort of, you know, the two-minute cook's tour of Peter's life.

Peter Berry: Sure. Thank you very much, James, and thanks for the invite to be with you today. So originally I'm an Adelaide boy and City of Churches, Adelaide University, and then I became a union official for 13 years and that's where I guess I first learned about the importance of safety; I was in the building industry, and I learned then safety was really a subset of culture. You could go to a building site and very quickly determine whether it had good culture or not. 

And then, 33 years ago, I decided to open my own consulting business. I figured there was a role for someone who could understand business, work with employers and the workforce. So today, we're the very proud distributor of Hogan assessments, which is the leading international standard for psychometric testing, which we'll talk about in relation to safety. 

So two-thirds of my business is doing assessments. We believe in measuring culture, measuring leadership, building high-performance teams and understanding the causal link between great leaders and teams and their bottom line results. So essentially, we believe that leadership drives engagement and engagement drives performance. We work all around Australia, we have global clients and we take safety very, very seriously.

James Kell: Well, that's fascinating. And I think I heard what you were talking about at the Global Safety Congress in Sydney late last year, and it really resonated with me. The fact that you can see such a direct link between engagement and performance, whether it be and safety being a subset of just a high-performing team. 

What we noticed in safety - this was at the genesis of Scratchie - was that, you know, in the mammalian kingdom, not even culturally or in our species but across the mammalian kingdom, there is and I may be reductionist in saying this, but there's really the carrot and stick approach. And of course, it's more complex than that. But if we were to reduce it down to that, then what we noticed with safety was that it was all stick and there was no encouragement whatsoever. It was a red light camera: "I'm going to ignore you till you're doing the wrong thing, and then I'm going to jump all over you." And it's not surprising. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And obviously there's a consequent disengagement. Right. And can you talk to that? Know your what you've seen in any stories that may come from that?

Peter Berry: Sure. And we've only got a few minutes, so I'll have to just pick my stories very carefully. So globally, most sophisticated organizations are using employee engagement surveys. They take engagement very seriously because engagement ultimately predicts both performance and retention. And that's a critical bottom line issue for businesses. So employee engagement is really a KPI now for most organizations, attracting the right people, building good teams, building a good culture. 

And what we know is that the impact of a leader is about 50 to 70% of the total workforce experience. So the most consequential resource in town is having good leaders and if you've got bad leaders you can have bad culture and probably bad safety. So we spend a lot of time developing effective leaders through personality profiling, 360 data, coaching, and we always say that leadership is about results. Teams deliver results so judge the leader by their team. 

So the concept of building high-performing teams is now very, very big. It's emerging as a huge issue and all of this drives the employee experience and it's either a positive experience or a mid-range experience or pretty toxic. And what we also know is that one in three employees are disengaged. They don't always like their boss, the team, the culture. It's the wrong job fit. 

So I think that's a key issue when it comes to safety. How are we hiring people with a safety profile and we talk about using psychometric profiling, which is best practice there. The carrot and stick question, I think it's an issue of both today. The carrot is to drive positive engagement because when we work with Shell, a huge company globally where we provide tools and consulting advice for every single one point increase in employee engagement, there's a correlated increase in safety performance, a reduction of absenteeism, a reduction of turnover. 

So Shell have got this wonderful causal link or analytical approach to measuring the impact of leadership and culture on the workforce. So engagement pays. So the better employees these days are really focused on hiring the right people, motivating them, retaining them because you get discretionary effort and the achievement of KPIs in general. 

Now, the other thing that's important is accountability. I don't mean that in a punitive way, but whenever we do surveys, it's workers that are calling out for managers - to use Jim Collins from 'Good to Great' - get the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off the bus. So you have some of those disengaged people that are negative, not giving discretionary effort, probably looking for jobs elsewhere. And that's where you start to see some of the safety issues.

James Kell: And is it? Well, actually, this so there's a couple of questions that come from this. But what interests me is you mentioned Shell and that they look at encouragement, the carrot and the stick. And because, you know, to go back to that example across the mammalian kingdom, both exist, right? You can't just have one. And we noticed that that was the problem with safety was that there was just one instead of two. So we're not anti stick, we're just saying that it needs to be balanced out. What sort of encouragement do you see in these leading companies such as Shell to encourage people to be more safe? Is there any systems that they use? Because that's really what Scratchie's emerging tech is doing.

