What Female Scholars Learned from Oil Rig Macho Men
Harvard Business School faculty conduct field research in all parts of the world, but only professor Robin Ely can claim a stint on an offshore oil platform, 130 miles off the coast of southern Louisiana.
What was she doing in this "manly men" environment? Studying how gender influences can negatively affect efficiency, safety, and productivity in the workplace. And what she and fellow researcher Debra Meyerson (Stanford) discovered can help most managers better understand how to change bad work practices.
As one would expect, oil rigs are typically a man's world. The problem: testosterone often overcomes common sense. Workers take unnecessary risks, disdain the appearance of vulnerability and create an atmosphere where physical bravery proves your worthiness. The results, of course, are high accident rates and lost productivity.
A platform operator decided to end that macho culture, and Ely was on hand to observe the results.
"The goal of this company's training was to enhance employee safety and reliability in a very hazardous workplace," Ely says in an interview with the HBS Alumni Bulletin. "We were intrigued by the prospect of an organization that had deliberately worked to decouple the concepts of leadership and unsafe actions associated with stereotypical masculine behavior."
Some takeaways for you to ponder from their paper "Unmasking Manly Men: The Organizational Reconstruction of Male Identity":
- Management changed the work environment from the top down through extensive training, and by creating policies and practices intended to make safety a top priority.
- Learning from failure was emphasized, as opposed to other platforms where failure was punished. Detailed processes were used to to analyze what went wrong and develop fixes.
- The changes gradually led to behavioral changes among platform workers. "Characteristics that gained importance included a willingness to ask questions, to listen, to admit mistakes, and to acknowledge the need to depend on the advice or assistance of coworkers," reports Ely. "The changes were designed to enhance safety and reliability, but the intervention had the unintended consequence of changing the way many of these men behaved and thought about themselves."
There may be few parallels between a cubicle farm and an oil platform, but here's one: Each can develop unhealthy strains in their own cultures. The good news is that management can be a positive force for change -- even in the last place on earth you would expect such change to work.
Have you been effective at changing the culture in your group? Please share some experiences with us.