Understanding “Safety Culture”
Tosan works with organizations whose performance and profit is directly affected, if not determined, by safety. Operating power plants, managing transmission and distribution, and quality production on the manufacturing plant floor requires employees to continually exhibit behaviors that keep themselves and others safe.
For a baseline, The U.K. Health and Safety Commission developed one of the most commonly used definitions of safety culture:
“The product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organization’s health and safety management”
Tosan would focus this a bit by saying that the values, assumptions, and expectations of groups and individuals define the parameters and boundaries for behaviors. If these boundaries establish a strong value for life and health, a safe work environment is the outcome and can be sustained.
To help organizations improve their safety metrics, Tosan collaborates with them to understand their existing cultural foundation that supports safe behavior. We do this by looking at organizational results that illustrate adherence and execution on safe behaviors. These results are then researched more thoroughly to understand the driving values, assumptions and expectations that are driving these behaviors. The combination of these understandings gives us clear insight into how and why an organization is achieving its current levels of safety.
To impact safety results, we work with clients to identify what behaviors would increase their specific safety results and then work back, or down, to define the necessary parameters that support these new behaviors. This change takes place at the cultural level by understanding how existing assumptions, values, and/or expectations are establishing a behavior that circumvents safety. Then, we can expose the cultural factors that are inhibiting the organization’s safety and drive change from the culture up.
To help you begin looking at your organization’s propensity for safety, think about where your company is as a whole, and then at the team level, how would you rate on the following safety behavior markers:
– Teamwork
– Respect and Inclusion
– Fairness in both reward and punishment
– Group, and cross-functional communications
– Civility in language
– Trust between supervisors and employees
– Job satisfaction
– Feedback and recognition
– Use of threat or fear
If you identify your organization as being poor at a marker (rather than strong), what is the root cause? What assumptions are at play? What does positive change look like?
Obviously, performing a cultural intervention to improve safety is not as cut-and-dry as this outline, but these basics can help to identify the key factors for change for you and your organization to consider.
Should you find yourself wanting to better understand where your organizations culture is supporting and challenging safe behaviors, drop us a note, we’d be happy to open a dialog in helping you succeed.
Stay safe.
