What Safety Culture is and what it isn't...

As an industry safety leadership professional, "Safety Culture" is not a new term or a foreign concept for me. But to be brutally honest, the way it's mostly defined, I'm not really sure I get or agree with it... I mean, I read and listen to a lot of peoples great work around Safety Culture and how to influence it, but I rarely read or hear about what it actually is to people, and especially what it isn't! So to provoke a little thought and maybe some discussion, here's my take on it.

In order to do this I wanted to first analyse a commonly accepted definition, then discuss why I do and don't agree with it. Then I'll explore a few examples of what I don't think Safety Culture is, but how I've often heard people relate to it. Then to finish I'm going to leave an opening for any and all to share their opinions because in all honesty, I'm still a little dubious and indeterminate.

Here's a quick teaser of my thinking: Is your Safety Culture a result of your workers' performance, or is your workers' performance a result of your Safety Culture? Let's have a look.

QLD WorkSafe provides a definition which is similar to other sources, but as mentioned I'm not totally sure I can agree:

"A safety culture is an organisational culture that places a high level of importance on safety beliefs, values and attitudes (totally agree)—and these are shared by the majority of people (kinda agree) within the company or workplace. It can be characterised as ‘the way we do things around here’" - totally disagree, and here's why...

I hate to be complicated, to nitpick and seem unnecessarily technical about this but I think it's a really important conversation as recognising your organisations safety culture and what drives it can mean the difference between safety excellence or not. My key objection with the term ‘the way we do things around here’ is that it infers a few critical things that to be true and correct must be have firstly been agreed on and accepted by the workforce - the most significant and effected stakeholder in any apparent safety culture.

The criticality is: If there are a lot of incidents and injuries within a certain workplace, people tend to blame or associate this to a 'poor safety culture', eventually. But if a 'safety culture' is to be defined by the term ‘the way we do things around here’, then this is a big issue. The term starts with "we", which if you're referring to the injured party, predicates this is how said injured workers "do things around here", naturally, culturally. When in fact this may be completely inaccurate and the workers do not do these things typically or out of choice but now (today or this year) must due to organisational factors often outside of their control. Yes there is always the argument of "they can stop the job if it's unsafe", which is cute, until you're a subcontractor on your third "stop" call for the week now being assured this job will occur with or without you, in no uncertain terms...

To me, that term explicitly indicates that the apparent culture and it's resultant performance is both agreed and accepted by the workers. Which I do not think is correct. So to provide a different take, but not boil the ocean, I've stuck with an alikeness to the term that has been so easily accepted by the safety industry but I'll give you my version with just a few words changed a little. My version of a Safety Culture is: "the way we enable and are we're able to do things around here", meaning the way we're enabled, empowered and encouraged through leadership, technology, authority, economics, regulations, inter-organisational social dynamics, external societal expectations, knowledge, training and skills etc.

To me that sounds a little more fair to the workers of industries or companies that suffer from a "poor" or "bad safety culture" because we must all agree that nobody came to work to get hurt. But instead workers operate, more often than not, within a work environment & design established and managed by others.

Now I wanted to explore and share two key areas that are often mistaken about safety culture. But to achieve this I'll share with you my opinions on what safety culture is not.

1. A Safety Culture is not defined by a lack or low frequency of reported injuries or incidents.

There are many powerful yet complex explanations to support this so I'll simplify to keep it short. "Reported" - by the very nature of the term “report/ed” we’re identifying an action. Therefore does the absence of the action equate to the absence of the subject at hand? Technically no, we’re merely identifying that no action was taken (nothing was reported). Which is a confounding paradigm as "not reporting" is actually an indicator of a poor safety culture and will go unidentified without genuine and adaptive leadership – nobody makes zero mistakes and has zero injuries, near misses or incidents. But are they potentially exposed to a culture where reporting is suppressed?

2. A Safety Culture cannot be defined by investigation findings, inspections or audits.

Whilst this information can alert to the something, a Safety Culture is not what you see or find. It is the “why” you see or find what you do. But not the direct and superficial “why” people often think – we’ve got to dig deeper into the hearts and minds of the organisation, it's leaders and workers alike. We must ask better questions.

For example, you’re experiencing a spike in hand injuries. Is that obviously due to the safety culture? Definitely not. However, through analysis of your Human Performance, Behavioural Based Safety or Field Leadership program data you can identify a trend in workers not protecting their hands, let's say by wearing their PPE. For me safety culture is the organisational “why” workers aren’t wearing their PPE - and that's rarely all the workers fault. Here are some examples of the superficial "why" they aren’t wearing PPE:

i) The PPE is inadequate, or ii) Too scarce, or iii) Your workers aren’t trained in its use, or, or, or…

But this is not your safety culture. Your safety culture is the “why” to those examples, which interestingly is also often the genesis of 'human error' and to what many people will calamitously consider a 'root cause'.

Let's dig into some why's. Why is the PPE inadequate, too scarce or unused? Is it because the organisation decided on a range without consulting the workers? Is it because the organisation has cut costs to PPE in budgets? Are your workers untrained because your TNA is non-existent, mismanaged or they’ve cut that budget too? The answers to these questions are due to an 'organisational' safety culture and the injuries or incidents are subsequent to that answer. A good safety culture isn’t that your workers are wearing their PPE, it is why they are, or aren’t if that's safer. 

Safety culture is the intangible and immeasurable underlying “why” to an organisations safety performance. As QLD WorkSafe aptly put it, it is the "organisational culture that places a high level of importance on safety beliefs, values and attitudes" - key word; 'organisational'.

There are however numerous commercial products or services that attempt to measure safety culture, i.e. the Bradley Curve, which is why I now need to identify my own hypocrisy to explain something. Why did I call safety culture “immeasurable” then share an example of how to measure it? It’s simple: Economics. Where there is demand, one will supply. The issue is, the need for organisations to understand the “why” is strong, so strong that clever businesses have filled the gap with products sometimes only loosely based on soft concepts and extracts from other more scrutinised and substantiated sciences, ie. Psychology.

My issue with safety culture and the concept as a whole is there is, even with my own definition, no one safety culture of an organisation and it’s definitely not static. Safety culture ebbs and flows with leadership decisions, macro-ergonomics, industry dynamics, market pressures and legislative influence or governance. For instance in regions or countries where regulators are least active or less punitive, safety culture tends to reflect that and is poor.

So to conclude I'd like to request others opinions of my viewpoint and also whether you feel declaring the outcomes of organisational factors (ie. a system failure resulting in injuries or incidents) can be accurately described as 'the way we do things around here'? Because the reality is that after an event it's more likely then not that the "Safety Culture" will be questioned, but who will they be talking about...

Cheers - AT.