Safety at Tomingley
The Social Psychology of Risk
Our approach to safety
At Tomingley, we follow the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) safety methodology.
The underlying approach involves understanding risk and the important concept of care for each other. We encourage our people to think, assess, learn and communicate. An important philosophy practised onsite is to ‘entertain doubt’.
SPoR considers how human fallibility, mortality, subjectivity and life experiences influence how people make decisions and tackle risk.
This challenges traditional thinking around work health and safety. Under SPoR, understanding the cultural influences and meaning behind a person’s actions are considered more important than traditional ‘lagging’ measures of safety activity (which often lack context and meaning).
SPoR foundations
The SPoR approach views risk through the lens of:
Workspace – the physical environment
Headspace – how workers think and make decisions
Groupspace – the understanding of how group culture influences and controls risk behaviours
At Tomingley, SPoR principles underpin:
- All employee and site inductions
- The critical control verification (CCV) system for the Tomingley safety management system
- The site internal auditing system
- Site hazard reporting system
- LEAP – an informal risk identification process
- Site incident investigation system
- Site document and authoring process
Guiding safety culture and actions
The SPoR methodology guides our approach to safety awareness, perception, motivation, engagement, communication and culture by:
- Challenging excessive confidence placed on ‘common sense’, self-perception, ‘myths’ of carefulness and a range of measures that tend to paralyse leadership thinking and practice.
- Generating a new awareness that accepts the importance of observing self and others in a supportive and non-punishing way, through conducting skilled and non-defensive approaches to safety engagement.
- Emphasising that the SPoR approach is about understanding risk through the lens of WorkSpace (physical environment), HeadSpace (how workers think and make decisions) and GroupSpace (how group culture influences and controls risk behaviours).
- Developing skills in identifying and addressing complex social psychological hazards and risks.
- Understanding how humans make decisions and how to learn from the decisions that are made.
- Applying SPoR principles alongside the WHS Act, AS/NZS ISO 31000:2009 ‘Risk Management – Principles and Guidelines’, and companion HB 327 ‘Communicating and Consulting About Risk’.
- Teaching how to observe and engage others for influence through effective conversations and observations.
- Re-shaping and reframing language as a tool to change culture and organisational discourse.
- Building capacity in organisational sensemaking.
Our SPoR journey
Tomingley worked with Human Dymensions (led by Dr Robert Long, founder of SPoR) to develop a SPoR program in 2016. The program incorporated the key findings of an organisational risk culture survey conducted onsite.
The ‘Mi-Profile’ survey assessed the organisational culture, values and beliefs of employees by capturing ‘gut’ (implicit) knowledge. This led to development of practical interventions to help shape workplace culture. The survey, initially conducted in 2016, was repeated in April 2021.
Tomingley has rolled out training introducing SPoR concepts to employees since 2017. In January 2022, an updated program introducing SPoR, as it applies to the Tomingley site, was added to the compulsory employee and contractor induction.
