Creating a positive workplace health and safety culture at work
What is a safety culture? Whilst there isn’t a particular definition of ‘safety culture’, the Chernobyl disaster was the catalyst for safety culture’s birth. It was first defined in the International Nuclear Safety Group’s 1988 report as “an organisational atmosphere where safety and health is understood to be, and is accepted as, the number one priority”, and refers to the manner in which workplace safety is managed.
A safety culture is said to ‘permeate all aspects of the work environment’, and ‘is reflected in a level of awareness and accountability for safety on the part of every individual in an organisation.’ The three basic elements of positive safety culture can be summarised as:
- Working practices and rules for effectively controlling hazards.
- A positive attitude towards risk management and compliance with the control processes.
- The capacity to learn from accidents, near misses and safety performance indicators and bring about continual improvement.
A positive safety culture
A prerequisite for a positive safety culture is good information. A workforce needs to be willing to be transparent when it comes to the steady flow of information, being prepared to report their mistakes, near misses and accidents. A strong health and safety culture is the result of:
- Positive workplace attitudes
- Involvement of all members of the workforce
- Mutual, meaningful, and measurable safety and health improvement goals
- Policies and procedures that serve as reference tools, rather than obscure rules
- Personnel training at all levels within the organisation
- Responsibility and accountability throughout the organisation
Assessing your safety climate
If you are unsure whether your health and safety culture needs improving, assessing your current safety climate is key. Safety climate surveys describe an organisation’s culture using similar factors as mentioned above.
It is important to note that you cannot achieve a health and safety culture change quickly, and it is an evolution of a long duration of time. Unless senior managers are proactive about pursuing a change, a culture change programme is unlikely to succeed. If you try to change a culture too quickly, you may just generate resistance to it.
When the aforementioned criteria is consistently aimed at accident reduction, a positive workplace safety and health culture is created.