The Dangers of Safety Incentives

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Diane Chadwick-Jones, a former BP safety leader and long-time researcher whose work has shaped how organizations think about safety incentives.

Diane explains why linking pay and bonuses to injury rates often creates unintended consequences, including suppressed reporting and reduced learning. Drawing on years of internal and external research, she shows how incentives can reinforce belief systems that feel right but undermine safety in practice.

She shares how BP and other high-hazard organizations have moved away from injury-based bonuses, what replaced them and why peer recognition, transparency and supportive leadership matter more than annual rewards.

This conversation offers EHS professionals practical insight into influencing senior leaders, changing belief systems over time and building conditions where people feel safe to speak up about problems before they escalate.

[Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for Safety Labs, the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership: empathy, influence, trust, rapport. In other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff. This podcast is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives.

Hi there. Welcome back to Safety Labs. What motivates workers to act safely? How about managers in charge of safety systems? Safety incentives, such as salary bonuses, are a popular way to encourage safer behaviors and systems.

Today's guest thinks that's a shame, because in her opinion, safety incentives often have unintended consequences that make workers less safe in the long run. Today we'll discuss her research and experience in this area to try to understand the pitfalls of safety incentives and how different approaches can be more successful.

Diane Chadwick-Jones had an extensive career in BP, spanning a number of businesses and functions, including exploration and production, as well as refining and chemicals. She's worked in Belgium, Brazil, and Egypt in operations and safety roles. In Diane's roles related to safety culture and human performance, she was instrumental in the refresh of BP values and delivering cultural change to enable safety improvement.

This included operationalizing a systems thinking approach, improving the way work is structured to reduce the potential for errors and increase effectiveness. She now focuses on education, mentoring, and advocacy. And Diane joins us from the London area. Welcome.

[Diane] Hi, Mary. Great to speak with you.

[Mary] Okay, so let's get right to the heart of it. Occupational health and safety is a huge area of practice. There are a ton of different specialties. How did you first come across the idea of understanding and discussing safety incentives as a specific area of focus? When did you start thinking about safety incentives?

[Diane] Well, it started relatively early on in my career when it seemed to be like such a huge deal, the conversation about the bonus and the issue that if there were a certain number of incidents that would go over the target level, that could lead to a reduction in the bonus. And there were rumors of perhaps people being less willing to report towards the end of the year. And so that was when I was working in operations.

And then when I moved into the safety department, I actually did a Six Sigma project on this. About what was the level of reporting completeness across the whole of BP. And so what happened in reality was that I did interviews and looked at also the statistics in terms of what was the perception of how much people were reporting versus the actual amount. And what I could see was that it was quite a patchy picture. Some places were reporting all the incidents and other places were not. And what I could see from the interviews was that part of it was to do with issues with computer systems, but also part of it was to do with perceived concerns about whether reporting injuries could lead to a reduction in pay.

And so I did that for a number of years, a series of research projects. And that was in about 2005, 2006. But some more research projects in about 2015, 2016, and 2017. And the results of those particular research projects, both outside BP — which was with 28 high-hazard industry companies, where I did interviews with their safety leaders who said that they did feel that there was an impact of the concern that bonus could be affected by incident reporting — and then also another project within BP with what were the perceptions around it. And that led to some very interesting results and some changes made in BP.

[Mary] So you've said before that the discussion of safety incentives is your life's work. That's a powerful statement. Why — you're laughing because you've probably been teased. Have you been teased?

[Diane] No, laughing because Andrew Hopkins has been very supportive to me on this. The academic from Australia. Very supportive. And when I once told him it was my life's work, he went, "I'm so sorry for you."

[Mary] So you have self-declared that this is your life's work. I guess what I'm curious about is why is this so important to you? Again, there are many different areas in safety. Why does this feel like something that really needs attention?

[Diane] Well, because it feels so instinctively right that we should reward people for good safety performance, that we should reward people for the reduction in incidents. But yet just using the lever of reward, it doesn't make any difference to the underlying issues that lead to incidents. In fact, what it does is it suppresses people speaking up and suppresses incident reporting, and therefore it leads to more safety problems, because the less information we have about things that are not going to plan in the workplace, the less we can do about it.

And I spoke recently at a conference on this and I had people coming up to me saying, "Yes, we have this problem." And I'm thinking, "My goodness, in 2025 we still have this problem." It doesn't go away, but that's because it just feels like the right thing to do. And that's why I'm talking about it, to say, well, there is another way. There are other ways that we can do this without people feeling that they're going to be having less pay if they speak up about an issue or an incident.

