Safety culture

Safety culture is the element of organizational culture which is concerned with the maintenance of safety and compliance with safety standards. It is informed by the organization's leadership and the beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to risks within the organization, workplace or community. 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.
A good safety culture can be promoted by senior management commitment to safety, realistic practices for handling hazards, continuous organisational learning, and care and concern for hazards shared across the workforce. Beyond organisational learning, individual training forms the foundation from which to build a systemic safety culture.

History

The Chernobyl disaster highlighted the importance of safety culture and the effect of managerial and human factors on safety performance. The term "safety culture" was first used in INSAG's "Summary Report on the Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident", where safety culture was described as:
Since then, a number of definitions of safety culture have been published. The U.K. Health and Safety Commission developed one of the most commonly used definitions of safety culture:
"The product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation’s health and safety management".
"Organisations with a positive safety culture are characterized by communications founded on mutual trust, by shared perceptions of the importance of safety and by confidence in the efficacy of preventive measures."
The Cullen Report into the Ladbroke Grove rail crash saw safety culture as "the way we typically do things around here"; this would imply that every organisation has a safety culture – just some a better one than others. The concept of 'safety culture' originally arose in connection with major organisational accidents, where it provides a crucial insight into how multiple organisational barriers against such accidents can be simultaneously ineffective: "With each disaster that occurs our knowledge of the factors which make organisations vulnerable to failures has grown. It has become clear that such vulnerability does not originate from just ‘human error’, chance environmental factors or technological failures alone. Rather, it is the ingrained organisational policies and standards which have repeatedly been shown to predate the catastrophe."
The safety culture of an organization cannot be created or changed overnight; it develops over time as a result of history, work environment, the workforce, health and safety practices, and management leadership: "Organizations, like organisms, adapt". An organization's safety culture is ultimately reflected in the way safety is addressed in its workplaces. In reality an organization's safety management system is not a set of policies and procedures on a bookshelf, but how those policies and procedures are implemented into the workplace, which will be influenced by the safety culture of the organization or workplace. The UK HSE notes that safety culture is not just an issue of shopfloor worker attitudes and behaviours "Many companies talk about ‘safety culture’ when referring to the inclination of their employees to comply with rules or act safety or unsafely. 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."
Since the 1980s, a large amount of safety culture research has left the concept largely ill-defined. Within the literature there are a number of varying definitions of safety culture with arguments for and against the concept. Two of the most prominent and most-commonly used definitions are those given above from the International Atomic Energy Agency and from the UK Health and Safety Commission. However, there are some common characteristics shared by other definitions. Some characteristics associated with safety culture include the incorporation of beliefs, values and attitudes. A critical feature of safety culture is that it is shared by a group. Creating such a culture in new domains can be especially challenging.
When defining safety culture some authors focus on attitudes, where others see safety culture being expressed through behaviours and activities. The safety culture of an organization can be a critical influence on human performance in safety-related tasks and hence on the safety performance of the organization. Many proprietary and academic methods claim to assess safety culture, but few have been validated against actual safety performance. 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 have been examined against company incident rates.

Broken safety cultures

Although there is some uncertainty and ambiguity in defining safety culture, there is no uncertainty over the relevance or significance of the concept. Mearns et al. stated that "safety culture is an important concept that forms the environment within which individual safety attitudes develop and persist and safety behaviours are promoted". With every major disaster, considerable resources are allocated to identify factors that might have contributed to the outcome of the event. Consideration of the considerable detail revealed by inquiries into such disasters is invaluable in identifying generic factors that "make organisations vulnerable to failures". From such inquiries, a pattern emerges; organizational accidents are not a result of randomly coinciding "operator error" or chance environmental or technical failures alone. Rather, the disasters are a result of a breakdown in the organization's policies and procedures that were established to deal with safety, and the breakdown flows from inadequate attention being paid to safety issues. In the UK, investigations into incidents such as the sinking of the MS Herald of Free Enterprise passenger ferry, the Kings Cross underground station fire and the Piper Alpha oil platform explosion raised awareness of the effect of organisational, managerial and human factors on safety outcomes, and the decisive effect of 'safety culture' on those factors. In the US, similar issues were found to underlie the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, subsequent investigation of which identified that cultural issues had influenced numerous "flawed" decisions on behalf of NASA and Thiokol management that had contributed to the disaster. 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."
From public enquiries it has become evident that a broken safety culture is responsible for many of the major process safety disasters that have taken place around the world over the past 20 years or so. Typical features related to these disasters are where there had been a culture of:

"Profit before safety", where productivity always came before safety, as safety was viewed as a cost, not an investment.
"Fear", so that problems remained hidden as they are driven underground by those trying to avoid sanctions or reprimands.
"Ineffective leadership", where blinkered leadership and the prevailing corporate culture prevented the recognition of risks and opportunities leading to wrong safety decisions being made at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.
"Non-compliance" to standards, rules and procedures by managers and the workforce.
"Miscommunication", where critical safety information had not been relayed to decision-makers and/ or the message had been diluted.
"Competency failures", where there were false expectations that direct hires and contractors were highly trained and competent.
"Ignoring lessons learned", where safety critical information was not extracted, shared or enforced.

"Tough guy" attributes like unwillingness to admit ignorance, admit mistakes, or ask for help can undermine safety culture and productivity by interfering with exchange of useful information. 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. After a number of Korean Air crashes, and particularly after the Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509 crash, a December 1999 review found that a culture of overly strong hierarchy prevented subordinates from speaking up in safety-critical situations. The airline's safety record later improved considerably.

Ideal safety cultures

has suggested that safety culture consists of five elements:

An informed culture.
A reporting culture.
A learning culture.
A just culture.
A flexible culture.

Reason 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. his requires a constant high level of respect for anything that might defeat safety systems and ‘not forgetting to be afraid’. Complex systems with defence-in-depth become opaque to most if not all of their managers and operators. 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. It is very dangerous to think that an organization is safe because no information is saying otherwise, but it is also very easy. An organisation that underestimates danger will be insufficiently concerned about poor working conditions, poor working practices, poor equipment reliability, and even identified deficiencies in the defences-in-depth: the plant is still safe ‘by massive margins’, so why rock the boat? Hence, without conscious efforts to prevent it, complex systems with major hazards are both particularly vulnerable to a poor safety culture.
E. Scott Geller has written of a "total safety culture" achieved through implementing applied behavioral techniques.
The importance of considering supply chains or supply networks in establishing a safety culture has been addressed by the Business Leaders' Health and Safety Forum in New Zealand and CSR Europe's Portal for Responsible Supply Chain Management. Rob Handfield notes an example of the role of BP's procurement team in sourcing vendors and placing orders to respond to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, commenting that the company's supply chain team " everything that is humanly possible to stop the oil, and clean up the mess".