Translating Intent into Action: What we learnt at our exclusive client event

Last month we held one of our exclusive client events in London to discuss the intent-action gap - the gap which lies between what organisations intend and what people on the ground experience.

Mark Ormond, Managing Director here at Tribe Culture Change, illustrated this perfectly with results from surveys performed in various organisations. These surveys showed that leaders score their own commitment to health, safety and wellbeing much higher than their workforce does. In fact, in one survey, leaders gave themselves an average score of 4.3 out of 5. The workforce scored the reality at 2.7.

So what is happening here? What did we learn? Here are some of the key messages that emerged from the presentations and discussions on the day.

• The gap is more about trust than it is honesty. The survey results initially show a level of mistrust over leaders' honesty about how committed they are to health, safety and wellbeing, but that isn’t really the story. In our experience, leaders are committed. The problem is how that message is passed down to the workforce. If trust doesn’t exist between boardroom and onsite, then the good intent doesn’t exist in that journey.
• The workforce sees new safety initiatives as liability protection, not care. Too often the workforce see new Health, Safety and Wellbeing systems and rules as a way of shifting blame onto the workforce if something goes wrong. You can’t out-message a blame culture with a louder safety campaign – the trust has to be built and the messaging has to be honest about why the system exists, not just louder about it.
• An increase in incident reports can be a sign of a healthier culture, not a worse one. An increase in reporting may not necessarily be a sign that there are more incidents occurring due to a failure of messaging on Health and Safety. Instead, consider the incidents were always happening, but the workforce hadn’t felt psychologically safe enough to report them. A workforce that trusts its leaders are more likely to report incidents rather than not.
• Leaders who share their own struggles create the conditions for others to do the same. Vulnerability from the top should be seen as an invitation for others to share theirs, and not as a weakness. When leaders show care, compassion, and an invitation to openness, they create a psychologically safe workforce - one willing to share concerns and report incidents so that everyone learns.

What ties everything together from the event is – Psychological Safety isn’t a soft add-on. It's the precondition for everything else working. Reporting systems, training, safety codes, investigations – none of them function if people don’t feel safe telling the truth. If the leaders are showing care, compassion and invitation to openness, it creates a psychologically safe workforce who are willing to share their concerns and report incidents if they occur so that everyone learns. This in turn drives safer working environments built on trust.