[Mary] So in part it's counterintuitive, which is maybe why it's so sticky.

[Diane] It's very sticky because people think, "Well, we should thank people for working safely." But really, that is a misunderstanding of what creates safety. What creates safety is the correct resourcing, the way that maintenance is done, the way that people are trained, the way that the whole workplace is set up, including procurement, including the number of spares.

And so what creates safety are many, many things that combine together, rather than just thanking people a year later — because that's how bonuses work, it's an annual bonus that happens a year later — thanking people a year later for something that they actually had relatively little influence over if they were the front line.

[Mary] Over the time that you've been thinking about this and over your career, has your thinking around it changed in any way? I think the main premise has stayed the same, that this is not an effective way. But are there any nuances, things that you've learned or unlearned along the way?

[Diane] Well, I think the biggest surprise — so there has been a big surprise. And the biggest surprise was when me and the research team in BP did the interviews of a cross-section of the workforce, many different levels across all the countries in the world.

And what we found out was that while relatively few people understood how the bonus calculation worked, and not many people actually understood it, a lot of people worried about the influence of the bonus on reporting. But there was a third insight that was a total surprise, and that was that we were asked not to remove safety from the bonus calculation.

So here we are in a dilemma. On one hand, everybody is saying, "Well, linking the annual bonus to injuries causes people to be less comfortable about reporting injuries." But on the other hand, the very same people say, "But if you remove the safety component from the bonus, then the emphasis is on cost and production."

So we're kind of like, "Okay, how are we going to manage this?" Now in the hydrocarbon industry, in the energy industry, we not only have personal safety with injuries, but we also have process safety with seeps and spills. And so what happened in BP in 2019 was that injuries were removed from the annual cash bonus calculation, but the seeps and spills remained. And of course, we know that a seep and a spill in a hydrocarbon environment is just looking for a spark, which can become a catastrophic event. So that was the compromise.

And at the same time, we also had a peer-to-peer recognition program, which had been piloted about a year previously — because of course the executives of BP had been thinking about this and worrying about this — where people can recognize each other for, for example, speaking up about an issue or helping out, whatever it is that people do. And those points then could be accumulated to have some sort of reward, like buying whatever item you want or having a voucher for money off your shopping. And so that has worked very well.

Because the big piece is about saying thank you, right? And so using a points-based thank-you scheme, that filled that gap. And the great thing about it is it's immediate. The problem with annual cash bonuses, as I said, is it's a year later. And this system's called Energize, and it was bought externally from BP and implemented in BP and is implemented in other companies as well.

[Mary] So it sounds to me like, in a sense, there are still incentives, but rather than an incentive for an absence of safety behavior, there's an incentive for the presence of safety behavior. And that while there is a monetary aspect to it, there's also a social aspect that wasn't there before.

[Diane] It is a social aspect. It's a live system where people blog quite a bit or send notes to each other about it. Of course, there are checks and balances. The Energize nomination goes to the person's line manager and the line manager approves it. Of course, there's a budget, so you don't go over a certain amount of money equivalent. So it's not a free-for-all. But it really is about the presence of the things that combine together to give safety. So it's about showing care, for example, speaking up, responding in a supportive way to bad news.

Those are the kind of high-level things that then enable safety when we're talking about the day to day. The ability, for example, if people aren't able to follow procedures and somebody speaks up about that, and then the procedure is amended or fixed or checked. It's those kind of things.

[Mary] So you did some internal research then with BP. In 2022 you co-authored a paper in Safety Science and it was entitled "Rewarding Safety Performance: Improving Safety or Maintaining Beliefs." At what point did you decide to publish outside the industry?

[Diane] Well, I think this had become a strategy that started in about 2014 in BP, because so much information is trapped within large organizations. And what we realized — the people who are in large organizations realize — is that we interact with so many companies. We interact with our contractors and we interact with subcontractors who may not have the resources to work on this, and also who may not realize that there are these kinds of problems.

So therefore, there were a series of research projects done, some of which were published externally, and this was one of those research projects. I mean, there's been a more recent research project that Natalie Abudwan has done on what are the precursors of trust and what causes trust, and published that in Safety Science, so that other people in the energy industry can see what it is that can build trust so that people can speak up, so that we can find out about the difference between work as imagined versus work as done, for example.

