Concept of Safety Culture and its assessment indicators
“Safety culture can be defined as the shared attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviours relating to health and safety”
An organization may have either a positive or a negative safety culture.
Positive Safety Culture:
- Where majority of the workers think and feel that health and safety is important, and everyone works and behaves safely because they understand the importance of self and others safety.
- There is a strong policy and clear leadership from the top management and passes through the whole organization from top to bottom.
- Managers think about the health and safety implications of their decisions and workers share the same view and work safely.
- People those are not behaving safely are in the minority and are likely to either leave, because they do not feel that they fit in, or possibly be dismissed for working unsafely.
Negative Safety Culture:
- Where majority of workers think and feel that health and safety is not important and behaves unsafely, often because they do not know any better.
- They are poorly educated in health and safety and see it as unnecessary or unimportant.
- There is a lack of clear direction and leadership from senior management.
- Managers do not think about health and safety in their decision-making and so let other priorities dictate their actions.
- Safety-conscious workers are in the minority and they may leave because they do not like the organizational culture and feel unsafe in the work situation.
Negative impact factors on health and safety culture
Invisible leadership from management, Not demonstrating management commitment to health and safety, It meant management discussing the safety matter seriously in conference room but not demonstrating actual in field, existence of blame culture
Lower priority to health and safety than other business issues, frequent changes in organization or poorly communicated changes make uncertainty, etc are some examples of factors creating negative safety culture in the organization.
Safety performance may indicate organization’s positive/ negative safety culture. Less or No accidents & less ill-health indicates people are working safely and organizations have a direct influence on worker behavior ie. positive culture whereas lack of attention to health and safety, Low standards, poor behaviour and accidents may indicate negative culture.
Indicators to assess safety culture
Below are some examples of intangible factors that have a negative impact on health and safety culture.
- Lack of leadership from management.
- Presence of a blame culture.
- Lack of management commitment to safety, e.g. saying one thing in conference room and doing another.
- Health and safety receiving lower priority compare to other business concerns.
- Organizational frequent changes/ uncertainty.
- More staff turnover rates.
- Lack of resources
- Lack of worker participation and consultation.
- Interpersonal issues
- Poor management systems and procedures.
- External influences including poor ergonomics
Accident record: Accident frequency rate and severity rate — Compare with past years data or with similar type of industries
Staff turnover: Low staff turnover may indicate a good safety culture, while high staff turnover may indicate the negative safety culture.
Conclusion
The safety culture of an organization can be improved only be demonstrating clear commitment by management with visible leadership.
Key to implement positive safety culture is involvement and cooperation of workers. Another way to create positive safety culture is Health and safety empowerment. But if it is not dealt properly, workers may come to resent instructions being imposed from above and start to actively oppose safety initiatives and improvements. This creates a negative culture. The most effective way to avoid this negativity and to actively encourage worker interest and ownership is to involve workers in the decision-making process, which is best achieved through worker consultation.
Originally published at https://safewolrd.blogspot.com.
