RE: Request: Improving attitudes and morale

[Steven_S_Prevette@rl.gov]

A few thoughts, both based upon experience and theory about attitudes and
morale.

First, a few experiences.  A previous contractor decided to get into
"behavior based safety".  Now those that believe in behavior theory believe
that I can only change my own attitude, I cannot change anyone else's.
However, I can change other people's behaviors, and changed behaviors should
(according to theory) lead to changed attitudes.

The company had problems with really embarking and doing what needed to be
done.  For example, the company wanted people to do "interventions", but
most interventions were very short term as there were numerical goals on
number of interventions.  If we really want to change behaviors it takes
time.  For example, I used to have a bad (unsafe) habit of kicking my feet
up on my desk and leaning back in my chair when answering the phone.  Now
this is not because I had a "bad" attitude towards safety, but I just seemed
to keep doing the habit.  My boss decided he would break my habit.  If he
saw this behavior, he chided me to get my (expletive deleted) feet off the
desk.  Now amazingly enough, it took more than one of these interventions to
change the habit.  But after about six months of this, I no longer put my
feet on my desk.  Now is my attitude towards office safety different?
Perhaps so, perhaps not.  But the behavior is different.

Second example is a work group that called me out to help develop some
measures.  And they wanted to measure worker attitude.  I asked, "why?".
They felt it was important.  I said, okay, I have just invented a black box
I can plug onto your shoulder that measures your attitude.  You are a 3, you
are a 9, you are a 7, etc.  Now what are you going to do with that
information, I asked?  As they could not come up with an answer, the idea
was dropped, and we went on to other measures.  This is a common problem -
people think they need to measure and influence attitude, but have little
idea "why", "how", or what to do with the information.

Now I can infer attitude.  Dr. Deming liked to look at sick day records and
personally interview workers.  He could very handily determine the relative
culture of the company, including "attitude".  Surveys can also infer
attitude.  See http://www.hanford.gov/safety/vpp/survey.htm for some survey
tips, and http://www.hanford.gov/safety/vpp/survey1.htm for an example.

We all "know" that attitude and morale are important.  Sometimes "attitude"
becomes the catch-all for generic blame however.  "If only I had workers
with a good attitude" is a common lament.  But the same lamenters go about
doing things that destroy attitude, not build it up.  The punishments will
stop when morale improves . . .  The Dilbert Principle (by Scott Adams)
contains a story of a company that did not give out company bonuses as the
bonuses were tied to a set of measures.  The measure that failed was the
morale measure.

Having measures that infer attitude and morale are useful, if you realize I
cannot directly influence that measure.  But you can put the right
environment in place that allows workers to take pride in their work, by
using Dr. Deming's 14 points and the System of Profound Knowledge.  Attitude
will follow as a natural result.

And gee, I didn't even mention control charts (unless of course you look at
how we analyze our survey data).

Steve Prevette
QA Engineer, ESH Radiological Compliance
Fluor Hanford, A Fluor Global Services Company
ASQ Certified Quality Engineer
steven_s_prevette@rl.gov
509-373-9371
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