Peter Berry: Okay. It's a good question, James. So in general, companies like Shell, some of our big mining companies, some of our transport companies, they understand that safety is a product of safety rules, safety policy, safety training. But increasingly they understand that probably 50% of safety comes from personality-based behavior. So true... in other words, are we hiring the right people? 

Now, I'll give you an example. In the Hogan suite of Tools Personality Assessments, there's one particular assessment which measures typical day-to-day behavior, and there's two scales that are used most commonly to look at the safety perspective. One is called adjustment, which is measuring the natural level of resilience. How do you cope with stress? How do you cope with pressure? Are you stable, composed, calm and can think logically when there's an incident or a crisis? Or are you stressed, emotional, angry, volatile? 

So just imagine if you were up in the sky on a plane, would you want a cool, calm, team approach or the volatile, stressed, angry, emotional? And so we know from the studies that having a high level of adjustment, keeping calm, staying positive, thinking logically is a big predictor. 

The second scale that is related to safety is what we call prudence. And a prudent person is someone who's there to follow rules, have high standards of probity. Ethics, not act impulsively, not go looking for trouble. So they're planful, methodical, conscientious, reliable. And we know that there's a huge correlation with safety. At the other end of prudence, if it's low, you are risk-taking impulsive and prone to break rules. So we find that a very simple little personality tool can be used as a screening for selection.

James Kell: I think you just described the start-up entrepreneur with the risk-taking impulsive, prone to break rules. So yeah, you got that one perfectly.

Peter Berry: Exactly. An entrepreneur is someone who's probably living off their nervous energy ready to break the rules. Absolutely. So let me just be clear about what I'm saying. When we might consider using the Hogan personality inventory, it's essentially for selection of the workforce, base great employees, you know, up to about supervisor and superintendent. Beyond that, you might then look for more around leadership or more around emotional intelligence. What sort of leaders do we want that are going to galvanize the workforce? 

So the companies we work with essentially trying to get best practice selection because safety starts with the people you hire. And what we say in the Hogan world is safety is often a behavioral issue and behavior is a function of personality. 

I'll give you one funny case study, James. I still can't believe this. We worked with a very iconic transport company. I'm not going to name them because it's just too obvious who it would be. And we were doing safety training for the workforce and we found that a lot of them had profiles with low prudence. And I'm asking them, but guys, you're there to drive safety. You're there to do things by the rulebook. You're there to play it safe and not act impulsively. They said, "Yeah, we know, but the trick is don't get caught." Right. And that was the culture, they're being honest. They're being totally honest. We know we break rules. We know we cut corners. We know we don't wear safety gear. Yeah, we you know, rules are made to be broken. That was almost the attitude, so the honesty.

James Kell: It's almost like being told- I remember the bridge climb guy when he applied to have this new business called bridge climb. And they said no. And he said, be more specific. And they said, well, here's 109 reasons - or whatever it was - why no. And he said, thank you. Now I can take these off and the rest is history. So it's almost like when they're honest with you about the situation, you can go, great. Now we can work with something, you know. So in a sense, that's a breakthrough almost.

Peter Berry: Well, the lesson we learned is that the issues then come back to the root cause. What's the selection system for hiring people? Right. As if you hire the wrong people in. Gee, it takes a lot of effort to change that behavior, which is hard-wired.

James Kell: What about - and I know I get that Jim Collins get the right people on the bus and that's... I get it. And that makes a lot of sense. Here's one story about recently actually the same construction company and Scratchie is across a number of their projects. So the thirty-second version: Scratchie is an on-the-spot categorised rewards system or platform for safety. So when workers are safe, they can get on the spot, instant, categorized cash rewards, right? So it has an instant effect. 

And so we're on a project in the middle of the city and it's currently actually and it's going really well. And this same construction company has a similar project also in the city that is problematic. And so there's one team in particular. It's a subcontract team. And let's face it, subbies, do not sign up to the values of their builder. They they are typically chosen on the lowest price. And so they don't care. They don't know the values of the builder. They're there to do a job and to get the hell out. Right. And so that that's the that can be a real problem, you know, long term subbies, different story. But a lot of the subbies are "fly in" sort of thing. 

