Behavioural Insights and Organisations

Fostering Safety Culture

Behavioural insights (BI) has become widely used by public bodies around the world, mostly towards improving the way policies are implemented and influencing individual behaviour. As the field of BI evolves to tackle more complex policy issues, there is widespread perception that BI can and should go beyond the study of individual-level decision processes for higher impact. This report presents research on applying BI to changing the behaviour of organisations, with a focus on fostering elements of a safety culture in the energy sector. It presents comparative findings from experiments with energy regulators in Canada, Ireland, Mexico and Oman, as well as guidance for applying BI to safety culture going forward.

Published on April 03, 2020

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Foreword	Read PDF
Abbreviations and acronyms	Read PDF
Executive summary	Read PDF
Overview and guidance for policy makers	Read PDF
Beyond the individual: why and how behavioural insights can be applied to organisational behaviour	Read PDF
How behavioural insights can help foster a culture of safety	Read PDF
Findings from experiments on fostering a culture of safety in Canada, Ireland, Mexico and Oman	Read PDF
Case studies: How regulators in Ireland, Mexico, and Oman currently address safety culture and behavioural biases	Read PDF

This report brings together all the experimental results, theoretical background, and scoping collected over a two-year project applying BI to changing organisational behaviour. The report conveys three key messages:

There is clear value added for Regulators to use behaviourally informed strategies for new and effective approaches to changing organisational behaviour and foster safety culture.
Findings need to be tested and re-tested in each context. While this is a general lesson from BI, the report findings demonstrate that results vary across countries and even within country, and across different groups!
The community needs to learn and evolve from this research. It applied BI in a setting where it was rarely used before. The report highlights lessons learned for using each of the behavioural insights, as well as possible approaches to future research.

See overview of the report in Apolitical here.

Combined with the comparative results presented in Delivering Better Policies Through Behavioural Insights: New Approaches, The results enabled the OECD to examine drivers of safety culture from many different angles and begin developing guidance for policy makers to start applying BI in this field:

Behavioural Insights: Fostering Safety Culture

For more information, please contact James Drummond

For more information on OECD work on behavioural insights, visit here.

Oman

Behavioural Insights and Organisations

Fostering Safety Culture

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