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Safety culture is the element of organizational culture which is concerned with the maintenance of safety and compliance with safety standards.

Safety culture refers to the enduring value, priority and commitment placed on safety by every individual and every group at every level of the organisation.

Safety culture describes the way in which safety is managed within an organisation. It relates to the beliefs and attitudes, values, and perceptions that employees share regarding safety in the organisation.

Safety culture refers to the disciplinary and biopolitical technology of organizational control that aims to connect individuals' conduct with organizational norms to prevent accidents.

Safety Culture is the way safety is perceived, valued and prioritised in an organisation. It reflects the real commitment to safety at all levels in the organisation. It has also been described as "how an organisation behaves when no one is watching". "The way we do things here"

A culture of safety describes the core values and behaviors that come about when there is collective and continuous commitment by organizational leadership, managers, and healthcare workers to emphasize safety over competing goals (ANA, 2016).

Safety culture is the sum of what an organization is and does in the pursuit of safety (TJC, 2021).

The safety culture of an organization is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organization’s health and safety management (Lee, 1996).

Descriptions of Safety Culture

• Collective reflection of the perception, attitudes, and shared experiences of the safety culture

• Your smaller work unit or “microcosm” should reflect the organization’s positive safety culture

Attributes include:

• Emphasis on quality

• Teamwork

• Leadership support

• Communication

• Non-punitive response to errors

• Perception of organizational commitment

• Work design

• Staffing and workload

Resources (Gershon et al., 2004; Stone et al., 2005).

Overlap and Differences Between Safety Culture and Safety Climate

The terms ”safety culture” and “safety climate” are often used interchangeably.

• Safety culture is a broad term encompassing overall organizational culture, values, and actions.

• Safety climate is a narrower term focusing on staff’s current perceptions about supervision, resources, and policies that support how safety practices are monitored and managed through trust and transparency (TJC, 2021).

Safety Culture is not something you get or buy; it is something an organisation acquires as a product of the combined effects of Organizational Culture, Professional Culture and, often, National Culture. Safety Culture can therefore be positive, negative or neutral. Its essence is in what people believe about the importance of safety, including what they think that their peers, superiors and leaders really believe about safety as a priority.

Why is Safety Culture Important?

Safety Culture can have a direct impact on safe performance. If someone believes that safety is not really important, even temporarily, then workarounds, cutting corners, or making unsafe decisions or judgements will be the result, especially when there is a small perceived risk rather than an obvious danger. However, a typical and understandable first response to Safety Culture is:

"We already have an Safety Management System, why do we need Safety Culture too?"

A Safety Management System  (SMS) represents an organisation’s competence in the area of safety, and it is important to have an SMS and competent safety staff to execute it. But such rules and processes may not always be followed, particularly if people in the organisation believe that, for example, ‘moving traffic’ is the real over-riding priority, even if risks are occasionally taken. Where would people get such an idea? The answer, ultimately is from their peers, but more so their superiors, including the person at the helm of an organisation, namely the CEO. To ensure the required commitment to safety, organisational leaders must show that safety is their priority.

So, organisations need both a SMS and a healthy Safety Culture in order to achieve acceptable safety performance. But with aviation, there is the problem that it is generally very safe, with serious accident outcomes occurring only rarely. This means that almost all organisations will assume they are already safe. There may be few incident reports, and these may be of low severity; safety cases may be well in hand for current operations and future changes. Real aircraft accidents are usually complex and multiple causes can be identified, so it is not always easy to see them coming. Even harder to see are contributing situations which affect an organisation's ‘forward vision’ in safety. For example, under-reporting of incidents due to fears of recrimination or prosecution; people running risks because they believe that is what they are supposed to do; different sub-groups not sharing information due to a lack of mutual trust; etc.

If you want to remain safe, you have to know the realities of safety in your organisation

How could a CEO be sure if such undermining factors were evident in their organisation? By asking their directors? By touring the workforce and asking? The alternative, and more robust approach, is to carry out A Safety Culture Survey which attempts to 'measure' Safety Culture in a way which can be repeated subsequently for comparative purposes.

