BDO partner Marita Corbett says leaders should adopt a ‘no blame’ culture

Businesses that adopt a ‘no blame culture’ will have happier staff and also greater safety, efficiency, productivity and consumer confidence.

Businesses should encourage staff to speak up without fear of reprisals.

As many businesses prepare to return to the office, now is the perfect opportunity to assess the role of blame culture.

Most of us understand that trust empowers employees to speak up without fear of reprisals. To reap the benefits of this, leaders need to foster a high-trust, low-blame company culture.

Yet, that sounds high level, ambiguous, and generally puzzling.

The unfortunate events of Covid-19 gives us a lens to understand blame culture. We see blame shifting from politician to politician, country to country, organisation to organisation.

Yet, by fixing the blame onto others, we sometimes sidestep the bigger question of recognising the problems that often lurk in complex systems and communication channels which are frequently the true source of avoidable mistakes.

Quickly blaming failures on good employees, who are most of the time trying to do their best, can sometimes miss the point that mistakes can be made by great employees.

The airline industry is widely cited in the positive impact of eliminating blame culture.

A deadly crash of United Airlines flight 173 in the 1970s transformed the safety and blame culture in the sector.

Eliminating blame culture can have a positive impact on an organisation.

Airlines changed safety and communication training by encouraging staff to speak up when they see a problem, with the belief that the UA flight may have been averted by staff speaking up to known problems.

The industry implemented reforms that mandated airline pilots to work more closely with the engineers and flight attendants through improved communication, collaboration and workload processes.

All levels of staff were required to actively promote feedback, and to speak up boldly when seeing risk.

The result, more safety, more efficiency, greater productivity, happier people and greater consumer confidence.

So, as a leader, do you understand the environment, processes, systems in which mistakes happen?

Do you encourage employees and colleagues to speak up and spread lessons learned in a productive manner?

Do you protect staff to speak up?

If you don’t, then there is a problem. Facilitating a no blame culture means there is less employee loss, less money and time spent on repeated errors, and more long-term efficiency - even when there have been costly mistakes.

Brisbane-based Marita Corbett is national leader for risk advisory at BDO in Australia.