Building a culture
June 1st 2005 The best way to improve your health and safety record is to make your people think and act in the right way. Achieving an effective safety culture reduces accident rates and the costs inherent in poor safety practice – and it can add so much more to business. Those benefits can include reduced insurance premiums, lower costs of production, enhanced quality and productivity, reduced levels of lost time, improved communication and control, more effective corporate governance and responsibility, reduced risk of liability in terms of both civil and criminal legislation, a stronger company image, and improved morale. Plus, a safety culture can show that a company is genuinely exercising its duty of care – to customers, staff and the community.
‘Behavioural safety’– limited effectiveness Many organisations are fully committed to optimising safety performance. Some take specialist advice to achieve this; others make their own efforts to improve processes and employee commitment. But whether they use consultant support or not, few achieve long-term, consistent improvement. Some experience short-term success, but it wears off when the initial commitment wanes. Some find the culture they’re trying to develop too inaccessible, too impractical or obscure for their people. Some find they can’t progress beyond a certain level – despite doing everything they can, they reach a plateau and can’t move off it. Lots of consultants offer training designed to achieve ‘behavioural safety’, but the experience of most companies is that it rarely ‘sticks’.
The problem There are a number of reasons why traditional methods don’t work. Conventional techniques all too often focus on the shop floor. They don’t permeate the business.
They miss out the people at higher levels – people who because of their seniority should be acting as examples of the new regime, but who actually don’t share the discipline. But any effort to change the culture should start from the top, engaging the leadership to help motivate and sustain improvement. But that’s not the main problem. What conventional techniques lack is what is fundamental to every business. Truly quantifiable processes, specific accountabilities, accurately measurable performance... a practical approach based on the same principles that underpin production, sales targets, and financial performance – principles that will ensure that safety performance is treated like any other part of the business.
A successful safety culture needs to identify and address the situations that cause companies and their processes to be unsafe. It’s all very well to win hearts and minds across the organisation – but that ‘warm feeling’ doesn’t work forever.
Continuing success depends on the practical approach: continuing analysis, quantification, measurement and practical reinforcement.
Processes that enable the company to be sure that change is happening, to track it continuously, to identify under-performing areas, to measure actual improvement – with real tangible data that empowers people to take the right action.
A model approach A different approach is needed. Most conventional behavioural safety techniques only address the need to reduce critical risks, not the underlying cultural causes.
A model approach should address all the factors that influence safety in the short and the long terms – like engaging the leadership, motivating improvement and sustaining change. As in a jigsaw, they are fully interlocking, mutually dependent parts of the picture. At the same time, the approach should at all times be practical and based on facts, figures and hard data.
There should be no vagueness about objectives, methods, or definitions – everything should be precise, pinpointing habitual safety-critical and management behaviours. Plus, it needs to be tailored to the individual company. It shouldn’t use processes that might be right for the business – no two companies’ working situations or cultures are exactly the same. The approach should provide tailored processes that identify and enable achievable, realistic targets that are integrated into the specific organisational philosophy and operating principles The key processes In summary, a model approach to safety culture, that provides the basis for long-term, sustainable success, needs to be based on four key parameters: visible levels of accountability; measures that have meaning and impact; genuine local management of behavioural risks; supervisors behaving as effective health and safety coaches. These should be based on measurable key performance indicators, to give real information and ensure accountability and ownership. These could include performance reports on daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly bases as required. There could be graphs, charts, checklists – all designed to give the clearest possible picture of what’s been achieved, what needs to be done, and how to secure it.
In short, a successful safety culture should be a continuous circle of measurement – feedback, positive reinforcement, and review. That’s the way to build an integrated culture that never dies. More articles from EEF Ltd/Woodland Grange: | 