So it was very much a clear strategy from the head of operations, from the head of safety, from the head of human resources. There was a coalition from the head of legal, because of course legal was supporting this work as well, to do this research and then to publish it so that we can share it with the energy industry and beyond.

[Mary] And can you describe briefly what the methodology was? How did this particular research project go?

[Diane] This particular research project, we had a core team of people who worked in the safety department and also in operations who worked together to identify — so this is the 48 people that we interviewed — to identify 48 people who'd be willing to do this, knowing that it was totally confidential, knowing that nobody would ever know who it was. And so we basically went around asking the regional leaders for nominations for people.

Then we would get in touch — me and the group of people from operations and also from the safety department — would get in touch with them, asked them if we could interview them, gave them the questions beforehand. And of course, because this is a research project, we had to go through ethics. So we did this under the auspices of the University of Aberdeen. We went through the whole ethics approval for these kind of interview projects, and then asked the questions, having it all recorded, transcribed, cut into small phrases, and then analyzed for the thematic analysis, doing this with two different people doing it to make sure that the scoring was a robust system.

Then we analyzed it, presented it to the senior leaders of BP, who then did actually make a change in policy. And then the team started to write the research paper and submitted it to Safety Science in 2020. But it took quite a while and a number of resubmissions for the paper to be accepted. And that's absolutely fine. I mean, it's a high bar. We had to add statistics and there were a number of reviewers, some of whom had done this kind of work previously and where we'd copied their methodology or we had built upon their work. And of course, we don't know who those people were, but we kind of guessed who those reviewers might be, but we had no direct contact with them.

But that's how it eventually became published. And I would say, trying to get your work published is very difficult. But the feedback of the reviewers, we always have to think of it as being helpful, because they've been in the same situation as us. And so rather than getting 50 comments and thinking, "My goodness, this is going to be impossible," you think, "Well, actually, that's a good idea. That's going to help." And just work through them. But of course it took us two and a half years from the initial submission for it to actually be published.

[Mary] Yeah. And I mean, that's the reason why peer-reviewed journals are respected, right? Because they have those layers of robustness. So your conclusion was, quote, "The inclusion of safety metrics in the cash bonus calculation should be abolished in favor of a culture in which safety is a value." And you've made this point before, so I wanted to talk a little bit about it.

I imagine some organizations believe that safety incentives are the embodiment of showing that safety is a value. And so in terms of intention, you're certainly not attacking intention for these kinds of schemes and programs. Have you ever been a party to an organization's realization that incentives are not a value statement, that they don't understand this paradox?

[Diane] Well, this is kind of tough, because our senior leaders — in all of our organizations, all the people who are listening to this podcast — they know that their senior leaders have the very best of intentions. And so I have spoken with a number of companies who have come to this realization, but it's a really hard sell upwards. It's so difficult.

Because the pay and reward committee always comes from a very wide background with a lot of traditional thinking. And so when your executives in a company realize that they'd like to update their reward system, there's a pushback. And I've seen that quite a bit.

And I have spoken — because of course, having worked on this since 2005 — so twenty years of slogging along on this, of really tough situations. And in fact, about two or three months ago, somebody came to me and said, "My goodness, they've just actually put in an incentive system linked to injuries and I don't know what to do." And I said, "Look, just keep going. Just keep going, because they're only trying to do the right thing. And what they will see is that they will get feedback that this is causing people to feel less able to report the incidents."

But yeah, it's a very tricky topic. But what I'm seeing is that bit by bit, industry through industry, these incentives linked to injuries are being removed. For example, the aviation industry has removed that. A lot of the oilfield drilling services companies have removed it. A lot of the traditional energy, oil and gas companies have removed it.

So I think we're moving in a good direction where we get very much a critical mass, rather than saying, "Well, it's just aviation. They're different and special." It's now moving its way through sectors. And I think that is helpful, because of course no executives want to be the first mover because they're worried about destabilizing their organization. So now we've got many stories of change happening in this area.

[Mary] Okay, so I want to read a quote again from the paper. And it sounds like maybe there's been some change since this was written, but I'll have a few questions after. So the quote is: "The biggest hurdle in the reform of the cash bonus system seems to be the belief system supporting the traditional approach, in the face of evidence to the contrary, which seems more predominant in the oil and gas industry than other high-risk industries." So it sounds to me from what you've just said like that is changing.

[Diane] There's definitely movement. And that's because companies like BP declare that they have made this change, and that it's part of the safety strategy to try and encourage reporting of issues. So it is moving forward. As I said, some companies are just starting it and others are trying to do something about it.

