Improving Worker Safety with Behavioral Design : a Case Study
As a woke college student, I often found myself rebelling against societal realities that seemed unjustified. “Why are women paid a lesser salary when they do the same job as a man?”, “Why do people burn fossil fuels when they know it’s causing irreparable damage to people’s lives?”. My concerns were often met with a “You can’t change people’s mindset. It’s impossible” and it bogged me down considerably.
Fast forward to 2019, I joined Pensaar Design and got involved in a project that aimed to do the ‘impossible’ for a major paper manufacturer. Their manufacturing facility had seen a number of injuries resulting from accidents on the shop-floor. The challenge for us was to design solutions that reduce these accidents and increase the overall safety of the plant.
This might not seem like a unique problem as safety has been a topic of research since the dawn of industrial manufacturing. However, each industry is different and certain unique behaviors have a major effect on how well a particular safety solution will work out. Take the example of Automobiles, manufacturers spend billions of dollars making airbags, auto brakes and seatbelts that make your ride safer. However, if the rider refuses to wear a seatbelt, none of these solutions would make sense. Sadly, 1.35 million people die of road accidents last year and in 47% of these cases, people didn’t wear seatbelts.
Given the challenge, a left-brained engineer would immediately go forward making the equipment safer to use. However, being designers we decided to work on the humans operating the machines instead.
A Designer is often perceived as someone who creates objects by giving it form and function with certain materials. Fortunately, we have moved past physical materials to include computer code and digital interactions. With this project, we asked ourselves —
What if we could go further and treat social systems, cultures, and human relationships as materials too.
Nudging vs Punishing
The team started by conducting in-depth research into the ecosystem of the plant, the tasks that people performed, and how each little activity comes together to make that paper on your front desk. We developed various tools to understand people’s perceptions of safety and over several months of research we saw recurring patterns leading to unsafe behavior. We realized that safety is not a discrete set of activities but a culture that has to be adopted by each person present in the plant right from the Managing Director to the Janitor.
The simplest perceivable way to curb unsafe activity would be to punish the defaulters. Fine them like traffic police does; cut their salaries, suspend them for a week. While all these look good in theory, we found that this didn’t deter the workers from conducting unsafe activities. Instead, it promoted secrecy among workers to hide details and save themselves a pay cut whenever an accident occurred. “We know they got hurt working in the factory sir, but they come and lie that they got hurt outside the factory.” said a medical doctor working in the plant. While this highlighted issues with monetary repercussions, it also highlighted what mattered to them, ‘peer relations’, and ‘respect’ from fellow workers. Having worked in the factory for 20 years, workers wore their dedication like a badge of honor, they wouldn’t let that go because they had a little slip somewhere (too cool to wear that seatbelt, you ace driver!).
Punishments don’t change behavior, they only enforce behaviour. To lead behaviour change, you have to understand intrinsic motivations along with fears.
Owing to this understanding, we designed a solution that did not punish unsafe behavior but celebrated safe behavior. Our solution utilized the nudge theory popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Consider this definition put forward by the authors
A nudge is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their incentives.
Or consider a simpler everyday definition —
prod (someone) gently with one’s elbow in order to attract attention.
The word “gentle” is key here as nudge theory does not ascribe penalties or punishments to achieve the outcome. Instead, it targets the individual’s automatic cognitive processes (System 1 in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow) to move them towards positive behavior change.
To put this in perspective, each worker who committed an unsafe act was given a choice to take up either an “honor badge” or a “killer badge” by their supervisor. It was kept as a secret between the two and his/her behavior was observed for 21 days. If the worker showed consistent safe behavior, he was given a victory badge which he/she could wear publicly however if he did not show a change in behavior, he was either given another chance or told to keep a “killer badge” for conducting unsafe activities and putting other people’s lives in danger. The Badge system was based on choice, they were in no way obliged to take up a badge but if given a choice who would you be an honorable knight or a serial killer (psychopaths, look away). When a worker showcased consistent unsafe behavior, the senior manager was alerted who came down to the shopfloor to give him a pep-talk. Again there were no major repercussions involved except the emotional weight of the Plant CEO telling you that you let him down.
Apart from nudging, social reinforcement mechanisms were also used to aid behavior change. Each Plant area had a dynamic real-time board that showed the number of people who received badges and the number of unsafe acts committed that day. A comparative table was shown at regular intervals celebrating the areas with less unsafe activity with a position at the top and shoving the losers to the bottom of the table. Social Proof and Competition is extremely powerful in triggering our automatic response systems. Think of all the Amazon Reviews that make you buy a product and all the Instagram likes that make you want to become an influencer (yes, we are social monkeys that crave validation and competition). A worker had remarked
My manager is like my father and my workmates are like my family. They are with me in all my good and bad times. I don’t want to disappoint them.