How do You Measure Safety Culture?

Safety Culture, like culture, is sometimes hard to see from the inside. It is like a fish swimming in water - the fish does not really think too much about the water. Therefore, Safety Culture surveys, in most industries, are usually a combination of internal and external perspectives: the ‘outsider’s view is used to help make objective the insider’s viewpoint. That being said, however, it is useful to have a ‘champion’ inside the organisation who can act as an interface between the survey findings and the staff at all levels. This champion is typically the Safety Director or Safety Manager of the organisation.

A typical Safety Culture Survey might proceed as shown below:

Safety Culture Survey

The survey process must lead to clear and concise actions being developed by the organisation to address any deficiencies identified. These may related to either particular employee functional groups or to specific business or operational processes.

The overall timings of the approach are illustrated below:

A typical of Safety Culture includes the components illustrated below:

Safety Culture components

What Does Safety Culture Deliver

An optimum Safety Culture will deliver a clearer and more comprehensive picture of operational risk, one that takes in all aspects of the activities of the organisation. This is possible through the achievement of a better information flow and the maintenance of an effective dialogue within the organisation about safety performance as priority.

Why Safety Culture Awareness matters

As well as the ‘macro’ effects already described, a focus on knowing what the level of safety culture is and striving to achieve a level which is adequate brings a better focus on incident recording, incident analysis, staff training and the integration of maintenance safety and operational safety priorities.

Safety Culture must be seen as a key business target so that the people at the ‘sharp end’ feel empowered to act in the interests of safety in the knowledge that the management will support them. This enhancement of mutual trust is invariably accompanied by a positive impact on productivity.

Any doubts about the validity of a Safety Culture Survey as a means to benchmark organisational culture can be resolved, if resources allow, by carrying out two independent surveys in parallel, which in the past has produced comparable results from both surveys.

Each organisation is different and each will also have its own national culture as a business environment, so both the methods and the opportunities for achieving organisational safety culture will vary. However, the insights achieved by regular measurement of safety culture and the use of the results to identify where improvement effort must be targeted is essential.

Safety culture, in formal social-scientific terms, is an object of knowledge. As such, it is part of a larger discursive practice of accident prevention, together with other objects like technical failure and human error. In the last three decades, safety culture has increasingly become the focus of attention of many scientific disciplines, such as anthropology , sociology, psychology, management, and engineering, in order to explain organisational safety issues. It follows a tendency toward more ‘socio-technical’ and ‘systemic’ oriented approaches to safety. In part, this is a result of the political need to explain large organisational accidents combined with an a priori knowledge on organisations. Safety culture has attained an important status in the discourse of accident prevention, since it is used as explanation for accidents (e.g. Starbuck and Farjoun, 2005) and safety management performance of organisations (e.g. Hudson, 2007).

To reduce the rate of incidents, we need a good understanding of:

• why accidents happen

• what really causes them

• what kind of organisational culture can help to prevent them

It’s important to recognise that while individual behaviour is influenced by many factors, the behaviour is an emergent property of the organisation. The safety culture of an organisation has a big impact on the actions of its employees and how seriously they take safety. Poor safety culture has been linked to many incidents in the maritime industry.

Why is organisational culture important?

Culture can be best understood as "the way we do things around here". Culture forms the context within which people judge the appropriateness of their behaviour. An organisation's culture will influence human behaviour and human performance at work. Poor safety culture has contributed to many major incidents and personal injuries. 

An organisation's culture can have as big an influence on safety outcomes as the safety management system. 'Safety culture' is a subset of the overall organisational or company culture. Many companies talk about 'safety culture' when referring to the inclination of their employees to comply with rules or act safety or unsafely. However we find that the culture and style of management is even more significant, for example a natural, unconscious bias for production over safety, or a tendency to focus on the short-term and being highly reactive. Success normally comes from good leadership, good worker involvement and good communications.

A Safety Climate survey provides a snapshot of the organisation's culture in relation to safety. Questionnaires designed to measure the culture of the organisation tend to focus on employee perceptions and behaviours. The Book - Building A Culure Of safety Practical Guide Book - has tools that have been carefully designed by scientists to assess the attitudes of individuals within an organisation towards health and safety issues to deliver an objective measure of your safety culture.

