New employees bring their unique personalities, perspectives, and history to your job site. What is their safety mindset? What was the safety culture of their previous employer? These are worth considering during the onboarding process of new employees. You are reading this publication because you have a passion for safety. You promote a safe work environment for your employees. You have a clear vision for your job site’s safety culture. You want new employees to share your vision, embrace your vision, and live by it. How do you influence them?
Typical safety orientation processes include things like:
- Review of company’s life-saving rules and safety policies
- Equipment training
- Personal protective equipment use and compliance
- OSHA or certification requirements for their jobs
- Emergency procedures
Each new hire goes through the organization’s checklist of safety knowledge and compliance requirements for their job. This is critical because it provides hires with clear safety expectations in their new position. What many safety professionals may not have considered are the social influences that affect new employees’ behaviors. There are social and psychological factors that have a tremendous influence on employee behaviors. These factors are especially powerful for new employees. These factors are not on a safety orientation checklist, but they may have a greater effect on a new hire’s approach to safety than the formal activities in your safety orientation process.
When in Rome, We Do as the Romans Do
Social Proof is a phenomenon that has been studied extensively by social psychologists. Prominent psychologist Robert Cialdini summarized many well-known experiments, studies, and historical examples of social proof in his book “Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion.” Few realize the overpowering effect social proof has on our behaviors. One everyday example is the laugh tracks that are applied to sitcoms. TV executives add artificial, canned laughter to sitcoms because they influence us to laugh. You may consider laugh tracks fake and corny. You may not like them, but researchers have demonstrated they work (Smyth & Fuller, 1972; Fuller & Sheehy-Skeffinton, 1974; Nosanchuk & Lightstone, 1974). Others laugh, so we feel compelled to laugh. TV executives know what they are doing.
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