Consistency: the foundation of a strong safety culture
When I’m talking to people about the dangers of misprioritising safety and health and interventions – I often use the analogy of trying to put cherries on a rotten cake. It’s not a pleasant image but it’s intended to highlight the futility of organisations spending effort promoting general employee health and wellbeing, for example, when their controls to stop the same employees from exposure to excessive physical or mental stress are patchy at best. You cannot build securely on weak foundations. It’s true for occupational health and wellbeing and it’s equally true for safety culture.
In previous posts we looked at how important it is to use the right language in trying to influence OSH culture and how leaders have to be seen to walk the talk in following the standards they set the rest of the workforce. We have saved the most critical building block of safety culture till last.
The fundamentals of safety
Mundane as it may sound, that foundation stone is consistently providing the controls to keep people healthy and safe. From the top of the hierarchy down, stopping or reconfiguring hazardous processes, educating people to deal with the hazards you can’t design out, supervising them where necessary, and finally providing sound protective gear, procured to a standard rather than just a price.
If this sounds very much like what any employer is supposed to do to meet their statutory obligations, that’s because it is. But that quality and consistency of what UK safety law calls “arrangements” to stop people being hurt is also necessary to build a strong safety culture; necessary but not sufficient. Equipping people to work safely is not enough to propel your organisation down the Bradley curve or up the safety ladder to the point where employees are actively looking out for their own and each other’s safety and welfare. But if you don’t do it all the other effort is probably a waste of time, like covering a mouldy cake with glacé cherries (other edible decorations are available).
Using the right language, or senior management wearing the right PPE, though important signifiers, weigh lightly in the balance against the message people get from the basic provision of training and equipment.
There is even an argument that this foundational provision of safe working conditions is the main driver of the safe behaviour and attitudes that are key to a strong safety culture.
Breaking down safety culture
Dr Dominic Cooper and has researched safety culture for more than 20 years – more than half the time the concept has been around - and written and lectured widely on the subject. In his book Improving Safety Culture; a Practical Guide (BSMS 2001) Cooper breaks down safety culture into three components:
- Situational aspects – the physical environment and organisational policies and controls to manage safety;
- Psychological aspects - how employees feel and think about safety; and
- Behavioural aspects – what employees do (or don’t do) to maintain and improve safety.
The elements all influence each other, but Cooper argues that the main lever any organisation can use to change safety culture is to improve the situational aspects. Thorough commitment by management to optimising safety, with adequate funding and other resources is the biggest influence on individual behaviour, he argues. And the practice of safe behaviour – when employees perceive it as a work requirement because of all the attention and resourcing it receives – means that the psychological aspect naturally follows in time. Cooper says that when people change their behaviour, over time they automatically change their attitudes and beliefs to fit with the habitual behaviour.
Staying consistent with safety
So arguably the most critical thing safety professionals can do, both for workforce safety and for safety culture, is to make sure those basic protections are consistently applied across the organisation.
Of course, to do so, they need a reliable flow of data on numbers trained and training effectiveness, corrective actions closed out and all those other inputs that are often described as leading indicators. Sadly, in many organisations with highly-evolved systems for inventory control or HR management have OSH managers still relying on basic spreadsheets. That’s not suitable or sufficient to monitor the temperature of OSH provision in an organisation. Good data flows are essential to the checking component in the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) model that forms the template for safety programmes - and for many other business processes.
There are plenty of building blocks for a good safety system and a strong safety culture but basic provision of safe systems, and the information to check that provision are the ones to lay first. For more resources, check out Ideagen’s safety culture toolkit.
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