Keep it Simple…To Form Safe Behaviors…Change Their Habits

We need to change the popular saying that we are creatures of habit, because according to psychologists habits make up only 40% of our daily activities.

From the perspective of safety professionals, changing bad habits in the workplace is a 24/7 job that never ends.  Just about every strategy, plan or process they use are in some respects about changing habits.  Psychologists spend their careers on the study of changing behavior.  In fact that’s the definition of psychology:

The scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context

There seems to be a never ending list of the steps safety professionals can take to change behavior, from the esoteric to the relatively simple. But you really don’t need to get deep in the weeds of the psychology of behavior, to coach employees in good work safely habits…but you do need some time and persistence.  As long as we understand that to be habitual we need to learn to form connections between different activities. These connections then becomes patterns of behaviors.  Simple?

Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology at the University of So California attempted to simply this by using these three easy steps:

Derail existing habits by disrupting habit cues.  Change the way you normally do things, creating a window of opportunity to act on new ways to do them.

Persistence.  The brain is slow to change.  It took a long time to form the habit and research suggests that a new habit takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days to make an action effortless and automatic.

Create new cues.  Remember habits don't exist independently; they are connected to previous actions.

Like everything else in the life of a safety professional, it takes a lot of time and effort to make a safe workplace.  Remember, that a habit consists of cues and responses repeated over and over.  Maybe not so simple?  But easy to understand.

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