Companies urged to alter their approach to Cultural Change

Mr Carter said companies’ focus on shareholder value often caused them to use a one-dimensional approach to change.

"It isn’t always smart to tackle change head-on. It is often far more effective to create a cornerstone around which broadly-based cultural change can be built," said Mr Carter.

Such cornerstones, or catalysts, are most effective if they are not solely and overtly concerned with the ultimate objective of creating shareholder wealth, but are also a demonstrable expression of management’s interest in, and concern for, employees’ welfare.

This way a management-workforce relationship can be established that is conducive, and indeed critical, to the implementation of change.

Mr Carter said this philosophy, which he had successfully brought to bear while head of BHP’s iron ore operations, underpinned his recent decision to join a leading Melbourne-based firm of occupational health and safety consultants, ZEAL Consulting. He was appointed as Chairman last year.

Mr Carter said ZEAL Consulting’s approach toward health and safety management was unique in that it not only helped companies eliminate workplace fatalities and disabilities, thus reducing compensation and rehabilitation costs, but it also used those disciplines and systems to help drive across-the-board cultural change.

He said there were several reasons why health and safety programs were ideally suited as a change catalyst.

"The issue of health and safety in the workplace is of great significance to the relationship between management and the workforce.

"But never has it been more important than now.

"Most people today work harder, feel they have reduced job security and face all sorts of demands from employers. It is therefore hardly surprising that employees are more inclined to participate enthusiastically in a change program which is designed primarily for their own benefit."

He said employees no doubt understood the business imperatives underpinning such initiatives, including ultimately shareholder value.

"Nevertheless they feel that through OH&S they can reclaim some of the esteem and self-confidence they’ve lost over recent times, as well as saving their own life or that of a colleague."

Mr Carter said he first recognised the enormous flow-on effect achievable through occupational health and safety when implementing an OH&S change program at BHP’s Mr Newman-based iron ore operations.

He said the initiative’s influence on people was so profound that soon health and safety systems and disciplines were grafted on to every change program. What is more, employees’ attitudes to change were readily transferred from OH&S to those areas.

"Employees suddenly felt the company was interested in their opinions, as well as their physical well-being. They didn’t feel like a commodity."

Introduced immediately following two fatal accidents which, he said, had had a devastating effect on workforce morale, the program was based on a recently completed cost reduction program.

Mr Carter said employees had also contributed constructively to that effort.

But the positive attitude displayed on that occasion paled into insignificance when compared with employees’ enthusiasm for helping to raise the operation’s health and safety standards.

"We suddenly realised that we had barely scratched the surface, both in terms of safety levels and employee attitudes and behaviour.

"It wasn’t just a question of being able technically to adapt OH&S principles to other areas. The real key was people’s readiness – even enthusiasm – to make it work throughout the organisation.

"I do not believe that we could have achieved such cultural change if we had tried to bring it about with the usual rhetoric about shareholder wealth and the need to be competitive.

"People understand those imperatives. But they also know the difference between an employer who uses fear to motivate and one who demonstrably cares for his workforce."