A clear and consistent safety culture in the workplace helps establish procedures and values for maintaining a safe work environment. Without this, many organizations find themselves falling short with their safety programs. Culture is defined as a shared set of common values, experiences, beliefs, and characteristics.
A safety culture is an organisational culture that places a high level of importance on safety beliefs, values and attitudes—and these are shared by the majority of people within the company or workplace. A positive safety culture can result in improved workplace health and safety (WHS) and organisational performance.
A good safety culture helps an organisation maintain safe operations. By having everyone, from operators to managers, take safety seriously, remaining watchful and avoiding compromises, means that operations are conducted in as safe a manner as reasonable, given the risk of the licence holders operation.
It not only protects workers from injury and illness, it can also lower injury/illness costs, reduce absenteeism and turnover, increase productivity and quality, and raise employee morale. In other words, safety is good for business. Plus, protecting workers is the right thing to do.