Working on your safety culture, how do you get started?
A few days ago, the prevention advisor of a big SME asked me the following question: “As a company, we want to work on strengthening our safety culture. How do we best tackle this? I have completed a quick scan on the internet which shows that our safety culture is at a reactive level…”.
This question deserves a nuanced answer, first of all because many prevention advisors struggle with this complex question. We would therefore like to highlight a few facets of it.
Start by determining the scope of your intentions
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.
Determine the entry level of your 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.
‘To measure is to know’ or ‘measure to know’?
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)
Make sure that the number of respondents in the survey is representative. Based on these measurement results, you will get a good and above all nuanced picture of your current safety culture. Then, by deciding in mutual consultation on which areas, at which level and within which time perspective your ambitions will be situated, you can decide which actions are necessary to close the gap between the existing and the intended situation.
In future blogs, we will delve deeper into these challenges.
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