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Safety Culture

Every organisation has a safety culture. The question is how good is it?

Without a safety culture, you don’t have a SMS – it’s that simple.  If people don’t feel empowered to contribute to it, they won’t feel inclined to be engaged with it, and therefore not be protected by it.
The safety culture in an organisation is integral to the Human Factors influence, both positive and negative.

Safety culture needs to be resilient. It must be able to be felt despite breaches of confidence, lapses by individuals and inevitable mistakes.  However it will never survive management indifference.

Preservation of the safety culture comes with Management commitment. When management ‘walks the walk’ all workers feel empowered to contribute to a positive safety culture. Damage to safety culture comes with management inflexibility, inconsistency or hypocrisy of safety standards.

It can also be damaged by management losing sight or focus on what the safety aims and objectives are.

https://youtu.be/venO7Jd-978?t=38s

…The rig has an effective SMS and a sound safety culture.  As management are aware, safety culture is essential for the running of an SMS and must be ‘fair and just’.  If rig personnel trust in ‘fair and just’ they will report without inhibition.  Issues arise when breaches of say,  Life Saving Rules are seen as inflexible in outcome (ie – run off the lease) when the context of the human error is not considered.  Should a breach be deliberate, willful or flagrant, there is no question that consequences should be punitive.  However should the error be a result of Human Factors, it needs to considered in context, and the outcome be a learning experience as part of a fair and just safety culture.  The real danger when breaches of directives such as the Life Saving Rules are seen as the ‘Sword of Damocles’, personnel will simply stop reporting breaches to protect their jobs, and the safety culture will be lost…’

Extract from internal safety review to management for a Bass Strait exploration drilling rig

Assessing a safety culture

There are metrics that can be used to assess the safety culture of an organisation. These would include;

  • The number of Hazard reportsCulture word on puzzle piece with connected elements marked Beli
  • Safety Action Group (SAG)/ Safety Review Committee(SRC)
    • Frequency
    • Attendance record
    • Effectiveness of action items
  • Safety stand down days
  • Amount of safety promotion material
  • ‘The Vibe’ of the workforce

The NSW Government – Workcover has produced a generic Safety Culture Survey for organisations to self assess their safety culture. The survey is available in the ‘Building an SMS’ link.

Just Culture/Fair and Just Culture/Just and Learning Culture…

HNZ Just Culture statement

The Evolution of a Safety Culture

Evolution of safety culture

Unaware………luck………hope………know………look

From Professor James Reason

From Professor James Reason

If you think you are good, that in itself is probably a warning.

‘…Management systems are primarily rational inventions, defined on paper in offices and capable of objective evaluation in audits. The next stage is one in which the aims and intentions can be allowed to flourish, even if there are gaps. This is a situation in which formally undefinable characteristics such as enthusiasm, care and belief are to be found. The kind of organisation that provides this support is a safety culture. In a managed organisation it is still necessary to check and control externally. In a safety culture it becomes possible to find that people carry out what they know has to be done not because they have to, but because they want to. It is at this point that worker involvement becomes both meaningful and necessary. Advanced safety cultures can only be built upon a combination of a top-down commitment to improve and the realisation that the workforce is where that improvement has to take place. The workforce has to be trusted and has a duty to inform. What this means in practice is that in an advanced safety culture it becomes possible to reap extra benefits, beyond having fewer accidents, such as reductions in the audit frequency. The next question is, what exactly is a safety culture and how do you acquire one?..

From  Hudson Long Hard Winding Road safety culture article by Professor Patrick Hudson

Where do you want to be?

When appointing where an organisation sits on the scale, consider the following types of organisations;

  • Pathological – hides issues of safety (or attempts to hide)
  • Bureaucratic – restrains safety issues (pays lip service but can fail to act when required)
  • Generative – values all safety information (recognises safety is ongoing and ‘the way we do business around here…’)
Type_Org

 

“Cultural change is impossible”

The Australian NRL was one of the most violent public sports games on earth. The Annual State of Origin between New South Wales and Queensland was ‘famous’ (‘infamous’) for the rivalry and subsequent on field violence.

It was ‘a given’ that State of Origin would result in ‘some good old fashion biff…’

NSW VS QLD Game 2 2014

There has not been a serious punch thrown on field since June 2013.

Integration of HF into SMS

Both ICAO and regulators refer to the need to integrate HF into SMS. In groups, discuss, and note what this means both holistically and specifically.

Use the template Integration-of-HF-into-SMSDownload