The largest influences on safety culture are:

• Management commitment and style

• Employee involvement

• Training and competence

• Communication

• Compliance with procedures

• Organisational learning

Therefore, this key topic contains links to three other issues:

1. Leadership

2. Behavioral Safety

3. Learning Organisations

Key principles on organisational culture

• A culture change process can take several years

• A good starting place is to measure your existing safety culture perhaps by using a safety climate tool or more informally by talking to your workforce (proportionate to the hazards and risks in your workplace). This can help you target weak areas within your organisation's culture

• As a first pass you could make use of the questions in the Human Factors Toolkit with your employees

• Remember that any set of measurements is only a starting point. It is important to take action on the findings of any measurement and to feedback the findings to your employees. Organisations have found it beneficial to repeat measurements to track progress

• Organisations have had very positive results from focusing on specific issues such as safety leadership, competence or procedures

• Many organisations use third parties to help measure and change their culture. It is important to retain ownership of the process and work in partnership, and acquire the knowledge and skills to continue the work independently

• One common mistake is to focus on the staff levels below the manager who initiates the work. Senior managers should be prepared to have their own perceptions and behaviours examined and challenged

Hudson’s 5 levels of safety culture

Pathological

Who cares as long as we’re not caught.

No one cares about health and safety and are only driven by the threat of punishment.

Reactive

Safety is important. We do a lot every time there is an accident.

Safety is only taken seriously when things go wrong.

Calculative

We have systems in place to manage hazards.

There is a focus on data collection and higher analysis regarding safety. Higher numbers of audits take place. The information is not always shared in a useful manner.

Proactive

Safety leadership and values drive continuous improvement

Everyone who words for the organisation is engaged in its safety. The organisation recognises the value of continuous improvement.

Generative

Health and safety is how we do business around here.

The organisation sets high standards and expects to exceed them. Accidents, incidents and near misses are used for learning. Time is invested in continuous learning for all. There is an understanding that mistakes are inevitable and so preparation is key.

Reaching any of the higher levels on the ladder relies on commitment from managers and all seafarers.

Several individual, environmental and organisational factors can influence our perception of risk and risk-taking behaviour. 


The factors that can affect our perception

Organisational, environmental and individual factors work together to affect our perception of risk and risk taking.

Organisational factors

• Safety culture.
• Organisational culture.
• Safety leadership.

Environmental or situational factors

• Peer pressure.
• Routine violations.

Individual factors

• Knowledge.
• Mental health and physical wellbeing.

Culture Of Compliance Compared to Culture of Continious Improvement

Culture of compliance

While a culture of compliance is certainly better than a culture of non-compliance, rules and regulations only define the minimum standards that should be met. In safety-critical organisations, new risks can arise at any moment.

Culture of continual improvement

An organisational culture that values continual improvement should constantly be seeking out information and ideas to improve safety onboard, to make risks in the working environment as low as reasonably practicable.

Continuous improvement means that:

• Scenarios are anticipated and planned for in advance
• Fewer emergency responses are needed as proactive management is in place
• Complacency is reduced because risks are continuously monitored and new ways of dealing with things are considered

Measurement is an important step in any management process and forms the basis of continual improvement. If measurement is not carried out correctly, the effectiveness of the health and SMS is undermined and there is no reliable information on how well the health and safety risks are controlled.

Safety officials should be given relevant information such as industry guidance as well as:

• Findings of the risk assessment and measures for protection in place
• Information on any other factors affecting the health and safety of those working on the ship
• Statistical information that needs to be considered when conducting risk assessments

Learning Culture

Safety culture is a set of ways of doing and thinking that is widely shared by the employees of an organisation in the context of managing the most significant risks associated with its activities.

Safety culture refers to the interaction between the requirements of the Safety Management System (SMS), how people make sense of them, based on their attitudes, values and beliefs, and what they actually do, as seen in decisions and behaviours.

Changing Organizational Culture