What exactly is meant by 'safety culture' and how can you build the right one for your organisation? Neil and Teresa Budworth explain.

First, it is important to note is that an organisation's safety culture can be positive or negative: it can serve to sustain and improve performance in health and safety, or it can undermine efforts to make those improvements.  This is best illustrated by an example.  Consider a factory or a construction site where 90% of the employees do not wear the personal protective equipment which is mandatory on the site.  A new employee is extremely unlikely to adopt a behaviour that is different from the majority.  The fact is, on that site the behaviour of the employees is directly or indirectly supported by the management of the site through their action or inaction.  Then think about a similar site where 99% of the employees wear the mandatory personal protective equipment.  In this case, a new employee is extremely unlikely not to wear the equipment as again the natural behaviour would be to comply with the prevailing culture.  That is, people generally adapt to ‘the way we do it around here’.

The question really is - how can you create a positive safety culture so that working safely becomes 'the way we do things around here'?

Culture is influenced by the attitudes, perceptions, competence and patterns of behaviour of the people on site.  These elements all form part of the overall culture of the organisation.  Changing culture does mean addressing a number of these elements simultaneously in order to achieve a shared perception of the importance of health and safety. For example, efforts to change attitudes to achieve safer behaviour will be wasted unless the appropriate equipment is available and staff have been trained to use it in order to complete a task safely

Focusing on these issues initially can be helpful in developing a positive safety culture. However, the single most important determinant of success in developing such a culture is the quality of safety leadership.  The fact is that the leaders of an organisation define what the overriding objectives and goals are, where resource is placed, and what behaviours and outcomes are rewarded - and by doing this, determine the safety culture of the organisation.

Why is safety leadership critical?

In the recently released HSE Strategy , there is considerable emphasis on the role of strong leadership in driving health and safety in the workplace.  The consequences of lack of leadership are readily apparent.  Virtually every investigation into a major accident has highlighted a failure to manage health and safety effectively as one of the causes or contributory factors.  The inquiries into Three Mile Island , Chernobyl, Piper Alpha , and the Esso Longford gas plant explosion , all found that failures at managerial levels were at least as important as technical failure and human error in causing the accidents.

Directors and Board Members set the values of the organisation and determine whether safety is a priority.

Securing excellence in health and safety performance

Pre-dating the launch of the HSE’s strategy, the Institute of Directors and the HSE jointly developed and published guidance for Directors and Board Members on embedding health and safety excellence within their organisations.

Based on this guidance, the essential principles for excellence are:

• Strong and active leadership from the top
• Worker involvement
• Assessment and review
• identifying and managing health and safety risks
• accessing (and following) competent advice
• monitoring, reporting and reviewing performance.

Strong and active leadership

The HSE commissioned the University of Aberdeen to undertake research into the impact of leadership at different levels in the organisation on workplace safety.   For senior managers the key factors and values identified in research as having a positive impact on workplace safety were:

• Commitment to safety programmes, policies and procedures
• Resources given to safety
• Safety seen as integral to competitiveness and profitability
• Perceived importance of statutory compliance
• Transformational leadership style
• Trusting relationships with subordinates.

The issue of leadership style is being considered further in a new research project on senior managers’ safety leadership in the oil and gas industry sponsored by the Energy Institute.  Their preliminary literature review  points to a correlation between leaders with transformational styles and lower injury rates and the perception by their subordinates of a high commitment to health and safety.

Transformational leaders demonstrate their commitment to health and safety by ensuring that it is a value reflected in all of their decisions, actions and communications.  It is obviously important that the health and safety ramifications of investment in new plant, premises, processes or products are taken into account before decisions are made, but such decisions can also be an opportunity to innovate and strive for higher standards, and to communicate the importance of safety in the process.

Worker Involvement

Leadership by itself is not enough.  Leaders need to establish systems to deliver great health and safety at the shop floor. Leaders need to recognise their role in engaging the active participation of workers in improving health and safety.  The accepted models of health and safety best practice all have one thing in common: they recognise that to build a sustainable culture and to deliver world class health and safety performance, an organisation needs the active participation of its workforce.  The best form of participation is a partnership for prevention, where workers and their representatives are involved in identifying and tackling potential or actual problems, rather than being informed only after decisions have already been made. Those working within a particular environment are likely to have a greater knowledge and understanding of it. Involving everyone engaged in a work activity, whether a manager, employee or contractor, means that they all participate in managing the risks associated with it.

Effective and sustainable worker involvement requires careful planning and implementation. There is no ‘one size fits all’ model for involving workers, and it is necessary to be flexible to the needs and the evolving culture of the organisation. The competence of the workforce should also not be neglected. A structured approach to managing competence is particularly important in high-hazard industries.

