Every time someone stays silent about a health or safety concern, the risk of a negative outcome increases. How well do we understand the impact of our own actions on motivating people to be heard?

We spoke to Dr Mark Noort, assistant professor at Leiden University and visiting lecturer in psychology and behavioural science at the London School of Economics, who has researched the behavioural nature of safety voice.

Man in orange shirt with tape over his mouth

The concept of safety voice is usually interpreted as the act of speaking up about health and safety concerns through formal or informal channels, with the aim of preventing or reducing harm. Dr Mark Noort proposes that to understand safety voice we should also consider the factors that lead to safety silence, defined as the active withholding of safety concerns.

Safety silence may not be as simple as the absence of speaking up. It may be lack of awareness of a safety issue, which Mark refers to as ‘unconcerned silence’. Whatever the reason, safety silence can contribute to a lack of knowledge around potential dangers in safety-critical areas – or even lead to incidents and accidents. 

Mark’s thesis looked at how interventions for improving safety voice could be optimised through better understanding the behavioural nature of safety voice. He found that only around one in two people raise their concerns, and that the likelihood that someone will speak up and how they choose to do it depends on at least 32 factors that are related to the hazardous situation, the individual and the social context. These include factors such as proximity to the hazard, and the perceived risk levels of the hazard, but also wider cultural issues such as team norms and values. (View the full set of variables in Mark’s thesis in Table 3, page 103 – link at the end of this article.)

Mark identified that research consistently finds that for people to be motivated to speak up, they need access to someone who they believe will listen (such as an inclusive leader), to have a low workload, and be part of an organisation with a weak hierarchy.

In addition to this, Mark analysed a set of 172 fatal aviation incidents and discovered that in 170 of them, staff had raised the concern before the incident, but the concern was not listened to effectively. So even when people were speaking up, there were important barriers. Because of this, he is undertaking further research on the relationship between listening and reporting.  

A review of previous studies in this area found that most had focused on ways of encouraging staff to speak up, but did not look at what drives behaviours in a potentially hazardous scenario: what will make someone say something, when will this be triggered, and what will they actually say? Mark concluded that creating a positive environment for safety voice is about more than just encouraging people to speak up. It’s about creating a dialogue where people feel they will be listened to (and are indeed listened to), and can discuss their perceptions of hazards and contribute to shared knowledge of these. 

In other words, genuinely listening to staff is a critical factor in encouraging them to continually raise concerns and prevent harm. If someone receives a poor response – or no response at all – when they speak up, they’ll simply stop doing it.

Applying it in practice

Although this research was conducted as part of his academic studies, Mark has also worked at NATS (the National Air Traffic Service) on safety management projects. He sees real potential to apply his findings to real-work problems to prevent harm. Mark’s 32 variables can be used to identify potential interventions at a practical level.

There is no silver bullet – what works for one situation may be less effective in another. But it is possible to use the variables to tailor interventions and identify trends which can help inform the development of interventions for a particular work environment.  

The next steps for Mark’s research will be to further investigate how his findings can be applied in practice in different sectors. Some of his areas of interest include exploring the extent to which accident investigators and managers looking into incidents are exploring whether people speak up, but also whether they were listened to.

Find out more

Mark’s PhD: The behavioural nature of safety voice: advancing concepts and measures to enable the prevention of harm (pdf)

Watch our follow-up special 25th anniversary webinar in conversation with Dr Mark Noort, exploring his research and its practical application.

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