Continuing our journey in Social Psychology of Risk

Since 2020 we have shifted our approach from traditional safety, which focuses only on workplace controls, to Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR), which puts people at the center of everything we do in (safety and health) leadership. Through our SPoR approach, we focus on understanding the influence of the unconscious mind in our behaviours, as most actions happen in the unconscious mind of people, not the conscious mind!

In our new approach, we have not entirely moved away from focusing on physical controls of the workplace, including – among others - engineering controls, checklists, trainings, administrative controls, risk assessments, audits, etc. However, we aim to find the balance between controls and people. SPoR focuses on three main elements of ‘Workspace’, ‘Headspace’ and ‘Groupspace’, referring to ‘physical controls’, ‘psychological influences’ and ‘cultural and group dynamics’ respectively.

Our Engagement Board tool

To support communication and engagement through fundamentals of SPoR, we have developed our Engagement Board tool, which facilitates an open and honest conversation between leaders and their teams. To help rolling out the tool throughout Mondi we provided training material, guidelines, videos and posters. Over the past three years our global Safety and Health network team has delivered training for all safety and health professionals on the basic principles of SPoR as well as the use of the Engagement Board tool. The teams at sites are increasingly using the Engagement Board for most of their discussions, ranging from incident investigations, to preparing for projects and mill maintenance shuts, to discussing new initiatives, to sharing personal or team concerns, etc. The Engagement Board has proven to be a helpful tool for engagement on topics related to not only safety and health, but many other functions across the organisation. 

In 2024, we ran our SPoR roadshow and trained all sites’ managing directors and selected senior leaders across the Group. A total of nineteen training sessions were held in various countries in which we operate, bringing together over 450 leaders from across our global network.

Our SPoR journey did not stop there. In 2024, we trained our senior safety and health managers to become trainers on introducing SPoR and the Engagement Board tool. Each participant was given a full training pack and will be running four training sessions in 2025 for the remaining leaders within the relevant business units in English, Slovakian, Czech, German, Italian, Spanish and Polish.

This training focuses on engagement, the conscious and unconscious minds, connecting with people, and also includes a lot of practical exercises, conversation, teamwork and activities.

We have received positive feedback from many senior leaders who have attended the training, highlighting that the training was not focused only on safety and health, but the majority of the content was on leadership.