Assessment and review

A great culture and excellent delivery depend on a clear sense of direction. Without a clear understanding of the actions that need to be taken to improve health and safety, a huge amount of effort can be misdirected.  Competent safety and health practitioners help to prioritise and target resources effectively, keep up-to-date with the latest legal developments and understand how best to comply with both the law and best practice in an organisation.

Making progress is one thing; making sure that it is actually in the right direction is another.  The leaders in an organisation need measures so that they know that the actions they are taking are having the desired effect.  The Baker Report and the CSB Report both identified that the BP Board was receiving no assurance on the status of safety-critical plant and processes.  Their information on the health and safety state of the company was the lagging and reactive measure of personal injury accidents.  This means that they we not looking at the things that would tell them if critical safety issues were improving or deteriorating.  Leaders need to have information on the health and safety issues that are relevant to their company.  Ideally these should be a mixture of leading indicators (those things that monitor systems which would prevent an accident) and lagging indicators (how many accidents and incidents have actually occurred.)

The advantage of using leading indicators is that actions can be taken to alter the course of safety performance.  If an indicator predicts poor performance, it is not necessary to wait to see if the prediction is correct (this would not be managing safety) - i.e. changes can be implemented to increase the probability of good safety performance.  

The concept of leading indicators is used in the management of many issues, not just safety.  Many senior management teams use a process of identifying Key Performance Indicators which reflect the Critical Success Factors for their business.  Leading indicators of safety performance are analogous to these KPIs measuring progress against plans in other areas of the business.  They are also a familiar concept to businesses using the six sigma quality management philosophy.

Recent work by Eon has also correlated leading indicators of their safety performance, including benchmarking audit scores and safety climate measures, with their lagging indicators, i.e. accident incidence rates. 

Figure 1 Correlation between Leading and Lagging Indicators of Performance within Eon (Europe)

Where managers and others report on and are held accountable for their safety performance, it becomes a shared value.

Conclusions

The safety culture of an organisation is influenced by a number of factors, but the single most important factor is the value placed on health and safety by its leaders. The Health and Safety Executive features leadership as one of the key areas in their new strategy for this very reason.  

The most powerful action a leader can take in relation to setting the health and safety standard is to demonstrate active commitment to health and safety – that is, commitment so strong that it’s ‘felt’ by the workforce and cannot be doubted. The management of health and safety is not a passive issue; it requires active intervention by senior managers. The good news is that actions taken to improve health and safety standards and culture within a business will almost certainly improve productivity and profitability as well.

References

1  Health and Safety Executive The Health and Safety of Great Britain:  Be part of the solution http://www.hse.gov.uk/strategy/index.htm

2  Kemeny, J. G., & United States. President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island. (1979). Reports of the president's commission on the accident at three mile island. Washington, D.C.: The Commission: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

3  Cullen, H. L. (1990). The public inquiry into the Piper Alpha disaster (Report to the Parliament by the Secretary of State for Energy by Command of Her Majesty Vols. 1 and 2). London: HMSO.

4  Hopkins, A. (2000) Lessons from Longford: The Esso Gas Plant Explosion. Sydney: CCH Australia.

5  The role of managerial leadership in determining workplace safety outcomes Prepared by University of Aberdeen for the Health and Safety Executive 2003 RESEARCH REPORT 044 HSE Books

6  Influence from the top: senior managers and safety leadership H. Reid, R. Flin and K. Mearns University of Aberdeen and R. Bryden, Royal Dutch Shell prepared for presentation at the 2008 SPE International Conference on Health, Safety, and Environment in Oil and Gas Exploration and Production held in Nice, France, 15–17 April 2008.

Neil Budworth is a Past President of the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. Teresa Budworth is Chief Executive of NEBOSH, the National Examinations Board in Occupational Safety and Health.

www.iosh.co.uk

www.nebosh.org.uk

Neil Budworth is the Corporate Health and Safety Manager for E.ON in the UK he is a visiting professor in occupational safety and health in the department of Human Sciences at Loughborough University  and is a Past President of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH). Neil has worked as a health and safety advisor in the utility, chemical, engineering and printing sectors.  Neil has also been involved in various government committees, including the Continuous Improvement Programme Action Group.

Teresa Budworth is a Chartered Safety and Health Practitioner and Fellow of IOSH.  During a 29 year career in health and safety, she has specialised in safety consultancy; working with a number of Boards of Directors on implementing safety governance within large and diverse organisations. Her work on competence, education and training culminated in her appointment as Chief Executive of NEBOSH; the National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health, in 2006.  She is a visiting lecturer in Occupational Health at the University of Warwick’s Medical School