Still trying to improve “Safety Motivation”? Stop!

Judging by a lot of articles I see online, safety management still focuses on how to motivate employees, be it with slogans, incentives, or disciplinary actions.

The logic sounds right: if people just cared more about safety, incidents would drop.
But as systems theorist Niklas Luhmann argued in his classic book from 1964, that logic is flawed. W. Edwards Deming took this point up in the 1980s: Motivation can’t be manufactured through posters or penalties. Nor can it be bought with bonuses for accident-free days; that only teaches people to hide issues. These approaches focus on individual behaviour, while overlooking the organisational structures that influence it.

Instead of trying to inject motivation into workers, we should design systems that don’t depend on it:
• People understand their role in the bigger system and feel part of it;
• Working safely is simple, consistent, and integrated, and not competing with goals from other organisational silos;
• Learning replaces blame, and feedback loops actually work;
• Reporting issues is safe and valued.

When the structure supports participation and learning, motivation follows naturally.
As Luhmann would put it: we don’t have to generate emotion, if we create clarity, trust, and workable frameworks.

So the challenge for safety leaders isn’t to “make people care more”, but to make caring easier by building systems where safe behaviour is the natural, effortless choice.

(this is one of my short pieces, based on Niklas Luhmann's classic book Funktionen und Folgen formeler Organisation)