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January 29, 2015

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Climate change: framework for a safety culture

Cracked Earth Wildflowers Proposed BLM WildernessA positive safety culture brings measurable benefits to organisations, including a more engaged workforce and reduced accident rates. Jennifer Webster outlines the framework for an effective assessment of safety culture by testing the climate in organisations.

Developing a safety culture that supports good health and safety in an organisation is vital to ensure adequate control over risks.[1] A positive safety culture contributes to positive safety outcomes, directly impacting on accident rates as well as reputation and competitive edge. But how do organisations go about improving their safety culture to obtain these measurable benefits?

Safety culture is a leading indicator of safety performance, and this is determined by how individuals interact with and perceive their working environment. No organisation can afford to ignore the fact that not only do poor health and safety practices cost lives, they also cost money. According to figures published by HSE for 2013/14:

  • In the UK, 28.2 million days were lost due to work-related ill health or injury, and injuries and new cases of ill health resulting from current working conditions cost society an estimated £14.2bn.[2]
  • Globally, every year, 160 million people suffer from work-related diseases and there are an estimated 270 million fatal and non-fatal work-related accidents, resulting in 4 per cent of the world’s GDP lost.[3]

But the drivers for organisations to improve their safety culture are not solely to do with cost. The Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) reports that for the majority of organisations the recurring reason is that they care about their workforce and reputation as a healthy and safe place to work.

There are five really essential steps in any safety culture improvement programme: foundation, analyse, focus, act and evaluate.

Foundation
It’s essential for any sustainable safety culture improvement programme to have a firm foundation, and this starts with thorough forward-thinking preparation.

Whatever an organisation’s reasons for improving its safety culture, it will need to begin by understanding the current state of its safety culture as this will highlight areas for improvement and feed into the organisation’s action plan.

Organisations use a variety of methods to obtain this understanding. One such method currently in use by over 350 organisations worldwide is HSL’s Safety Climate Tool (SCT), an online survey to measure workers’, supervisors’ and managers’ perceptions across eight key factors.

Setting the safety culture assessment up correctly and preparing the ground for a programme of change demonstrates that an organisation has a long-term commitment to taking health and safety seriously, and is going beyond its minimum legal duty to ensure the safety of its workforce. It is important to ensure the improvement programme starts by:

  • Securing senior management commitment.
  • Setting up a steering group.
  • Developing a project plan and investing adequate resources to carry out the five steps and implement improvements.
  • Developing a communications/employee engagement strategy.

When working with organisations, HSL advises that they invest in planning and laying down firm foundations to run a safety culture assessment; this helps to engage with the workforce and achieve a high response rate. Approaches to planning, running assessments and acting on the results vary from straightforward checklists to more sophisticated project management tools that identify what needs to be done and when.

But what they all have in common is that the plans are SMART; specific, measurable, accurate, realistic and time bound. Others incorporate plan, do, check, act into their thinking and this works really well for organisations just starting their improvement journey, as it helps them think about: who they need to involve; what resources they will need; how they will communicate what they are doing; and what they will do with the outputs.

It helps to have established a clear and compelling vision for what an organisation thinks a good safety culture should look like. This makes it easier to explain the rationale to senior managers to get their support and commitment, and it helps to communicate consistent messages to employees about why the organisation wants them to provide their opinions and what it will do with the information when it is received.

It is not always easy to get senior management commitment. But time and again, HSL’s work has shown that when an organisation’s assessment and subsequent interventions have the full support of senior management, they are more successful. A simple statement of support from a CEO can have a powerful effect.

Worker engagement was a key element in the excellent safety record at the Olympic Park in 2012

Worker engagement was a key element in the excellent safety record at the Olympic Park in 2012

Senior management commitment was a critical success factor in ensuring that the London 2012 Olympic Games were the safest on record. Senior managers listened, supported and provided the resources to build a strong health and safety culture. They communicated what they did with the results and encouraged worker engagement at all levels.

As a result, when HSL carried out research on safety leadership at the Olympic Park during its decommissioning, their leaders and workforce consistently demonstrated that everyone was ‘walking the talk’ and health and safety was seen as everyone’s responsibility.

Some of the workers we talked to with many years’ experience in the construction industry found they were adopting safer working practices which they then took to other sites. Challenging unsafe behaviours when they saw them became just part of the way they did things.

Safety culture assessments have been run by some organisations without this level of commitment at the outset and they have been able to implement some localised interventions. But when the person driving the assessment or survey through, typically the health and safety manager, leaves, the initiative tends to lose its momentum.

Therefore, it’s important that organisations don’t do everything on their own, no matter how tempting it is. Far better to set up a small steering group to help with the planning and delegate tasks, or do what some organisations have done and use external consultants to act as a proxy team.

Analyse
Several sources of data, information and knowledge can be used to measure the current culture in an organisation. Running a tool like the HSL SCT is an easy, evidence-based way to gather employee opinions on the safety culture, providing an organisation with valuable data as well as increasing employee engagement. By analysing the results of the assessment, organisations will start to understand their strengths and target areas for improvement, and obtain data against which they can measure the future success of improvements.

Focus
Analysing the data should provide a broad indication of the underlying culture of the organisation and key areas to target. The next step is to discuss the results with employees and work with them to develop solutions that can be acted on. This can be done through employee engagement workshops. It is critical that employees and their representatives participate in this process as they:

  • Are often closest to the issues identified;
  • May know better what will improve safety performance; and
  • Are more likely to help ensure the success of any agreed actions if they have taken an active part in developing and agreeing solutions.

Act
At this stage, an organisation can now make evidence-based decisions which will form the basis of targeted action plans that focus resources on those areas that genuinely need attention, and those that will have most impact on improving safety performance.

Action planning also helps to identify the interventions that can be accomplished with the least amount of effort. Creating a positive safety culture is not something that can be achieved overnight.

However, organisations that can demonstrate early on that they have acted on at least some of the results appear to have a more engaged workforce and can help maintain the commitment of their senior management and the workforce over the longer term.

Evaluate
To ensure that the interventions are having maximum impact on improving safety performance, it is essential to evaluate the interventions and adjust them if necessary. How the process of change has been managed should also be evaluated to enhance the long-term culture change project plan.

What next?
It takes time to create a good health and safety culture. This framework is designed to help organisations carry out an effective assessment of their safety culture and to start the improvement process. Using external support can help organisations keep the momentum going, input targeted expertise and provide an objective viewpoint.

By working with many organisations, HSL has built up benchmarking data from over 98,000 responses and the figure is growing. It is very important for HSL that everything we do is evidencebased so we are also in the process of building up a series of case studies based on the experiences from organisations in our network, allowing us to pass on practical help and advice from the lessons they have learned to others.

Jennifer Webster is safety climate & behavioural change consultant at HSL

References:
1. Health and Safety Executive, 2007. Safety culture: a review of the literature. http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/hsl_pdf/2002/hsl02-25.pdf (accessed 15 December 2014)
2 . Health and Safety Executive, 2014. Health and Safety Executive Annual Statistics Report 2013/2014. http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overall/hssh1314.pdf (accessed 15 December 2014)
3 . International Labour Organisation, 2014 (accessed 15 December 2014 from http://bit.ly/151nnjU)

What makes us susceptible to burnout?

In this episode  of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.

We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.

stress

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