Implementing a True Safety Culture

I have found that there are a lot of companies who talk about safety within the organization.  There are even those companies who spend enormous sums of money trying to improve safety performance through elaborate safety programs, incorporating increased inspections, training, and enforcement activities, only to become frustrated with the results.  Safety must be an obvious priority to the people in leadership positions and shared by everyone in the organization at all levels. If senior management ignores safety, everyone else will too, regardless of what the safety manager says or does.  Safety must become the top priority in every level of the organization with accountability.  It must be an on-going process of continuous improvement, integrating safety into every task so that safety becomes a way of life within the organization.  Safety cannot be viewed as an add-on or as something extra that must be done by workers and managers. Everyone within the organization must look upon safety as a core value.  That of which is inherent in every part of the operation.

Most often production excellence is highly rewarded and stiff financial penalties are imposed if the work is not completed on schedule, increasing the pressure and forcing unsafe situations.  These types of management system deficiencies, favoring production and schedules over safety, regardless of the risks taken, will never create a safety culture.  Do some of these conditions exist in your company?

If a company is to develop and build an effective safety culture, it requires a change in the way safety is perceived throughout the organization.  A company needs to learn where they are, before they can decide where they are headed.  This requires clearly defining the existing culture, developing a strategic action plan for changing the culture, implementation of the changes, (measuring future progress as changes are implemented) and then change management process.

In summary, having the very best written safety policies and procedures in a binder will never create a safety culture. Merely hiring a safety manager to implement a safety program will not work either.  If a company is to achieve safety excellence they must work continuously to shape a culture of excellence, making safety a key corporate objective, requiring the development of safety benchmarks and reviewing them regularly, addressing safety in corporate meetings, and evaluating managers on their safety effectiveness.

How is safety perceived in your company?