Quality Safety Edge: Safety Culture

Culture is much more than simply what people do. A definition of culture should include not only what we do but why we do it. We want people to do the right thing for the right reasons. To be effective in the long term, our safety efforts must produce an organization where people will work safely when there is no threat of punishment from other people. This is when we would say that they have come to value safety. So we are striving to produce a culture where safety is a core value. If safety is a core value, then the members of the culture will work safely all of the time, whether anyone else is there to observe them or not. This is truly a “safety culture.”

Addressing the safety culture of an organization requires utilization of a state-of-the-art process to address safety and an alignment of existing systems to support the mission and values of the organization. Currently, the only empirical approach to improving safety that has been proven to be effective is a behavioral safety process. Behavioral safety is the only approach that has routinely produced significant reductions in incidents in well-designed research studies.

To address a lack of alignment between values and behavior typically requires an educational process targeting improved supervisory and managerial skills. Often aligning the formal processes to support the mission and values requires special attention to the organization’s team, feedback and compensation systems. Creating a culture that has safety as one of its core values is not easy. It is a complex task that requires a long-term commitment. A behavioral safety process is a state-of-the-art process that provides a solid foundation for the employee involvement and continuous improvement that are critical to success.

Readings on Safety Culture

“Culture” is one of those words that we tend to overuse both in our discussions and in our literature on management and organization change. It is one of those words that we use loosely, and everyone thinks that they know what it means, but many of us would be hard put to define it.

Part 4 of a paper, Values and Behavior: Building a Culture that Promotes Safety, published in Proceedings of ASSE's Professional Development Conference, American Society of Safety Engineers. Nashville, TN, June 2002. Creating a culture that truly values safety requires the alignment of both formal and informal systems that support safe work practices. Good managers and healthy organizations develop a balanced emphasis between emphasis on results and emphasis on process.

“Culture” can be defined as a combination of the practices common to a group of people and the reasons people do what they do. Thus, a safety culture is an environment where people do their jobs safely “to prevent injury to themselves and others, not just because of pressure from management.”