So anyway problems problems job problem subbie on a problem job this subbie, same group of people, come to the Scratchie job. Where Scratchie's in place, right? And all of a sudden, they're getting rewarded for being safe. And it's a game, right? How do I play this game? The same group of people change. So now, if it was using a Jim Collins mindset, they would say no. You know, you kind of judge the person. You say wrong person. But in this sense, it's like it's that, you know, the rat cage. So you know how they did that, that the rat in the cage and I think it was heroin-laced water. Did you do you know that story or can I share it?

Peter Berry: So now I'm going to give a paraphrased version of this.

James Kell: But in the sixties, I think they put a rat in the cage because they wanted to tell what that the impact of hard drugs. And so there was normal water and there was heroin-laced water and rat in a cage. And you could do it. Right. And so rat and rat can tap on whichever one he wants. So inevitably, rat taps on the heroin-laced water until rat dies. Okay. So they said fine. The we know how mammals are. You know, Given a choice, we're going to go for the hard drugs and get addicted. And that and that informed a lot of policy. 

But then a subsequent study was done and the guy thought, hold on a second, I'm going to put the same rat, so to speak. Not the same rat, but a rat. I'm going to put a rat in a cage. I'm going to give water. I'm going to give heroin-laced water. So same. The only difference is I'm going to make this cage amazing for the rat. It's going to be rat utopia. I'm going to have a female rat there. I'm going to have slides. I'm going to have whatever rats love. I'm going to have it. It's all going to be there for the rat. And they found that that rat didn't- like it tapped on the heroin-laced water every now and then. But it certainly didn't overdo it didn't die. It had a lot more balanced approach. 

So the takeaway from that was if you put something in a different environment, then that you get different performance out of them. And so as to say that and we humans are like that, if we're the same person can be and I'm speaking like from personal, if I'm in a certain environment, you'll get good performance out of me and in a different environment you'll get very poor performance out of me. Same person. I think I'm pretty good. I think I'm fairly conscientious. So is there anything you can say to that in the sense that I know this is a long lead up to a question? My question is, have you seen any examples of people being put into a different environment and getting a very, very different outcome, productivity, engagement, that sort of thing?

Peter Berry: Look, I think thanks for the wonderful story you kept you kept me entertained then for a minute or two, I think the point for me would be a positive culture is what we need to create for the workforce and if you're going to get the best out of people. So the positive culture is that we have the right leader because as I said before, the leader can have 50 to 70% impact on the total workforce experience. Is there a high-performing team as an expression of that leadership in the workforce? Respect that team and get along with that team. And then you get down to are we hiring the right people, picking the right subcontractors, not just on lowest price? And what are the values on the site? What's the culture we want to see and how do we celebrate success? How do we reward good performance? 

So there should be recognition of achievement of KPIs and safety is probably the number one KPI as well as the project being on time and within budget and mistake-free. So I think probably in sport, you see in team sport someone's been playing in a bottom-ranked team, the culture is toxic, they might be issues of who knows, you know, drugs or whatever. And then you transfer to another club and it's a completely different culture and all of a sudden your performance goes up. So I think the point would be James absolutely: Culture just drives everything to do with the workforce experience, including motivation, engagement, performance and of course, safety.

James Kell: Right, right. And so what we've found I know your area is in leadership and change management, at least that's that's a strong part of your background. We've found that because Scratchie is about improving safety through encouragement, which is different to what's been done recently. It's a real change management exercise. And the tech piece is the easy piece in a funny sort of way. The change management piece we found in some areas is really challenging. I'd love some tips on, you know, if you've got a different paradigm such as in encouraging safety. 

You know, in our recent two and a half year experience, we've found that leadership is a big part of it. And it's interesting how you say it's probably 50% of its 50 or 70% I think you said, which really it's interesting that the data matches up with our kind of experience. So it's essential otherwise, you know, in other words, what are some of the other areas in this change management exercise to ensure that you can sort of shift a culture to one that is this engaged culture that we talk about where it's not it is getting the right people on the bus, but it's focusing on the bus itself.

