Beyond the Bottom Line
How culture shapes production pressure, and re-prioritizing safety
As a risk management professional, you’ve likely felt tension between meeting organizational goals and safety.
It’s a tension I sat with as a program director in a secondary school and something I dealt with every day as a National Risk Management Director at a major non-profit. I often witness this conversation when working with decision-makers from various organizations, including from schools, universities, non-profits, government agencies, and recreational outfitters.
Production and safety are often viewed as competing priorities, positioned at opposite ends of an organization’s performance spectrum. For outdoor organizations, this tension can be especially pronounced. Outdoor programs, it seems, almost as if by definition, operate on thin financial margins and face immense pressure to sell more programs and create “sexier” offerings to stay competitive among schools and other clientele–all while doing so with less. This constant demand for growth, innovation, and catering to individual clients’ wishes can push decision-makers to unwittingly prioritize production over safety.
A wealth of information is available about production pressure, which is a key driver of contemporary safety science thinking (Hashemian & Triantis, 2023). Production pressure is a concept that every risk management professional and safety leader should be familiar with and adept at navigating.
This post highlights the influence of national culture on production pressure that, if unrecognized and unaddressed, could hinder efforts to mitigate these pressures.
What is Production Pressure, and How Does it Affect Safety?
Production pressure occurs when operators are expected to perform optimally with suboptimal resources, often and inevitably leading them to make trade-offs that prioritize business interests and efficiency over safety (Kontogiannis & Malakis, 2019). These rushed decisions and small trade-offs are deviations that are initially seen as acceptable risks, and over time, they become normal practices (Everson et al., 2020). In time and with the introduction of the right triggering event, the culmination of drifting norms can overwhelm a safety management system, culminating in a major accident (Rasmussen, 1997; see my post on the systems thinking approach to accident causation)
In a complex sociotechnical system where social and technical parts are tightly coupled and dependent on each other, such as an outdoor activity program, the effects of migrating work practices are amplified and can emerge suddenly and unpredictably (Hollnagel, 2017; Cook & Rasmussen, 2005). Thus, any drift in work practice increases the likelihood of a sudden and significant accident.
In outdoor organizations, production pressure often comes in the form of overselling programs, staffing shortages, or other compromises related to staff competence, along with a reluctance to cancel or postpone programming due to financial and business pressures. These types of demands and trade-offs are key influencers to safety culture in that they reflect management’s attitude to safety, which spreads throughout the organization as values and “the way we do things here.” In turn, management’s safety attitudes further influence production pressure, creating a persistent cycle between safety culture and business or operational pressure (Everson et al., 2020).
Production Pressure is Culturally Informed
Production pressure is not solely a result of organizational demands; it is also influenced by cultural factors. National and organizational cultural traits, particularly masculinity and short-term orientation, affect how safety and operational priorities are balanced. These cultural dimensions shape management’s attitudes toward safety, which then define the organization’s safety climate and overall risk culture (Reader et al., 2015).
Masculinity vs. femininity is a cultural dimension that describes people’s motivations (Hofstede et al., 2010). At each end of the dimension’s spectrum, traits and preferences for success can be competition- or relationship-based. To clarify the meaning and utility of this dimension, some groups refer to it as “motivation towards achievement and success” (e.g., The Culture Factor).
At the masculine, competition-based end of the spectrum, organizations are likely to prioritize performance, operational targets, and financial success over employee well-being or workplace safety. At the other end, the feminine, relationship-based orientation is characterized by cooperation and collective responsibility as key motivators for success. In this orientation, safety is more likely to be valued and is even an enabler of productivity.
Short-term orientation further compounds production pressure by influencing whether organizations prioritize immediate results or long-term stability. In short-term-oriented cultures, there is often intense pressure to maximize efficiency and meet short-term goals (think quarterly or annual revenue goals), even at the expense of long-term health and safety investments, like reducing workload stress. Organizations influenced by short-term orientation tend to focus on immediate profitability and productivity rather than investing in long-term well-being initiatives and learning from past incidents (Reader et al., 2015).
In contrast, organizations influenced by the long-term orientation view safety as an investment and incorporate it into their operational strategies to prevent future incidents and maintain sustainability.
The Cultural Context in Which Outdoor Activity Programs Exist
To truly understand the cultural forces at play in production pressure and outdoor programming, it is necessary to zoom out and consider the context in which outdoor programs exist.
