1. Driving cultural and behavioural change, ‘The Arla Way’
Written by Matt Winterburn – April 2016
At the beginning of 2015 I set off on an exciting journey to co-create a unique, scalable and fit for pur-
pose behavioural safety programme and strategy that fitted the pace, culture and needs of Arla foods
supply chain arm of their business. This is a core pillar in supporting Arla’s wider business strategy of
developing its role as ‘leading global food company’ that ‘adds value to people’s lives in a responsible
manner’.
Two years into this journey and the results so far have been astounding with measured improvements in
Arla’s safety culture, significant reductions in workplace accidents and dramatic improvements in proac-
tive safety elements such as identifying and remedying unsafe acts and behaviours. In this short paper
you will learn a little more about the principals and outline strategy I have led and how Arla are, in my
opinion, breaking the mould and stereotypes towards behavioural safety and behavioural science. I hope
you find it interesting and insightful.
The guiding principal adopted for the Arla’s behavioural safety programme (BSP) is to work with a core
group of colleagues we call ‘key influencers’ and give them skills and knowledge to understand and drive
organisational behavioural change. The key influencer group accounts for around 10% of our colleagues
and they are from all operational levels in the organisation.
The developed strategy runs over a three year period. At the end of a three year period Arla will have de-
veloped all colleagues’ skills and capabilities to understand and influence key safe behaviours through-
out its business.
Year one is all about building skills, knowledge and understanding
Through a series of workshops key influencers discovered the basis of human behaviours and why peo-
ple do the things they do. This helped each site outline the basis of their own behavioural safety ‘corner-
stones©’ plan. The concept of Arla’s cornerstones© is co-developed by Arla and focusses on the follow-
ing key elements:
Cornerstone© model
Key influencers explore each element of Arla’s BSP cornerstones© and identify improvement initiatives
that could improve safety related behaviours. Time bound, measured cornerstones© plans are then de-
veloped. As well as each cornerstone© site plan also consider how to launch and bring BSP alive with all
colleagues, visitors and contractors in there operational environments. The local BSP launches where
designed by key influencer and completed in a way that suited the environment, culture and require-
ments of the site. Some sites stopped production other did a series of shorter workshops.
As part of each site launch the local key influencers took every colleague through the journey to date,
the plan for the future and explained a set of locally developed key safe behaviours. Key safe behaviours
are a set of simple, visible behaviours that everyone can observe and proactively challenge. The key safe
behaviours are designed to start Arla’s cultural transformation of having behavioural related conversa-
tions.
• CLEAR, SIMPLE AND COMMON
STANDARDS
• ACCOUNTABILE PEOPLE WHO ARE
EMPOWERED AND RESPONSIBLE
• MONITORED & TARGETED SYSTEMS
THAT GIVE ACCURATE AND TIMELY
FEEDBACK
• CONSISTENCY IN SAFETY RELATED
BEHAVIOURS

2. Driving cultural and behavioural change, ‘The Arla Way’
Written by Matt Winterburn – April 2016
Year two is all about embedding each sites behavioural safety programme, measuring
the progress and sharing best practice
With all colleagues having been taken through there site BSP launch the strategy shifts focus to ensuring
the built skills and knowledge and all the fantastic plans stick and continue to flourish. This is done
through realising and measuring the level of cultural improvement.
Whilst the general safety metrics, like accidents and near misses, are a good indicator that things are im-
proving this only tell part of the story and sometimes after events when it’s too late. We wanted to de-
velop a method of measuring our culture on a regular basis to help us identify where resource and sup-
port may needed but also to enable us to create a culture of best practice sharing.
Aligned towards Arla’s unique cornerstones© approach a framework has been developed that defines
each cultural stage of our BSP journey. From the BSP cornerstones© framework unique tools and pro-
cesses were developed:
 A series of self-assessments have been developed that allow key influencer groups to measure
progress in each cornerstones area on a regular basis. Targets have been set by management
groups in each local business plan to realise and achieve cultural levels over the year. Self-
assessments are completed monthly by key influencer groups. The outcomes of these are
tracked centrally to realise the level of improvements and identify where support or resource
maybe required. The question sets also act as a good aid memoir and proactive prompt for lead-
ers visiting operational sites as to where each site is at with their BSP journey and where support-
ive conversations can centre.
 A twice annual BSP process confirmation audit has been developed with the aim of confirming
the self-assessment outcomes, identifying and sharing best practice within the group and agree-
ing any corrective action or support that may be required to realise the local BSP cornerstones
plans and measures of success.
Visible performance management model

3. Driving cultural and behavioural change, ‘The Arla Way’
Written by Matt Winterburn – April 2016
Year three is all about local self-sufficiency and broadening the BSP cornerstones© con-
cept to other key focus areas.
To ensure Arla’s BSP is not a short term initiative we feel that all the processes, ways of working and con-
tinues development of skills and knowledge need to be fully embedded in what we do. We do this partly
through continually assessing our cultural improvements in line with our cornerstones© framework but
to be truly effective we need each site to be self-sufficient. Self-sufficient in the sense that external in-
fluence is not needed for programmes, frameworks and measures to continually be developed and im-
proved… effectively the way we change behaviours and culture become ‘just the way we do things round
here’.
Through further development of our key influencer skills we will have greater ability to:
 Locally on board new starters, visitors and contractors to the business in Arla’s unique BSP and
how this translates to the local ‘way we do things around here’
 As a group complete peer to peer audits and assessments, realise and share best practice
straight from the point of origin
 As a global organisation we hope to take this scalable, proven BSP model and develop it for other
local markets and have the same success.
 Utilise the skills, knowledge and momentum around cultural change to develop other exciting
behavioural improvement programmes in key areas such as food safety and product quality
So there you have it, the Arla way towards driving cultural and behavioural safety.
Hopefully you found this short paper insightful, useful and who knows maybe inspirational?
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you would like to find out more.
Many thanks, Matt W…