Peter Berry: Yeah. So our research about great leaders and great teams shows three or four competencies or characteristics. One is the best leaders are achievement focused. They're looking at goals. They want to be successful, they want to meet targets or KPIs, milestones. And we celebrate those successes with the workforce. Every worker wants to work for a winning team and be part of a successful project. 

Secondly, the great leaders are also emotionally intelligent. They know how to build relationships, stay positive, influence people, make people feel valued. They know how to give the T or C, so to speak. 

The third thing that great leaders and teams do is show inspiration. They bring passion and energy and enthusiasm. It's like Jim Collins in Good to Great again, he said. Level five leaders drive the purpose, the values, the strategy, and they bring all that passion and energy to mobilizing the team. 

And the fourth competency that we see in great leaders is conscientiousness, that prudence that I was talking about before, whether it comes natural or it's learned. But we've got to do things by the book. We've got to make sensible decisions, we've got to do risk management. And all of this involves communicating with the workforce, taking your workforce on a journey. You know, the best leaders are the best learners, but they're also great communicators and know how to talk to listen, do your toolbox meetings. 

And how do you measure all of that? You do your engagement survey and there's two ways of measuring engagement, James. You do your engagement survey, which shows that two thirds of workers are typically engaged and one third are not. But you want to get a good percentile score against your industry or global benchmark. And the second thing is you look at employee retention. Are people staying or leaving? And we've got some clients at the moment have got 30, 40% staff turnover. People are just quitting the jobs, quitting their manager, quitting the culture, and it really kills your bottom line. 

The third indicator, if I threw another one in would be safety. So I'd just go on to a site or a project or a manufacturing plant and say, Show me safety indicators. And are they best in class or not. So you just need the measurement to then understand what's happening with the culture and what to do with that culture. 

But I can't stress how negative an impact on culture can be if you've got the wrong leader or a toxic team. So we recently had a construction engineering project. It was a billion dollars worth of work, and we went through four different project managers in the life of two years. Why? Because we couldn't get them right. And you imagine the impact of having a new CEO to speak every six months coming in and ...all that knowledge... Oh, it's just terrible. It was disheartening to the workforce. And so what happened? The project was running late. They weren't making budget, safety was an issue and staff started turning over. So that's why we always say safety is a critical subset of the broader culture. And culture comes down to then hiring the right people because personality predicts behavior and you want to get the safety behavior.

James Kell: Got it. You mentioned Shell before, and I'm not sure where they sit in the spectrum of highly engaged safe cultures, but I'm imagining they're pretty good. What would a really safe, engaged culture look like in terms of, well, the type of people and you've mentioned conscientious and prudent and that sort of thing, but also the tools that they use, you know, you've got your safety management systems and they're pretty progressive. In fact, Australia is a world leader in those sorts of things and then you have attitude kind of tools and that's where Scratchie's at; what can you sort of describe what that would look like?

Peter Berry: Sure, yeah. So Shell are very sophisticated with having an analytics team and best practice these days is for organizations to use data. The science of analytics.

James Kell: They're legendary for it, aren't they actually Royal Dutch - Shell?

Peter Berry: Yeah. Oh, yeah, they're huge. And they've got this team in London made up of super smart people that do nothing but analyze the numbers. Now, here's the point. They're able to track the impact of a leader on the team because they measure leadership by doing annual 360s. They do about four and a half thousand 360s every year. So you are evaluated by peers, boss, reports, and you get a score and we aim for a gold standard. We want great leaders, not ordinary leaders. 

And then we track the linkage to the team that each leader leads and they do team diagnostics. How is the team going? Because you might know that teams can be dysfunctional. That was Patrick Lencioni's work, or they can be amazing or awesome. Then they correlate it to the employee engagement data and then they look at safety and turnover. So we start with measuring leadership, measuring team, and then we look at the impact on the workforce. And there's a direct correlation. The higher the engagement score, it's a reflection of a good leader and a good team, and that's where you get your bottom line numbers, including the safety increase. 