But what I would say to anybody who is listening to this and who's worrying about this — it's probably a five-year journey. So please don't try and make this change happen overnight. Think about the coalition that you have. We're talking about influencing your peers and the senior leaders in your organization.

And remember that when you do this, your incident numbers will go up. So you do need to be very considered in how you manage this, so that the board understands that this change is going to have an impact on the level of transparency in your company.

But what companies see, however, is that the number of reports go up, but the severity goes down. Because of course the smaller issues are being reported before they turn into something worse. And so that is the way of showing the success of this. But look, it's not easy. And what companies often say is, "Well, this is the proof that this strategy is working — that we're becoming more transparent. Yes, our recordable injury frequency has gone up, but when we look at it, we see that the incidents are less severe. And we expected this. We expected this to happen when we decoupled the annual cash bonus from the number of injuries."

[Mary] Yeah, I would imagine the less severe injuries are the ones that are the easiest to hide and the first to be underreported if you've got an incentive in terms of number of reports. So belief systems develop quite gradually and are difficult to change. How do you think this traditional belief developed? I guess you've talked about that — it's kind of intuitive. And what are some of the keys to changing the actual belief system? Because it seems like that's the key. You can change a structure or a policy overnight, but changing a belief system is much harder.

[Diane] Well, how this belief system starts — and it's actually reinforced every day — is when something doesn't go to plan, you look at what happened on the day. And as James Reason would say, or as Lord Cullen would say, the people who are closest to the work, they actually have very little influence over how the work is set up. They just deal with the workplace setup with all its imperfections on the day and they do the best they can.

But when things don't go to plan, they are then blamed for it. Because it looked as if they made a mistake. It looked as if they were careless. It looked as if they made a poor choice. However, the reality is that they made the choices that they were given. It wasn't that they created the incident. It was just they did the best they could under the circumstances.

And so how we manage this belief system is, every time something does not go to plan, we dig into it and we say, "Well, there should have been four people doing that scaffolding instead of two." "Well, the procedure was 45 steps long. And so Bob missed a step in it, but somebody else had missed a step in it last week." "Well, this particular issue, working on an electrical junction box — this is a repeat incident that's been happening time and time again. We keep on kind of sending the engineers away by saying that they're not trained enough, but let's actually look into this more deeply and find out that actually there's a problem with labeling of the electrical junction box and also that two different teams are working in ops and maintenance and they're changing configuration."

And so it's looking — and this is what Ed Schein said to me many years ago. I was talking to Ed Schein about this, and I said, "How do we start?" He said, "Well, all you do is you take an incident investigation report and you run through it with the senior leaders and you go into a deep dive of what led people to do what they did, what made sense to them at the time."

So in summary, the belief system is caused by looking at incidents and being quite far away from those incidents as a senior leader, and it just appears that somebody on the day made a mistake, versus looking at the underlying issues of the difference between what we thought the way the work was set up and the way it actually was set up. And this is a huge insight and a huge piece of education that we can do for all of our leaders.

And I mean, it's kind of uncomfortable. I have to say, a few times I've talked about this and people said, "Well, we don't have the time for that. Don't have the time to look at the underlying issues. Just tell people to follow the rules or they'll be punished." And I'm going, "Well, you can do that, but then you'll just have repeat incidents."

[Mary] Which is terrible. And so does it work when you — I mean, it's tough. It's very tough to persuade someone if they're bent on not being persuaded. But does it work if you say, "Okay, well sure, we don't have the time for this now, but do we have time for a major incident? Because that may be the outcome of this."

[Diane] I have got to say, I tend to be a bit gentler than that, just because I have to be very careful not to blame senior leaders for being time-poor, and realizing that they're all drinking from fire hoses and that it's incredibly intense to be a senior leader of any company, because the weight of the world is on your shoulders.

So instead, it's more about, "Let's sit down and talk through a bunch of examples. Let's have a bit of time." Sometimes what I do is I just work with the people who are around them. Very senior leaders will have a personal assistant, they'll have an executive office. And I work with the people in the executive office, and then they're with the senior leader through all the day, traveling. And that works really well.

Because when we understand that there's always going to be a difference between work as imagined — perfect setup, perfect people, perfect procedures, perfect equipment, perfect weather — versus the reality of work as done, which means that there is a problem with the equipment, there's not enough resourcing, there's issues with training, the weather is very hot so there's high pressure — and then by them understanding this difference, the second thing happens, which is how we respond to things not going to plan. And respond in a supportive way.

