By Mark Cartwright, Head of Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention at National Highways
At National Highways road safety is our number one priority. Our roads are some of the safest in the world, but our ambition is for no-one to be harmed while travelling or working on them. Road safety is a shared responsibility – everyone must play their part.
In March 2024 we hosted a a free one-day conference at the National Space Centre, to educate vehicle-using organisations on the role they can play in managing work-related road risk. A key element of building safer fleets and safer drivers is the creation of ‘psychologically safe’ cultures, as Psychsafety founder Tom Geraghty, explained to the audience.
Tell us about your interest in psychological safety, Tom.
In 2015 I came across the term psychological safety, after stumbling across an Amy Edmondson TED Talk and I thought ‘wow’. I’ve always been really passionate about management, because I wanted to create the conditions in which we get high performing teams. But that’s actually a really difficult thing to learn. How do you do it? There’s management training, but little that really addresses this. That talk was the catalyst for me. That’s how I ended up creating my psychsafety programme.
What is psychological safety and why does it matter?
Psychological safety is the belief that it is OK to ask questions, raise issues, express ignorance or take risks in terms of innovation or contribution, without the fear of reprisal, penalty or embarrassment. (Risks in terms of divergent, challenging or creative thinking, or innovating – not risks in terms of physical safety.)
It’s very important for any team member to feel they can speak up if they believe something may not be safe, and not be penalised by their manager or the rest of the team, even in small ways like rolling eyes, or dismissive comments.
Psychological safety avoids or reduces the chances of things going wrong. In terms of road transport, it mitigates the risk of collision.
High performing teams tend to report their mistakes and learn from them. But where does accountability fit into that? Don’t we have to hold people accountable for unsafe acts?
It’s a false dichotomy to think that accountability doesn’t fit within a just culture. We are all accountable if we do something illegal for example. However, from an organisational viewpoint, if drivers admit to mistakes, it can be rectified more quickly, they can be supported towards better practices and the whole process can be stress tested to prevent such mistakes in future. Most people go to work wanting to do a good job – they don’t intend to mess up. But humans do make errors and being able to identify when and why they make errors helps us to engineer safer working practices and intervene before a critical event takes place.
Driving for work continues to be one of the highest-risk activities that employees undertake. At Driving for Better Business we try to help organisations put structures in place to identify and manage road risk. Is this useful?
No safety failure comes out of the blue. Having policies, structures and education in place is very important, because these clearly communicate to everyone how something *should* work, and the importance we place on recognising and avoiding hazards. Then employees need to be empowered to speak up when something does not fit with the established protocols, or when the established protocol no longer fits with safety.
Any programme such as Driving for Better Business, which helps people to identify and achieve higher safety standards is a good thing.
~ ~
National Highways engages with businesses through its Driving For Better Business (DFBB) programme. They provide a range of high-quality, free-to-use tools to help organisations identify and reduce their work-related road risk – and make the roads safer for us all.
National Highways will be returning for a third year at the National Space Centre in Leicester in 2025, with speakers covering the latest topics relevant to those involved in health and safety of their work forces. Please check our site for updates on how to book your spot.
