Basic psychology will tell you that human beings are adept deniers. It’s easy for employees to feel that health and safety messages do not apply to them—and this is why feedback, and the right feedback, is so important.

Often, employees are reluctant to recognize risk factors in their own behavior and lifestyle, let alone in their work. There is an inherent risk that every employee feels when owning up to a mistake, and this is a serious problem for building a robust safety culture.

So, what do you do?

Well, the key is really in linking identified risks with improvements in overall performance. Managers need to know that their role in identifying, recording and mitigating risks are a shortcut to other savings. The positive knock-on effects of risk mitigation need to be made tangible.

If employees can see how their mistake (or near-miss) helped to improve a process for the organization (or save money), they are more likely to continue to raise issues in a productive way.

Positive reinforcement works, and it’s part of creating the kind of feedback loop that generates ongoing improvement—and hopefully improvements that spill out beyond the traditional ‘safety’ realm to create a culture of high performance. Many companies are proving that this is possible, and they’re using some innovative ways to get there.

The reason why this positive (rather than blame-placing) approach works, is simple. McKinsey research shows that employees need to feel that their interests and the interests of the business are much the same.

Rather than being just another compliance burden, safety and well-being can be framed as a mutual obligation between employee and employer, and between employer and the broader community. In this light it can be used as a retention tool of real significance and it can genuinely benefit the bottom line and beyond.

Once management has grasped this link, conveying to employees is relatively straight-forward, because it is a natural extension of how people generally want to work. They want to feel valued, to contribute and to see how their success impacts the business—and this is the test of true safety leadership.

This post is an excerpt from Why Regulation Won't Solve Safety Issues In The Workplace, Part 1 of Carrot or Stick? a white paper series exploring safety management issues in the workplace for the APAC region.