Because then that gives space to the whole organization to understand what made sense at the time. And that's where the people who surround the senior leaders are incredibly helpful, because they help the leader take a step back. And rather than get really upset or really angry because of a loss of production — or just say it's a near miss and there's a loss of production, so we don't even have the emotion of the guilt and the shame of somebody being injured on our watch, let's just go with the loss of production — they actually manage to calm them down and say, "Look, there's always a difference between work as imagined versus work as done. We've got great people. They were doing the best they could under the circumstances. Let's now talk about how we can support our teams."

[Mary] It sounds like a role that you're mentioning for the safety professional is to contextualize and tell the story. And kind of work on the assumption level. So for example, a more senior and therefore distanced-from-the-frontline executive might have the same data, but it's the interpretation of the data and the assumptions under that interpretation that have been the problem.

[Diane] Yeah, and it's the questions they ask. So really, the third thing here — so the first is work as imagined versus work as done, the second is responding supportively, but the third one is the questions we ask.

There's a huge difference between saying, "Who's accountable and who we're going to punish?" versus saying, "How can I help? And what made sense to people at the time? And what was making the work difficult?" Rather than — there's an issue. In the middle of the night, doing a job, it's very cold, minus twenty degrees C, and people have not done that job before, and there is a near miss. Rather than saying, "Well, my son wouldn't do it like that" — and I've heard that, by the way — instead of saying that, saying, "Well, hang on, wait a second. There were a lot of things that were making the work difficult. These were two subcontractors who had never done this job before. And it was dark and it was cold. And they were given this equipment and they did what they could do with the equipment."

But really, what we found was that it was the wrong equipment for the job, and then in fact the risk assessment 18 months earlier had been done incorrectly. So many things had to happen for this particular near miss to occur. So yeah, it's a tough one. But I think giving case studies and showing examples and supporting leaders to ask different questions — these kinds of questions about the underlying issues — there is actually a very positively circular situation. Because the more they ask these questions, the more they learn. The more they find themselves, rather than being in a command-and-control kind of space, they're actually in an influencing and collaborating space, which is of course the way that modern leadership is.

[Mary] So I've heard several tips here. One of them is set your own — if you're the safety professional — set your own expectations that this is not an overnight change. You said probably a five-year shift.

[Diane] Well, I mean, you do need to have people in your organization who are dissatisfied with repeat incidents or surprises. If everybody thinks that there are no problems at all, then I think trying to do the shift is not going to happen. There have to be sponsors. There have to be influencers.

[Mary] So it's a five-year shift, especially because you don't want to destabilize the organization. That's the other thing, because you have to make a lot of changes. Like, you have to change the way you do incident investigation. That doesn't happen overnight.

[Diane] Yeah.

[Mary] Well, and it sounds like from what you've just said too, there's like, keep your eyes open for a window of opportunity. When you start to sense that dissatisfaction, or when people are in the mindset of, "I don't know what has to change, but something has to change," that might be a good time to step in.

[Diane] Absolutely. And sometimes it's to do with ambition. Not in BP, but in other companies, I've seen where a senior leader is being asked, "What's your vision? What's your vision for the next five years?" And they go around and they look at other companies and they go, "Well, they're doing this. They're modernizing their safety in this way." And so they'll think, "Well, doing this not only would help my company, but it'll help my career."

And I have seen it. And I confess I've gone along with it, because I thought, well, the intent may not be the most pure of intentions, but at least it's going to make a big difference to the company.

[Mary] Yeah. And I think a safety professional should also give themselves a bit of slack. You don't have unlimited power in persuading these people. And I imagine it's very rare that there's a person in an executive position who has a thorough grounding in safety practice. So in a sense, it's the position you're in.

[Diane] Yeah. I mean, we struggle so much, I think, in the safety profession, because there is such a feeling of, "Well, people will be safe if we tell them to be and give them pictures of their family and to work safe for their family." "People can be careless and that's the reason why we have slips, trips, and falls." "We should reward people so that they work safe and try harder." There's all these ideas that feel like the way of the world.

But in reality, we're in a very controlled environment in the workplace, generally speaking, where the equipment and the way people are trained and the resourcing, generally speaking, it all comes from the way that senior leaders speak and how we do the resourcing, how the priorities and the resourcing are set. And so understanding that, and as an HSE professional being able to influence that — when it works, that's the purpose of being an HSE professional, really.