So they very much take- You can imagine Shell with mainly engineers being the dominant occupational group, but they take analytics, the causal link of the impact of a leader and and it's a KPI. And that's the other thing James, that we say about safety for example, it ought to be a value for an organization, one of your values, but it can't just be a value. It's got to be a key performance indicator. So just like bringing the job in on time or within budget, safety is often the first indicator that you look at. And and like you said a bit earlier, we've got to celebrate those successes. So success breeds that positive behavior. It's encouraged. We want to do it again. 

And Okay. James, perhaps I could give you a few statistics; two case studies. One was of bus drivers and in a separate organization, train drivers. And what we were able to use was the Hogan personality inventory, again, looking for the safety profile. And we found that if you were highly adjusted, which means coping with stress, staying calm and cool, and prudent, following rules and being planful and conscientious versus people with low scores there, there was a direct correlation of 20 to 30% better performance in terms of incidents, compliance not damaging the vehicle when you're driving and being able to lead the workforce there. 

So in both of those companies, it was well validated then that we should be recruiting for people that are cool and calm and can manage stress and they can be rule compliant. And so engagement pays. It starts with hiring those right people. And look, it doesn't matter. We even take a safety approach in hospitals sometimes; we've done studies on nurses. So it's just who's got that conscientious profile, who's going to follow the rules, who's going to do it by the book?

James Kell: And given that So you've got the best choice of people on the bus. So that's important. I get it. So it's really important to get the right people in the bus. You've got to choose well and get these prudent, conscientious people. But then they're on the bus. And that's when the culture takes over, isn't it? That's when their culture really drives it. And obviously they're going to have an impact on the culture. Each individual's going to have small or large impact on that culture. So once you've got those people, you've got you've closed the doors. The bus is now. So what? What then? To engage. To create, highly engaged. And you know that highly engaged is a good thing. What are some of the things that that you can do to to engage?

Peter Berry: So typically, if you take any sort of enterprise, there will be business units, departments, teams in site. Everyone belongs to a cluster. And the goal ought to be that all teams are high performing and that's measured regularly. So we think teams is largely neglected. People focus on individual training or sending a manager off to business school, but the team is the unit of performance. So we love to go into an enterprise and say, let's start working with the different teams with the goal of making them high performing teams, because that's the team that's got to really drive the performance and the culture. 

Now we do know that on any enterprise in any business unit, be it manufacturing or construction, you will have teams that are awesome and you will have some teams that are toxic. And we've seen teams where there's infighting, finger pointing, bullying. And of course, that just erodes the culture and confidence of the individual employees, even once we've selected good employees, that's said to throw into a rotten culture.

James Kell: So interesting. When when we first started, I think it was the fourth project we did or something, was Australia Post out at Western Sydney that we were building sorry, It was built by Richard Crookes and it's a Goodman owned job so there's a couple of large companies there. Anyway, what we found and they were using Scratchie which was great and what we found was that - and Scratchie rewards an individual, that's how we designed the system. Right. And your to your point about the teams being really the the most effective unit to be looking at. What we found was that some of these guys and girls were forming their own informal teams and pooling the rewards right between themselves, the winnings of of Scratchies. So when one of them did something well, they would informally they would say, okay, that's going to our team. And then we'll go out on Saturday and we'll have a lunch or something like that and we'll do something fun with these with 100 bucks that we can pool together. You know, in the last week of of winning these $10, $20, small amounts. But. Right. And so that occurred to us exactly what you said occurred to us after the fact. So we designed this for the individual. But here people naturally coalescing into teams and it makes and so a new iteration of Scratchie is you pull yourself into your own teams as you wish, and then your winnings can go into the team. And it aligns very much so with what you just said.

Peter Berry: So, well, I can't tell you how to suck eggs, James. I wouldn't dare do that. Please. But maybe the next iteration of Scratchie would be to pick out the high performing teams. Yeah, because people belong to a team. Yeah, we're humans, we live in communities, we live at home.

James Kell: We actually have that. We've got a leaderboard, but we have a leaderboard per individual. But to your point, we need to have a leaderboard for the teams. and and it's the teams that you and I decide we're going to form a team like we need. It's peer to peer. So we need to decide that on our own, that it's not some supervisor nominated thing or it's best. I think when people go, Yeah, you're in the team, you know what I mean? So we need to design that.

