Safety Culture Plus

Safety professional pretty much ignored the concept of culture through the 80′s. However, as management attempted to improve culture through changing their styles of leadership and through employee participation, safety efforts changed very little. Management was using the same elements in their safety programs that they had always used. I am reminded of the definition of insanity, "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Under the old traditional style, this is common. Safety programs typically consisted of the usual things: for example, safety meetings, facility inspections, and incident investigations to some degree (not getting at the root cause), with little emphasis on identify and correcting hazards Most professional perceived these tools as the essential elements of safety program. However, these tools do not create a safety culture or build a safety management system.

While OSHA and some state programs were going down the "essential element" track to safety (as was much of the safety profession), of suggesting implementing a management system, a number of research pieces began to come into play with different answers to the safety problem. Most of the research results were consistent in saying, "there are no essential elements." As we discussed, what works in one organization may not in another. Each organization must determine for themselves what will work for them. The answer seems to be clear: it is the culture of management and the employees and the organization that determines what will work in any organization.

Reference: Peterson, Dan, The Challenge of Change, Creating a New Safety Culture, Implementation Guide, CoreMedia, Development, Inc., 1993, Safety Climate, Category 19, pp. 90-92.

Today we are bombarded with many terms that are used to help management to define and/or describe safety efforts. We use the term behavioral-based safety to describe why some employees engage in risk-taking behaviors. One cannot pick up a safety journal without an article where some one is telling us that behavioral-based safety will change your safety program. What it does not tell us is that this is only one element of a successful safety management system. “What works in one organization may not in another, there is no magic bullet,” as some people will lead you to believe.

Reference: Peterson, Dan, The Challenge of Change, Creating a New Safety Culture, Implementation Guide, CoreMedia, Development, Inc., 1993.

Creating self awareness for safety is important, especially when you are working in environments where it is common to work without other co-workers present. In this three (3) part session, we will discuss one tested, successful approach to increase personal safety awareness and how this can be applied and used within a safety observation process.

Safety Culture Excellence

This podcast is part 3 of this self awareness series and concludes this talk by Terry Mathis. I hope you enjoy and find some ideas to self implement!

Safety Culture Excellence

This podcast is part two of Terry’s recently recorded talk that focuses on how to implement innovative self observation strategies, that increase self awareness of low probability risk.

UK’s HSE provides PowerPoint slides for promoting the leadership guidance in Safety and Health

A PowerPoint presentation is now available to help promote top-level leadership of health and safety. It covers the (Institute of Directors) IOD/HSE guidance on leading health and safety at work and includes information on the new law on corporate manslaughter/homicide. View presentation [PPT 1.4MB]