The badge honor system invoked this emotion by associating unsafe activities with disappointing your peers and managers.
Unfortunately, all Managers are not made the same way.
Safety vs Productivity
Unsafe acts are one side of the coin when it comes to safety, the other side is unsafe conditions that can cause a whole variety of accidents. These conditions could range from exposed wears lying on the floor to faulty machines that stop working when a worker is conducting risky maneuvers. Checking for unsafe conditions and fixing them is a duty that the Management has to actively perform. However, in our research, we found that there were glaring gaps between what was promised and what was actually getting fixed. “If they don’t care about our safety then why should we care about following safety norms.” said a worker pointing out the deep distrust between Management and Workers.
Fixing a machine requires the machine to be shut down for a considerable amount of time and this can lead to a major loss in production. To put it in the words of a manager “If the big boss has told us to give $85 Million profit this year then we have to give it by hook or by crook.” This pointed out to a deeper issue in the company culture, ‘Productivity trumped everything’. Their appraisals, promotions all depended on getting the maximum number of paper bales out of the factory.
Our foray into this negligence led us to stories of workers getting crushed under trucks and losing their limbs due to sheer management negligence. Our project no longer felt like a 9–5 job but a critical mission to prevent loss of life.
Designers are often blamed (by designers) for having ruined people with digitally addicting products and dark patterns, however here was my chance to save lives and I simply couldn’t let it slide.
The culture of productivity was a result of a consistent effort by the management to make production visible. Units produced by each area were proudly displayed and faces of star performers were put on the wall for everyone to see. Along with being visible, our solution had to strike a balance between safety & productivity, to get adopted as a new culture by the entire plant. Hence, we introduced the principle of accountability as a means to quell worker distrust and put a check on negligence. Each manager would be held accountable for resolving unsafe conditions in his/her area through a condition resolution system. Large screens were placed on the shopfloor where each condition reported was displayed with the responsible manager’s face and system-generated resolution date. If the issue was not resolved within the deadline, it was escalated to a senior manager and his face was shown giving the workers assurance that the issue is now in the hands of a person in authority. Even if the resolution was met in time, workers voted on the satisfaction of resolution for it to be marked completed, increasing their trust in the management and system.
While accountability was one aspect of the system, we also used our earlier social proof trick to lead behaviour change. Each manager was assigned a resolution rate and a leaderboard of managers was displayed to celebrate hard-working managers and raise envy in the low-performers(nothing better than a good points table).
Our team held several co-creation sessions with key stakeholders involving them in the design process. A Collaborative approach was crucial as the solution had to ultimately work for 9000 employees in the plant. After the Design Thinking & Co-Creation, came the Design Making wherein we designed multiple prototypes to test out our solutions.
Results
The past 4 months have been spent collecting data from the deployed prototypes and solutions. Getting a clear ROI in Behavior Design takes time as Behaviour Change is a slow process. Nevertheless, the early results are extremely positive and have proved the efficacy of the proposed solutions.
A large number of workers who received badges showed a complete turnover in their attitude towards safety. They not only corrected their behavior for the identified act but also swore to not commit other acts as they had a new reputation(victory badge) to maintain. Many workers have started questioning the managers on the status of resolution as they feel that they have a voice in maintaining safety on the shop-floor.
“I had tears in my eyes when I heard that our solution made contract workers stand up to the managers and refuse unsafe work.” my colleague remarked. We had spent months empathizing with them, having chai time with them, and becoming their extended family.
The long journey gave us an emotional response that espouses human-centered design, a win for them became a win for us.
Yes, you can change people’s minds. Yes, you change culture but not with the hostility of an angsty teenager but with the empathy of a wise old man. Culture is a set of shared norms, customs, and beliefs, once you open yourself up to understanding where these beliefs come from(without prejudice), you can work towards altering them.
To my woke college self I would say, we’ll change the world, we’ll change people no doubt, but slowly & steadily, one boomer at a time.
Thanks a lot for reading. This a small part of a large body of research and design work spanning over a year. This is an ongoing project with lots of experiments and prototypes still being tested out. Big shoutout to Pensaar Design for giving me the opportunity to work on this and a bigger shoutout to Arul Ganesh for teaching me, coaxing me, and never losing hope.
