Safety Culture

An Innovative Leadership Approach

James Roughton, Nathan Crutchfield

• Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780123972170
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Health & Safety
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Current safety and risk management guidelines necessitate that organizations develop and formally manage their understanding and knowledge of the standards and protocols of risk management. The impact of communication and human performance on the identification and control of hazards and associated risk must be addressed in a structured manner. This core reference provides a complete guide to creating a comprehensive and effective safety culture.

Safety Culture is a reference for safety and risk professionals and a training text for corporate-based learners and students at university level. The book will keep safety and risk management professionals up-to-date and will provide the tools needed to develop consistent and effective organizational safety protocols.

• How to develop a foundation to improve the perception of safety, analyze the organizational culture and its impact on the safety management system, and review the importance of developing a influential network
• Provides a format for establishing goals and objectives, discusses the impact of leadership on the safety management system and the roles and responsibilities needed as well as methods to gain employee participation
• Tools to enhance the safety management system, the education and training of employees, how to assess the current safety management system, and the process of curation is introduced

Part 1

Laying the Foundation

Outline

Chapter 1 The Perception of Safety

Chapter 2 Analyzing the Organizational Culture

Chapter 3 Analyzing and Using Your Network

Chapter 4 Setting the Direction for the Safety Culture

Chapter 1

The Perception of Safety

Abstract

Perceptions can affect the sustaining and continued improvement of the safety culture. These perceptions are based not only on the current opinions about the role of safety management held by leadership and employees but include perceptions based on what has gone on in the past, how your predecessors managed themselves, and how safety-related criteria were communicated in style and message. Organizations are not static and are constantly in flux and change. Therefore, safety is not something that is static. Safety is an emergency property that is determined by an ever emerging set of organizational and environmental conditions. It is essential that you fully understand the environment you are in and how to approach and communicate with leadership and employees. To accomplish this goal, you must understand the current perception that your organization has about the role of safety. This chapter will help you to develop a personal working definition for “safety”, understand why perception is important for the safety culture, identify ways you may be perceived in the organization, and identify perceptions about safety and how to shape those perceptions.

Keywords

ANSI/ASSE Z590.3; Occupational hazards; Occupational risks; Organizational behavior; Organizational culture; Safety culture; Safety management system

Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.

—Wayne W. Dyer

Introduction

The development and sustaining of an organization’s safety culture requires a multi-disciplinary approach that entails understanding the work environment, perceptions about safety, compliance, basic safety management systems, human error performance, communications, etc. For a safety culture to be developed and sustained, the leadership team and employees must change their perception about safety itself and the management system.

Organizations are not static and are constantly in flux and change. Safety management desires stability and wants to build processes that are permanent and unchanging. This sets up an adversarial relationship.

Safety is not simple! It is complicated, as it is a complex network of many business skills and psychological and scientific interactions combined with internal and external resources. Safety management and a safety culture requires following a “Long, Hard, and Winding Road” (Pearse, Gallagher, & Bluff, 2001). Improving the safety culture is also dependent on your sphere of influence within the organization and how well networked you are into the organization.

The extent of safety-related information readily available from many resources (Internet, government, professional associations, media publications, etc.) has created an environment in which organizations cannot be excused for not knowing or finding content regarding safety-related issues. We have found through experience that we have shifted from being the sole primary information resource to expanding into researching, teaching, and mentoring how to deploy a safety management system and ensure safety information is utilized.

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

Ancient Chinese proverb

The need to shift from a loss-based safety process that uses injury data to drive decision-making to a risk-based approach that decreases the probability of severe loss has been advocated in safety management systems such as ANSI Z10-2012.

We believe in the need for the safety professional to not only be proficient in hazard and risk control, but to understand the impact of communications, social networking (not just the Internet), and the perception of safety when presenting a case for the safety culture to the leadership team.

When this chapter is completed, you should be able to:

• Develop a personal working definition for “Safety”.

• Discuss why perception is important for the safety culture.

• Identify ways you may be perceived in the organization.

• Identify perceptions about safety and shaping those perceptions.

Defining Safety

Let us start by covering an issue that impacts the safety culture, namely the definition of safety. The assumption is made that everyone understands the term “safety”, but that is not necessarily the case. If a safety culture is to be sustained or developed, a mutually agreed upon definition is needed for the term “safety”. While this may seem to be unnecessary, a second look shows that after all these years, a clear concise definition is still debated and discussed. If an organization is working with multiple definitions or vague concepts, then the potential for improving the safety culture is reduced.

Dictionary definitions for safety include:

• “Safety—(1) The quality of being safe; (2) freedom from danger or risk of injury”.

• “Safety: the condition of being safe from undergoing or causing hurt, injury, or loss”. (Safety, n.d.)

These definitions define safety in terms of itself and imply safety is something you know when you see it. They do nothing for determining latent hidden hazards that may be a high risk with potential that has not as yet been identified. A better definition is:

Relative freedom from danger, risk, or threat of harm, injury, or loss to personnel and/or property, whether caused deliberately or by accident.

(Safety, n.d.)

ANSI/ASSE Z590.3—2011 defines safety as “freedom from unacceptable risk” with risk defined as “An estimate of the probability of a hazard-related incident or exposure occurring”. Hazard is defined as “The potential for harm” (“Prevention through Design Guidelines for Addressing Occupational Hazards and Risks in Design and Redesign Processes”, 2012). These definitions from Z590 for hazard and risk allow for a relative level of risk acceptance as a practical matter. A higher risk can be acceptable as certain jobs or tasks retain an element of risk even after intense efforts are made to mitigate or control their risks. Examples range from firemen, police, astronauts, race car drivers, stuntmen/women, and so forth where the risk is considered acceptable by society to achieve a goal or necessary or desired activity. High risk must be evaluated and controlled to the degree possible to ensure all feasible protective devices and procedures are effective. We discuss the concepts of risk perception in Chapter 9, “Risk Perception—Defining How to Identify Personal Responsibility” and the concepts for risk management in Chapter 10, “Risk Management Principles”.

Lesson Learned # 1

A colleague and risk control consultant, William Montante, has asked supervisors and managers over a number of years to define safety in supervisor training classes and presentations. He cites William W. Lowrance from “Of Acceptable Risk” (Lowrance, 1976) that “much of the widespread confusion about the nature of safety…would be dispelled if the meaning of the terms safety were clarified”. Lowrance’s definition for safety is “A thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable” (Lowrance, 1976). “Safety is that state of being when risk and the hazards derived from it are judged acceptable or in control” (Montante, 2006). The issue of defining safety is not new!

Montante has been given dozens of definitions for safety. In an article for Professional Safety (Montante, 2006), Montante listed responses from 130 safety leaders within one organization. The definitions he received include:

• Preventing accidents or injuries;

• Freedom from harm or injury;

• Being safe;

• Being aware of your surroundings;

• Not getting hurt;

• It is number one;

• Following procedures and rules;

• It is a state of being;

• Looking out for each other;

• Complying with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA);

• Going home the same way you came to work.

Montante states, “simply put, safety is no more and no less than a condition or judgment of acceptable control over hazards and risk inherent to what one is doing at a point in time or chooses to do at some future point. That state of being can be personal or a reflection of the business culture (our italics)” (Montante, 2006).

To better align a definition of safety with an emphasis on hazard and associated risk, Montante suggests that safety be defined more in terms of hazard control: “Replace the traditional mantras of ‘Safety first’, ‘Think safety’, and ‘Safety is your responsibility’…Strive for the personal and organizational mastery where each ‘hazard control manager’ can state with confidence and certainty that s/he intimately knows safety and how s/he and the company manage control” (Montan...