I’ve read a lot of articles on how to get employees involved in the workplace safety process, how a good safety culture is important and how employees’ attitudes towards safety must be changed; but how does all of this actually happen on the employee level? How do employees react and change their own ways and thinking when it comes to workplace safety? It’s just like with any other change someone is trying to make, whether that change is to lose weight, quit smoking, or change working habits; workplace safety is something that has to start on an individual level.

During a lecture at the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) conference in June 2009, Diane Stober, Ph.D., spoke about the six steps that employees must go through to consciously change their day to day workplace safety habits. Laura Walter commented on the speech in the article, “Safety 2009, How Stages of Change Influence Safety Behaviors.” She stressed that worker attitudes directly affect safety behaviors. A worker who has been on the job for years will look at their work with a different attitude than someone who has just started.

Stober mentioned six different stages of behavioral change that safety professionals must be aware of when trying to implement a safety program.

1. Precontemplation: Employees don’t feel that change is necessary. They have been doing a job one way for many years, and it is working out just fine.
2. Contemplation: Employees may start to contemplate changing workplace safety behaviors, but that does not mean they are physically changing what they are doing. They are weighing the pros and cons of a new system.
3. Preparation: These employees are thinking about safety and are becoming determined to learn how to keep themselves safe. They are getting ready to change.
4. Action: Employees have started to make changes in the way they do their jobs. The changes may not happen on a day to day basis, and are not automatic yet, but workplace safety behaviors have started to change.
5. Maintenance: Change has happened throughout the employee’s actions and behaviors. They have started to make a habit of safe workplace procedures.
6. Relapse: This will happen from time to time. If there is a lot of stress in the workplace or a lot of change going on, workers may revert back to old unsafe habits. Motivation back to the maintenance level is possible because the worker has reached this safety level in the past.

Stober stresses that workplace safety professionals must recognizeed that workers may be in all six stages, and any workplace safety program they are trying to implement must be presented at all levels. Every employee is different and in order to keep them all safe in the workplace, different strategies must be implemented.

Walter, Laura. “Safety 2009, How Stages of Change Influence Safety Behaviors.” EHS Today. June 20, 2009.

Filed under: Workplace Safety by Beth Faraci