Safety culture
[1][2][3] Safety culture has been described in a variety of ways: notably, the National Academies of Science and the Association of Land Grant and Public Universities have published summaries on this topic in 2014 and 2016.
However we find that the culture and style of management is even more significant, for example a natural, unconscious bias for production over safety, or a tendency to focussing on the short-term and being highly reactive.
Two of the most prominent and most-commonly used definitions are those given above from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and from the UK Health and Safety Commission (HSC).
The vast majority of surveys examine key issues such as leadership, involvement, commitment, communication, and incident reporting.
Some safety culture maturity tools are used in focus group exercises, though few of these (even the most popular) have been examined against company incident rates.
From such inquiries, a pattern emerges; organizational accidents are not a result of randomly coinciding "operator error" or chance environmental or technical failures alone.
In the UK, investigations into incidents such as the sinking of the MS Herald of Free Enterprise passenger ferry (Sheen, 1987), the Kings Cross underground station fire (1987) and the Piper Alpha oil platform explosion (1988)[24] raised awareness of the effect of organisational, managerial and human factors on safety outcomes, and the decisive effect of 'safety culture' on those factors.
The lesson drawn from the UK disasters was that, "It is essential to create a corporate atmosphere or culture in which safety is understood to be and is accepted as, the number one priority.
A Harvard Business School study found an intervention to improve the culture at Shell Oil during the construction of the Ursa tension leg platform contributed to increased productivity and an 84% lower accident rate.
[28][29][30] James Reason has suggested that safety culture consists of five elements:[31] Reason[13]: 294 considers an ideal safety culture "the ‘engine’ that drives the system towards the goal of sustaining the maximum resistance towards its operational hazards" regardless of current commercial concerns or leadership style.
Their design should ensure that no single failure will lead to an accident, or even to a revealed near-miss, and there are no timely reminders to be afraid.
For such systems, Reason argues, there is an ‘absence of sufficient accidents to steer by’ and the desired state of ‘intelligent and respectful wariness’ will be lost unless sustained by the collection, analysis and dissemination of knowledge from incidents and revealed near misses.
[13] Hence, without conscious efforts to prevent it, complex systems with major hazards are both particularly vulnerable to (and particularly prone to develop) a poor safety culture.
E. Scott Geller has written of a "total safety culture" (TSC) achieved through implementing applied behavioral techniques.
[19] Although the overall culture of an organization may affect the behaviour of employees, much research has focused on the effect of more localised factors (i.e. supervisors, interpretation of safety policies) in the specific culture of individual workplaces, leading to the concept of a "Local safety climate, which is more susceptible to transition and change".
Variables consistently related to lower injury rates included both those specified by a safety management system and purely cultural factors.
[citation needed] Building and maintaining a durable, effective safety culture is a conscious, intentional process that requires successfully completing several steps.
