What is a Proactive Safety Culture?
Safety culture is today a core element that a company has to focus on, reinforce, and clarify for all its employees, when this company aims at improving its safety performance. Safety culture influences safety performances within the company, positively or negatively. Are workers aware of safety-related issues? Do they all act in the same safe way? Do they share same behaviors, values and mind-set when it comes to safety? Do they do their job the “same way around here”? Safety culture of a company therefore impacts the way safety is perceived and dealt with during operations.
Proactivity can be defined as acting in advance to deal with an expected activity, operation, change or difficulty.
Any company wishing to promote a “Proactive Safety Culture” will therefore plan operations, discuss and assess hazards and risks prior to taking actions, enhance safe operations among workers, facilitate these operations to be performed in the same and aligned way: the safest way. Always! Without any compromise!
Safety culture and safety performance
Improving safety performance is a must for all companies. Behavior-based safety study from 1998 (“Critical success factors for behavior-based safety” J.H. Hidley) showed that companies successful in safety are also successful in operational performances.
Same study also concluded that the most important factor contributing to the proactive safety culture is the quality of safety leadership employees are showing while performing their daily activities. Safety leadership could be defined as the influence one employee has within his/her area of work, whatever the hierarchical responsibilities he/she has, throughout his/her behaviors and decisions, motivations, beliefs and values, to make safety the central part of any activities he/she performs.
Companies often believe that, by changing knowledge and competencies, reinforcing safety rules and procedures, performance will improve. And they are right.
Therefore, companies willing to make a step-change in their safety performance have not only to focus on systems, rules, procedures, competencies, but also on people. People as safety leaders, starting from the Top Management of an organization. Commitment, behaviors, actions and values of these people towards a safer place to work in, will shape the behaviors of others, will set what is acceptable and what is not in terms of safety.
One way to start improving a company safety culture
When a company wants to improve its safety culture, and before tackling any specific issue or raising any conclusion on how to do so, it shall understand where it stands in terms of maturity of its safety culture.
A specific assessment of the maturity of the safety culture can here be performed. It will assess the compliance with any standard (such as OHSAS 18001.2007) as well as the level of safety leadership within the company (e.g. using the 5 step Hudson ladder model of safety culture*). It will focus on every aspect of the safety management system but also the behaviors, involvement and commitment of all employees.
A specific action plan can be built from this assessment, by the company itself for maximum efficiency. It will allow the company to prepare itself, target priorities in terms of safety improvement, therefore benefits employees, operations, projects, the overall company and its safety performance.
Note: The addition of “safety leadership” is the core element of change from OHSAS 18001.2007 standard to ISO 45001 to come.
Examples of mature safety culture characteristics
Company with a mature, developed and anchored safety culture has closely connected characteristics. Some of them are the following:
•Consistency: everybody knows what is acceptable or unacceptable in terms of safety rules, behaviors and attitudes. Transparency generates credibility and confidence. The things people say are what they do. The things they do are safe. They are constantly setting examples, and those around them will follow, if they like it…or not! They will “lead by example”.
•Transparency: everybody can intervene to report any topic, issue or concern related to safety. Anybody, at any hierarchical level, can intervene on a colleague, from Top Management to any worker in the company, to raise an issue related to safety. With no fear of being judged, reprimanded, even if it jeopardizes operations and planning. Top-down and bottom-up communication is therefore the norm / the culture of the company!
•Collective objectives: everybody is involved and shares a collective will to improve safety: people are closely interconnected, share global goals, participate in team meetings and communicate widely.
•Continuous improvement: everybody is ready to improve its working condition, benefitting from good practices from others, applying changes with relentless commitment. Any legal requirements or operational constraints, planning or else, are always taken into consideration, retaining focus on safety at all times.
Note: This article does not intend to present all characteristics of the safety culture of a company, neither to develop each of those presented here above. Such topics will be proposed and discussed in the near future.
Have any interesting thoughts about safety leadership, safety culture and proactive safety characteristics? Do leave a comment.
About Julien
Julien Marcoin is a senior consultant specialized in safety management, safety leadership and behaviors, safety training and coaching. He has been working in safety for 15 years in many sectors (Oil & Gas, Pharmaceutical, Energy, various industries) in various international environments.
*: Professor Hudson, psychologist with wide experience of safety management in a variety of high-hazard industries and Professor of the Human Factor in Safety at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He established a model to define the level of safety maturity of a company: from pathological, to reactive, to proactive, to calculative and finally to generative. Each level having specific characteristics that drive the management of safety process, the involvement and commitment in terms of safety leadership of individuals, making the safety culture of this company.