And I know that people like David Provan and Drew Rae talk about what is the role of an HSE professional. But really, it's about being an influencer and getting to understand more about the reality of work.

[Mary] Well, there are a few questions that I like to ask my guests sort of near the end of the interview. And one of them is, if you were given a magic wand and could change training for tomorrow's safety professionals universally, where would you focus that training? Or another way to ask that is, are there any areas that you feel are underserved currently in the way that safety professionals are trained?

[Diane] Well, I mean, there's the great technical professionalism courses. But I suppose when we think about the role of the safety professional, it's about how to communicate with people without having any direct authority. There's no authority, because really, the operations own safety and the safety professional is enabling that and supporting that. And so communication skills and influencing skills are something that can make a huge difference.

And I've got to say, I did a course called Positive Power and Influencing in BP. And it was so useful. So useful. They videoed us and did it for a week and they videoed us endlessly. And I just realized how awful and terrible I was, and that I wasn't asking questions and I wasn't listening to people enough. And really, I think for safety professionals, asking open questions and then listening. Because if we just talk at people, then we'll never find out what really they are worried about and what's in it for them and how we can help them.

And I think that would be where I would go with that, because otherwise I go in with things about me — me, I want to change this, and me, I want to change that — not thinking about the reality of the leaders that I was working with.

[Mary] I think a lot of us assume — generally, just people generally assume — that some people are born able to engage and communicate and gather information, or sometimes we call it charm. Some people are just born with these communication skills and some people aren't. And I think a lot of people just leave it at that, when in fact they can be taught. You just need to make the effort to do so.

[Diane] And I'd say practice. I think, I go to conferences and I speak, but when I first started speaking at conferences not so long ago, I was absolutely terrible. And so the way to think about it is, "Well, this is a privilege. Aren't I grateful that I'm able to do this?" And I think as a safety professional, try just practicing and speaking with leaders. And feeling safe in your technical expertise does help — that you're just thinking, "Wow, I'm speaking with this leader about this topic, which is quite a thorny topic. On one hand it's a bit scary, but on the other hand, aren't I lucky to be able to do this job and to speak with them about this? Because I think they do want to know and they will want to be curious about what other companies are doing in safety and how we can improve."

[Mary] If you could go back in time to the beginning of your safety career, is there a particular piece of advice you would give yourself?

[Diane] I have to say, I was really lonely. And I think I didn't — with these thoughts, the thoughts I had about the problem with incident reporting related to bonus, for example, because that was relatively speaking at the start of my safety career — and I think if I'd reached out outside of BP, if I'd tried to find other people who had similar concerns, because of course there are thousands of people with similar concerns.

And I say just in general, looking outside — and LinkedIn, it's transformed my life. It really has. You find such a supportive safety community outside of your company. Obviously in your company as well, but I mean, on LinkedIn, I've learned so much. I totally changed as a leader and as an influencer from learning things from LinkedIn and bringing things from LinkedIn into companies.

So I say — people complain about LinkedIn, they have little niggles about it. But I think overall LinkedIn is very, very positive and there are so many people to connect with who you can then collaborate with.

[Mary] So on that note of resources — and I would agree, I think the safety community is very enthusiastic and ready to share with others — are there any resources that you would recommend to listeners to help them dive a little bit deeper into some of the topics that we've covered today, whether that's books or organizations or what have you?

[Diane] Well, in terms of influencing, I would say there are some Energy Institute videos that I'll give you the links to, Mary, that are very, very helpful. They're very short, but they're actually little safety moments that you can use. So one's about the modern view of incident causation — that it's a combination of things rather than a root cause. What enables human performance. How to ask questions as a safety leader. Those kinds of things are very, very helpful.

And so I'd recommend those because that makes it more real. When you and I are talking about this, it can all seem quite distant. But these little videos — one of them is like a walk-through, talk-through of a job to see the difference between work as imagined versus work as done, and it lasts for four minutes and you can actually see the difference. They're little cartoons, basically, provided for free by the Energy Institute, and instantly it just gives a lot more examples to what you and I are talking about today.

[Mary] Good. And how can our listeners find you on the web?

[Diane] Loving LinkedIn.

[Mary] All right, well that's all the time we have for today. Thanks so much for joining me for this conversation, Diane.

[Diane] Well, thank you, Mary. It's a pleasure.

[Mary] I'd like to thank our listeners and the Safety Labs team working behind the scenes. Bye for now.

This podcast is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice, and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Until next time, stay safe.