Historically, outdoor activity programs tend to emphasize achievement (e.g., conquering a summit) and physical challenge (e.g., pushing through one’s limits)—traits that align closely with Hofstede’s masculinity dimension (Mitten, 2017). Take, for example, “rain or shine culture,” which contributed to the fatal Mangatepopo canyon incident where management sent a group into a swelling gorge despite forecasts for rain and unprepared staff (Brookes et al., 2009).
Risk-taking has traditionally been seen as necessary for achieving outdoor activity program goals, resulting in participants learning about what they can achieve rather than their connectedness to self, others, and nature (Mitten, 2017).
Further complicating the inherent cultural traits of production pressure in outdoor programs are Western countries’ characterizations as short-term oriented. These traits are evidenced in political and economic systems, which create the context in which the sector and organizations exist. These macro-systems are competition-based, and they reward decisions and actions that favor financial and business growth. The operational, safety, and staff well-being trade-offs that come with these reward systems are then viewed as normal–and are even expected–which further promotes leadership’s normalization of production pressure.
Practical Steps to Balance Safety and Business
Managing production pressure requires more than just acknowledging the problem—it requires structural and cultural changes that promote good risk management.
Consider these steps to help change the perceptions between business and safety:
Establish and use culture to achieve your strategy. Increased safety incidents are typically not part of an organizational or business strategy, and for many executive leaders, safety is an assumed goal, and it goes unsaid. However, safety and safety participation are not assumed by the administrators and frontline staff who make decisions based on the stated organizational priorities and reward systems. Incorporate safety goals as part of business and operational goals. Lead with your values and anchor your decisions and actions in those values around every turn.
Examine and improve your organization’s feedback loops that inform decision-making, such as including safety participation in performance goals for personnel charged with business development, and reviewing incidents to learn how perceptions of organizational values influenced decisions and actions.
Highlight the heroes of the culture you want to build. For example, give public credit when a decision is made that prioritizes safety over business or efficiency.
Prioritize leadership field visits in your calendar, budgets, and job descriptions. Use these opportunities to observe, ask questions, and model what safety values and participation look like.
Examine the extent to which your program fosters connectedness (over grit or competition). Learn about and teach approaches to healthy relationship-building (contact me to learn more).
Conduct an external review to gain perspective on how safety culture and production pressure influence staff perceptions and the decisions and actions that occur across all levels of your organization (reach out if you want to learn more about what this could look like in your organization).
Contemporary safety science widely recognizes production pressure as a major contributor to safety incidents. While organizations can take internal steps to manage production pressure, understanding the cultural forces that shape it provides deeper insight into why it happens. This understanding can help create meaningful change that positively impacts the well-being and safety of participants and staff.
Dive In
This series is intended to make cultural influences on risk management more tangible and actionable. To stay updated, subscribe to my newsletter for new posts. I send a short and sweet monthly newsletter to announce new posts and share other insights and musings on culture, climate resiliency, and safety science.
If you're looking for more hands-on support, I help organizations apply these insights in their unique contexts through staff training, coaching, and program review and improvement work. Reach out to chat about how we can work together.
References
Brookes, A., Smith M., & Corkill B. (2009). Report to the trustees of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuit Centre of New Zealand, Mangatepopo Gorge Incident, 15 April 2008 (Rep.). OPC Trust.
Cook, R., & Rasmussen, J., 2005. “Going solid”: a model of system dynamics and consequences for patient safety. BMJ Qual. Saf. 14, 130–214.
Dekker, S.W.A., 2017. Resilience Engineering: Chronicling the Emergence of Confused Consensus.
Everson, M.G., Wilbanks, B.A., Boust, R.R., 2020. Exploring production pressure and normalization of deviance and their relationship to poor patient outcomes. AANA J. 88, 365–371.
Hashemian, S. M., & Triantis, K. (2023). Production pressure and its relationship to safety: A systematic review and future directions. Safety Science, 159, 106045. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.106045
Hollnagel, E., 2017b. The ETTO Principle: Efficiency-thoroughness Trade-off: Why Things that Go Right Sometimes Go Wrong. CRC Press.
Kontogiannis, T., Malakis, S., 2019. A system dynamics approach to the efficiency thoroughness tradeoff. Saf. Sci. 118, 709 –723.
Mitten, D. (2017) Connections, compassion, and co-healing: the ecology of relationship, in Malone, K., Truong, S., and Gray, T. (eds) Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times, London: Springer.
Rasmussen, J., 1997. Risk management in a dynamic society: a modelling problem. Saf. Sci. 27, 183–213.