Peter Berry: So that's true. Look, I think teams is, as I said, vastly underrated. We don't focus leadership spend on teams. We don't we don't get teams with the goal of being high performing. It's just assumed that a motley group of individuals can come together for maybe a year or two. If it's a project, they're only going to be there for that short period.

James Kell: That's my biggest takeaway from this. If I have one takeaway from this podcast, I really appreciate that because you're right. You either look at the individual or you look at the company. You don't. And and, you know, even on a site and you look at the company, you go, That's the team. And you go, Well, actually, let's have a look at that, because it might be two or three different teams within that group. And there's different ways to slice and dice things like let's say, for example, you're a plasterboarder, and you've got fifty plasterboarders on this job. Well, there might be the team that's doing the upstairs component, the team that's doing the auditorium component. And so instead of saying it's individuals or the company, you go, no, actually this is formed into three teams and they see themselves as different teams in the same company. And that's okay because they can be a high performing sort of group among them.

Peter Berry: Right. And my response there James would be teams need to have sort of like something like a one page business plan. What does success look like for this team for the next year? Do we want to be a winning team and how would we measure those goals or outputs? And the softer metrics, which are just as important as the hard ones. What's the employee engagement? For that team. You can break it down demographically if you do a good engagement survey. What's the staff turnover? We want to be low according to industry standards. And what's the safety performance? Because those three together are putting the whole employee experience together. Am I am I engaged? Do I want to perform? Do I enjoy being here? 

If I was setting KPIs for a team, there's hard KPIs, which would be productivity, financial performance, operational excellence. But the soft ones enable the hard ones. So my three soft KPIs would be what's the employee engagement data for that team? Because any decent survey should be able to give you the demographic breakdown by team or business unit. Two; what's the staff turnover or retention. Are we losing people or people are staying? And thirdly would be safety and I and what we say is those three measures there, engagement, turnover and safety, that's the whole employee experience for their lifecycle. Do I enjoy coming to work? Do I enjoy my colleagues? Do I respect my manager? And do I do my job well? And then you've got to celebrate that team success, not just the individual. Yes. Who might be picked out. And the mistake we make sometimes is we're too focused on hard KPIs, our productivity, quality, timeliness. And at the surface, they're easy to measure, right? They're easy to measure. That's any engineer can do that. But the harder ones are the people side. And one of the things we say James, to managers is 80% of your problems in life will be your people issues, and they go, only 80. You know, it's 90. Yeah. So they just don't know how to deal with people. Yeah. Anyone who's leading people needs to be a good leader, a good learner, if you're going to mobilize and motivate and communicate.

James Kell: Do you think - just to put you on the spot: Do you think something like this instant rewards could work in a company like Shell if it was team based and it provided it allowed for the supervisor to instantly recognize - that's the key piece. The reward itself is just the the vehicle for the actual conversation, the positive conversation. Do you think there's something there?

Peter Berry: Oh, there's definitely something there, because what you're doing is role modeling the behavior you want to see from everyone. Yes. You're describing what good looks like. Absolutely. And good or great, the only thing you've got to be careful of is it transparent? Is it does it stand the test of scrutiny? Do the coworkers perhaps nominate that person? Because otherwise it could be perceived as tokenism or favoritism or or not, you know, recognizing the team.

James Kell: That's a good point. And I'm very excited that you should say that, because I so we really need a client like Shell who's data driven because we need to prove this data out because we've seen it. And that's what 2024 is all about. But it's, you know, you use the word tokenism. And I think that's really valid what we've found. And again, we started in construction and we're still largely there. We have Toll as a client and we our first manufacturer as a client. but we're mostly in construction and that's in many ways it's the hardest thing because it's a constantly shifting feast isn't it? So as opposed to manufacturing where it's largely set, you know, totally oh construction is a difficult industry.

Peter Berry: You got construction, engineering, you got building and we're all there for the life of the project. And that's why I mentioned before where you've got to have the right project leader, the right team at the top, hiring the right people getting the right subbies. And and we've had experiences with wonderful cultures and equally some bad ones. Yeah. And if it goes bad, all of the KPIs go bad. We're losing money, we're behind schedule, there's safety problems, it's terrible and.

