Managing Risk: Understanding People and Process

3.1 Health and Safety Culture

What is meant by health and safety culture

A short way to put it: your safety culture is how you do your tasks when nobody is watching.

The safety culture of an organisation is the product of the values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and patterns of behaviour, held by individuals and groups, that decide how committed the organisation is to health and safety management and how skilled it is at it. Organisations with a positive safety culture share certain traits: communication built on mutual trust, a shared view that safety matters, and confidence that preventive measures work.

Good organisations plan for a positive culture. They welcome changes that improve procedures and involve both staff and management through consultation and communication. Problems are discussed in full and a solution is sought that everyone agrees to.

The link between safety culture and safety performance

An organisation's culture can influence safety results as much as its management system does. Safety culture is one part of the wider company culture.

Where the safety culture is strong and positive, most workers think and feel that health and safety is important. Policy is strong and leadership from the top is clear, because senior management holds this attitude and it runs through the whole organisation. Such an organisation is made up of competent people who hold firm safety values and put them into practice.

The HSE lists the key features of an effective culture:

• Management commitment. Commitment from the top raises motivation and concern for health and safety throughout the organisation. It shows in the share of resources (time, money, people) and support given to safety management, and in the status safety has compared with production, cost and so on. Active involvement by senior management is vital.
• Visible management. Managers must be seen to lead by example. Good managers appear regularly on the shop floor, talk about health and safety and show commitment through actions such as stopping production to settle an issue. Management must be seen as sincere. If it is not, employees will assume that commercial interests come first, and safety initiatives will be undermined.
• Good communication at all levels. In a positive culture, questions about OHS are part of everyday conversation. Management listens actively and takes what it hears seriously. Active participation by employees builds ownership of safety at every level and uses their unique knowledge of their own work, for example through workshops, risk assessments and plant design. In companies with a good culture, employees and managers tell the same story and safety is seen as a joint effort.

A weak or negative culture. Here most workers think and feel that health and safety is unimportant, and they are poorly educated about it. Safety-conscious workers are in the minority and may leave because they dislike the culture and feel unsafe. Direction and leadership from senior management are unclear, managers do not think about safety when they make decisions, and they put other priorities first. Management and staff tend to adopt only the minimum arrangements needed to comply with the law, and only under pressure, or may ignore the requirements altogether. Total disregard is unusual, but many organisations approach safety in a half-hearted way. Hazards and risks do not concern them, danger is accepted as normal, and the whole approach is unhealthy.

Summary notes for Element 3 · Cheat sheet · Glossary. A study aid, not published or endorsed by NEBOSH.