As true promoters of safety, management and senior management can be expected to have a regular and proactive presence on the shop floor.

For this specific function group, it should be evident that they refuse to make any concessions when it comes to safety, whether or not in the interest of the production results. To such an extent that they must fully meet any meaningful demand for safety resources and support.

Regardless of the fact that, from a legal point of view, this group bears ultimate responsibility for occupational safety in the workplace, line management can first and foremost be expected to set an impeccable example. As true safety ambassadors, we can expect them to coach their immediate supervisors in managing the correct safety behaviour in the workplace.

By doing so, the much-needed trust of the immediate supervisors in keeping line management informed of possible safety issues grows. The fact that line management creates the necessary preconditions for the team leaders to tackle safety challenges themselves is a first step towards collective safety ownership.

All too often, this is a highly underestimated function group, also when it comes to occupational safety. Direct managers can be expected to turn every safety meeting into an inspiring learning moment and to encourage the people in their team to report any unsafe situation immediately.

They are the first and also the most powerful lever to give direct feedback on the safety behaviour of their employees. This way, it is possible to continuously work on behavioural development, change and influence.

In a strong safety culture, operational employees are not passive objects but actively cooperating ones. This function group can mainly be expected to care not just for their own safetybut also for that of their colleagues. This obviously means that they must never look the other way and react immediately to unsafe actions.

Equally, they should be expected to report unsafe situations and even formulate proposals to improve safety at work.

If you thought that we’ve reached the end of the line by now, you are wrong.

What about the following groups?

Unfortunately, ‘They have nothing to do with occupational safety’ is a frequently heard statement and they themselves are usually the first to say so. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

Occupational safety and health is also manifestly an issue in the office, especially since ergonomic risks or falling and tripping are one of the most common causes of occupational accidents. Therefore, office workers also have an ambassadorial role to play, not least with regard to customers, visitors or other external parties.

This group can and should be expected to add value to your safety culture, not to devalue it. It is a matter of enforcement, and this should start during the contract negotiation phase.

Working on strengthening the safety behaviour of a specific function group within your organisation, for example of your direct managers, requires a completely different approach than working on the development of your safety culture.

Strengthening your safety culture is a matter of everything and everyone in your organisation. After all, safety culture is about the way in which your organisation as a whole deals with occupational safety and, by extension, with the well-being of its employees.

For the sake of clarity of the story, we start from the assumption that the questioner means the overall safety culture of his/her organisation.

Knowing your starting position is essential; there are many ways to do this accurately. We advise everyone to be very careful with the result of a quick scan for the following reasons:

– The result of a quick scan is the reflection of your personal opinion and as such, it is not representative of what is going on within your organisation as a whole.

– The result of most quick scans is based on a limited number of questions, which usually leaves a lot to be desired in terms of validity and reliability.

Measuring is useful and necessary, as long as the right things are measured correctly.

The question shows that the only yardstick used is Hudson & Parker’s maturity ladder.  Just to be clear: cultural maturity is only one way to look at your safety culture. Limiting yourself to this leads to one-sided and usually wrong conclusions. Compare it with the conclusion that an Olympic weightlifting champion has the potential to win the hundred-meter sprint…

“On top of that, a culture of security cannot be expressed in a single figure!”

This statement does not belong to me, but to Prof. D. Parker, co-developer of the famous maturity ladder. So, map out your safety culture in a ‘nuanced’ way. The following cultural aspects are all at least equally important, mainly because they complement and interpret each other.

>Your safety character profile

>Your cultural maturity – choose sufficient and relevant safety topics

>Your topic analyses, to indicate averages

>Position of your sociocultural variables

>The scores for the 5BI model (Five behavioural influencers – see also StepStones for safety model)

Let’s start with the concept of ‘safety culture’.

There are few misunderstandings in this respect: by analogy with Deal & Kennedy’s well-known statement regarding corporate culture (‘The way we do things around here’), we can state that safety culture can simply be described as ‘the way your organization deals with occupational safety’.

What makes a safety culture ‘a dime a dozen’ and what makes a safety culture a ‘world-class culture’?

The answer is simple: the number of hierarchical levels and the number of employees within each of those levels who play a lead role. By ‘playing a lead role’ we mean: showing safety ownership at all times. In other words: the number of employees, right across the organisation, who are responsible for their own occupational safety and that of all colleagues, contractors, suppliers and/or visitors. And without pass responsibility onto ‘the organisation’.

In this type of what is also called ‘high reliability’ organizations …

• everyone regards safety as a value
• everyone is always alert in expecting the unexpected
• everyone always perfectly understands what is expected of him/her
• everyone is always open to new ideas
• every employee wants to make a difference
• Employees believe that their own behaviour is the determining factor.
• all employees spontaneously watch over each other’s health and safety

Executives in particular …

• do not confine themselves to managing operations, but show authentic leadership
• see attitudes and behaviours of employees as a reflection of their own leadership

If only it were true… With such ill-considered statements, executives and/or senior managers completely ignore the peculiarities of the human brain and the way in which behaviour comes about.

Why is this so?

Usually, they unconsciously start from the classic but largely outdated behavioural theory that states that employees on the shop floor make a conscious and well-considered trade-off between the pros and cons of a certain behaviour and make their behavioural choice on the basis of this positive or negative balance. Moreover, it assumes that these choices, whether or not formalized in some procedure or work instruction, are seamlessly converted into perceptible safety behaviour.

If this were really the case, it would mean that every employee within the organisation would continuously rely on the energy-guzzling cognitive part of his or her brain for all his or her behavioural decisions. Something that no human being is capable of. After all, the most current scientific research states that 95 percent of human behaviour is fully automatically controlled by the ‘low energy consuming’ emotional part of the brain (e.g. Kahneman, Thaler, Cialdinni).