James Kell: Well, exactly. And what we found in construction is you can work on the values and the team and everything of the actual builder can work on themselves. But then these subbies parachute into the job. Right? And, and a job is typically, let's say, let's call it 80 to 90% subcontractors, right. And so they need to get up to speed and they all say the same posters on the walls, the posters say safety first. They say it's our highest priority. And you know, how much did that poster cost to print that they ask? You know, and so they put a very low value on it and they wash it off as motherhood statements because they know that everyone has to put those posters on the wall and then and they have the induction same deal the toolbox says we are, but we're different because safety is really important here and they go blah, blah, blah. 

And it reminds me of a Gary Larson comic where the owners is talking to the dog and it says what the owner says and the owner says, Fido, you've been such a good boy today. And we're going for a walk after dinner and it's, you know, wonderful, wonderful, blah, blah, blah. And then Fido, now here's your dinner. And then it says what the dog hears. And it's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, dinner. 

And, and I think a lot of safety is like that where there's all this talk from the builder about safety. But what we've found is that and it's fascinating to see in these toolbox talks and they say, okay, so now we're going to give the monthly draw for Scratchie. And all of a sudden you see everyone listening. They've been looking at the birds that in the sky. They've been, you know, watching other things and then the Scratchie draw. And the thing about it is that this is the first time where people where the managers can say to the worker, hey, you know how I told you to do that before I've seen you do that. Here's an instant reward. And it's not a badge or a flag or points. It's cash. And the subbie goes: respect. Right. And because money talks and so these subbies that parachute into the job, they go they instantly turn okay what do now I know what good looks like and I'm being rewarded for it. I'm going to change, you know. So I'd love to hear your I know that's the first description I've ever given you of that, but your initial thoughts to that sort of thing.

Peter Berry: So cash is hard to beat, there's no doubt about it. You know, at the end of the day, we've all got to pay the bills and we want to show the bucks at home. So yep. Cash or something similar as a reward. Goods or services? Yeah. Yeah. And then I like the idea of celebrating successes, celebrating individuals. But then again, I'd love to be able celebrate with the team. Hey guys. It's the team. We just had a month with no incidents. Yeah, no lost time injuries right down. And I think I come back to my point, James, that these individuals have got to want to be part of a winning team where they're looking at their coworkers and saying, I've got good colleagues here. Yeah, we've all got each other's back. And they look up at their leaders and say, These are intelligent leaders, emotionally intelligent they're good communicators. 

You know, I tell you one funny story. I was doing a bit of research before I came along today. Everyone would know the ship. Costa Concordia. Yeah, in Italy. And the captain was Captain Francesco. Mm hmm. And he turned off the warning systems on the ship because he wanted to take the shipping close to the village, because that's where he was from. And we all know what happened, that the ship crashed and people were jumping off and so on. And you may not recall, but he abandoned the ship. He was one of the first ones to leave the ship.

James Kell: Yep. Which is just. You cannot do it. It's your duty to stay there.

Peter Berry: Yeah. And subsequently, he was charged with manslaughter. It cost $2 billion to salvage that ship - two billion?! 2 billion to get that ship back out. So this was all the consequence of someone that just lacks prudence. an a Russian dancer by he was having dinner with a lady having dinner in inverted commas.

James Kell: Yeah, well, he was distracted.

Peter Berry: And so that for me is a failure of leadership. And that would be someone who is not focused on rules. Fancy turning the warning systems off, fancy breaking the process of not going too close in to the village. So that was just a failure of selection of leaders and bravado. I think the the whole how close can I go sort of thing?

James Kell: Yeah, absolutely. So that goes back to leadership as 50 to 70% impact on the whole employee and customer experience.

Peter Berry: Yep, yep.

James Kell: Oh, very good. Now you work across Asia Pacific, is that right? Do you see a any big differences in safety culture across regions?

