Rethinking Peer Pressure
When it comes to worksite safety, can peer pressure be a force for good?
By Roger Lis, Senior Consultant
As a child, you learned about “peer pressure” as a negative force — a powerful kind of influence that, if you weren’t careful, could drive you to do dangerous or unhealthy things. We all remember one version or another of the educational video in which an innocent protagonist is pressured to smoke a cigarette by a group of his friends:
‘Come on, try it. Everyone is doing it,’ they say.
The story always ends the same: ‘Just say no. Don’t give in to peer pressure.’
But is all peer pressure bad?
Peer pressure is a mechanism of social conformity, and it’s well understood that social conformity is an important part of human survival. We are programmed to act as others do, to follow the crowd and avoid standing out. The urge to conform effects much of what we think and the way we act. The impact of conforming on our lives can be both negative and positive, but we can leverage it for mostly positive results—if we understand how it works.
When it comes to safety at work, the urge to conform can override our commitment to what we know is right or what our experience tells us to do:
Suppose you are a new member of a work crew. Your new work crew is under schedule pressure, and most of the crew decide to take a shortcut to meet the demands of the schedule. Although you know the shortcut is incorrect and may injure you or others, your emotional brain craves social synchronicity—it will override logic and move with the group. In one way this makes sense. It feels uncomfortable to be an outsider; to break with the group is to risk losing the group’s support. In another way, the effect of your choice to conform is an increased risk of injury for everyone.
Of course, sometimes group conformity can drive us to do the right thing for our team. The military uses conformity to drive discipline, team work, and operational success. In particular, they leverage the power of the group and social approval to motivate high performance. From day one at boot camp, soldiers feel the negative impact of stepping out of line and the positive impact of staying aligned with their group. This comfort with the clan is reinforced by a strict command structure and a culture that praises dedication to one’s team unit over all else. Additionally, military training is laden with repetition, drills which build-in automatic patterns of behavior that persist even when the team is in a high stress situation or under direct threat.
I am not suggesting that we strive to create military training or battlefield conditions on the work site. But, it is helpful to consider how we can use social conformity to build a safer workplace:
First, positive conformity requires a strong foundation built on clear expectations, policies, and rules from day one. The team can align with the right behaviors more easily if we define a reference point and get key people on board from the beginning.
Second, we must define and support daily habits around planning work, assessing risks, and following up on plan progress and roadblocks. If we can influence team members to live by a set of rules and call each other out on deviations from the norm, we will create positive conformance and an environment where it’s uncomfortable to do the wrong thing. Getting a positive set of norms in place and getting most people on board early encourages people to act the right way more often without much oversight.
The biggest challenge in safety is combatting negative conformity — a force that aligns people around a poor example, often one that involves cutting corners or taking risks (modeled by those who have what we call ‘cowboy syndrome’). Negative conformity happens when experienced people take risks and the team follows their lead. Under these conditions, it becomes less and less likely as time goes on that people will speak up and go against the prevailing culture. This is especially true when experienced risk takers are paired with new recruits who fear rejection if they speak up or challenge the status quo. Turning this tide requires those in charge of safety to look into the behaviors of work teams and provide them feedback in a targeted effort to shift the motivational tide.
In our coaching work, we have succeeded in resetting team norms by requiring documentation of safety risks and arranging frequent ‘checks-ins’ on risk management. In our Focus4Safety process, supervisors fill out a simple notecard to specify task plans and then ask their teams to identify risks and risk controls for task steps. We then require safety advisors and supervisors to check the card and track follow-through during the work day. This process helps the team set a positive standards for conformance and reduce the influence of risky habits. Once the standard is reset, it is much easier for new members of the group to do the right thing earlier and with consistency without having to push back against strong negative models.
The bottom line: peer pressure can be used moment-to-moment throughout the workday to promote a strong safety culture, but this requires that we set clear standards, communicate expectations, and establish a daily rhythm of work planning, risk management, and peer feedback. The more we can get teams to use these tools consistently, the more people will build stronger safety habits, eliminating the need to parachute-in costly external influencers for intensive learning sessions.
Visit us at kintla.io to learn more about our work and our approach.