Peter Berry: If only the listeners could see you. Your reaction? Look, in in some of the Third World countries, you just walk around and you see bamboo scaffolding. You can just tell they're cutting corners in some countries equally. You can go to Hong Kong, Singapore and you see pretty sophisticated standards. So I think what happens there, culture and safety is a reflection of the economy and and who's doing the construction. So, yeah, it can be very variable.

James Kell: Hmm. And would there be any tools that could quickly sort of encourage them or discourage them for that matter, to change?

Peter Berry: I guess if I could start with a clean sheet of paper, I'd say, what does success look like for this enterprise or facility or project? And it's going to have the hard KPIs, financial, operational, but they've got to put the soft ones in. We want to build a workforce that's engaged. We want to have safety being paramount and I would get those KPIs agreed from day one. And then I'd say, Well, what's the process for selection of people, selection of subbies and can we put You know, a fantastic leadership team in place that's going to have the inspiration, the motivation the goal setting, and the focus on culture to really deliver?

James Kell: Hmm. Just changing tack. We met at the Global Safety Congress with what are your thoughts from that whole thing and you know, positive, negative, whatever and that that's sort of maybe the second question. The first question is what were you there to talk about? And with your PhDs in tow?

Peter Berry: Yeah well there were four of us presenting. And I'm lucky that I've got a couple of PhDs that are specialist in organizational psychology. So, look, we presented statistics and case studies. We talk about Shell, we talked about a bus company, a train company, a manufacturing facility, and all of it was the same correlation. If you're hiring the right people and you've got a culture of engagement, you get superior safety results. And if you don't do that, you're heading for trouble. 

So we were showcasing our research. We had pleasure in explaining the Hogan personality inventory and why two scales around adjustment and prudence are just such powerful predictors of what an individual will bring to a role or to a job. And we emphasize the importance of leadership and the high performing teams being the key to taking the workforce on that journey. 

Look, I thought it was an amazing conference. There were thousands of people from all around the world and they were all there to have thought leadership and case studies and networking. So we were absolutely thrilled to be a partner and a sponsor and to meet so many decent people there.

James Kell: Yeah right. with what you do, you focus a lot on the business excellence and the actual the return that comes from that, the return on the investment. So the hard sort of business benefits. What's the potential business case around safety, like lower insurance premiums and improve productivity? You know, of course, better talent recruitment, that sort of thing. And how does what we do, the positive reinforcement, tie into being an employer of choice?

Peter Berry: Oh, look, it pays in multiple ways. Obviously, productivity, if you've got zero injuries, less workers compensation, which would then go to the insurance. We think there's a causal link also to employee turnover. If if if it's a bad culture with a poor safety record, the better ones will want to leave. And the better ones are the ones that are employable. They'll get a job down the road because there's a tight labor market there. So, look, safety pays. There's no doubt about it. Engagement pays. Even the extent of having reputational damage, like I mentioned, the Costa Concordia on page one of the paper, who wants to be there. So reputational damage is a part of it and just fines and sanctions. You know, most executives don't want to face fines and sanctions. You know, you can be up for that if you've got a terrible safety record. So, look, engagement pays. Safety pays, and the better employers get that.

James Kell: Yeah, right. Great. We've spoken a lot. We've spoken about culture change. ROI. engagement is a big one and teams most, most importantly. Is there anything else you'd like to share?

Peter Berry: No. Look, you've been very good with your questions, James, you've interrogated me on a number of fronts, but I guess if I had to make a final comment. Safety's got to be seen as part of the overall culture. And we need to understand that leaders and teams are the drivers of a great culture. And if you do that well, it just pays handsomely. And if you don't do it well, you're in a world of pain.

James Kell: Very good, Peter. Well, I really appreciate you coming today and talking to us and sharing these these insights from your lengthy career not just in construction, but across the workplace. Right. So thank you very much.

Peter Berry: It's an absolute pleasure. Keep up the good work, James. Thanks.

James Kell: So thank you, Peter, for a great discussion about engagement and about safety. The real takeaway I got from that and Scratchie is going to morph in this direction largely because of this discussion, is the importance of ad hoc peer generated teams in terms of motivating safety. So if you'd like to talk about gamifying and encouraging safety in your workplace, feel free to reach out to me. I'm james@scratchie.com. Have a great day.