Safety culture often reflects the
”attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and values that the employees share in
relation with safety” [1].The term was first used in the IINSAG Report on
Cernobil (1988).
Reason [2] highlights that the safety
culture is a “concept whose time has come”, stating that there are both
challenges and opportunities “to create a principled basis for more effective
culture enhanced practices”.
A more succint definition of safety culture
would be “safety culture is how organisation behaves when no one is watching”.
Is safety culture important ? Yes, if we
need to have:
-a better and improved
safety at the workplace, safety which involves the commitment of all the
involved actors – from employees to employers, through the safety experts and
safety manager of the enterprise;
-a shared awarness
regarding risks at the workplace towards the global image of specific
occupational risks acting on the enterprise;
-a management commited to
safety which is acting in close relation with the employees in order to improve
continously the well being at workplace.
Challenges to the leadership of the
enterprise are:
-to determine at which
level the safety culture in the company is- for the moment- and at which level
are fixed the goals for the culture in the general image of enterprise
development;
-to decide if they are
really commited to the culture improvement or this will be only the
responsibility of employees- which should manage the culture as psossible;
-to chart and allow the
navigation on a path from here (actual safety culture) to then (optimal safety
culture).
A weak safety culture can (and would be) an
evidence of action (or moreover- inaction) of personnel at all the levels of
organization.
Key attributes of an optimal safety culture
would be:
-safety as a core value;
-strong leadership with
delegation of responsibilities regarding safety in the whole employee mass;
-high standards of
performance;
-maintaining a sense of
vulnerability among the employees in order to make them aware that hazards are
at the workplace even if we don t see them;
-empover individuals to
fulfill their safety responsibilities;
-establish a learning
environment;
-foster mutual trust;
-provide continous
monitoring of performance;
Its main elements are:
-professional- without
professionals we could not speak of safety in a real sense; the goal would be
that as many as possible employees should be trained and prepared to solve
specific safety aspects;
-maintains risks below
ALARP for property, people and environment;
-manage potential
hazardous activities mainly through collective preventive and improvement
actions;
-considers safety as a
real goal into the management portfolio;
-is based on prospective
visions upon the future of the enterprise on a mid and long term basis;
-raise constant awarness
regarding risks, taking into account also new and emergent risks;
-is based on the just
culture notion;
-works through employees towards
management and top management- in order to cover all the floor aspects
regarding safety and health at the workplace;
Figure 1 shows the main elements.
Figure 1- Main
safety culture elements
The proposed paper starts from a real need-
the improvement from an ad-hoc safety culture to a minimal optimal structured
safety culture so that the enterprise should obtain a continous safety
improvement on this sole basis- if there are also resources in order to invest
in safety this could be optimal- however if not, safety culture should be the
improvement engine for all the needed safety at the enterprise level.
A root cause analysis for the development
of an optimal safety culture is included.After this root cause analysis a
safety seed could be implemented in the enterprise in order to lead to the
desired safety culture. The safety seed develops later into a framework in order to develop efficiently the
safety culture.
All the presented structures were developed
into a prototype and were tested in Romania in a an energy complex- which
included mining, thermo-energy units and electrical distribution.In the
Conclusion part are prezented some aspects regarding this structure.
Finding the optimal safety culture
seed is an important aspect to start with. In doing this we have done a DMAIC
Six Sigma Analysis combined with a Root Cause Analysis.
Root Cause Analysis should identify the
main causes of problems (variations) regarding the safety of the enterprise. In
addition, DMAIC stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control and would
be the best way to develop the safety culture seed.
Main elements for root cause analysis are
shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 Root Cause
Analysis Diagram
Taking into account that we are
focused on the safety culture, the order of the Root Causes that must be
included in the safety culture seed development is:
Human
Factor-->Task-->Machine-->Work Environment.
In this case, DMAIC goes as follows:
D-Define- define the main elements of the safety culture seed; these
elements are defined now and nuanced in the framework part of this paper.
The main elements defined for the seed are:
-Commitment;
-Behavior;
-Awarness;
-Adaptability;
-Information;
-Justness;
M-Measure- express the possible metrics for this seed; using a Likert
scale, the above mentioned elements could be estimated, taking into account
that 0 stands for inexistent and 5 for excellent;
A-Analyze- analyze the optimization of the safety culture seed; if the assessed values are below 3- as a minimal
threshold, the analyze step should find why the elements with a measurement
below 3 are behaving like this and what should be done in order to improve
them; for example, a better commitment could go with a bigger individual
responsibility of the employee in safety assurance; if the employee would be
put in position to solve safety problems they would like to have the best
optimal safety culture in order to help them to solve safety problems;
I-Improve-solutions for the improvement of safety seed that could be
useful in mean time; the solutions are derived from the Analysis phase and
would go gradual, from the solutions that are free of costs towards the
solutions that require a resource investment.
C-Control- control the development of the seed into an efficient
safety culture at the level of enterprise. The control part should be exercized
with care by the enterprize management together with the employees. A too
management oriented control would be seen as rigid; a lose control would be
easily avoided by the employees. In this part commitment and control should
work together in order to assure an optimal control level.
Going down in the search for a
better safety culture it is possible to detail the main elements as they were
shown above. The components are presented in Table 1.
Table 1 Detailed
elements and components of the safety culture framework.
|
Element
|
Short description
|
Components
|
|
Commitment
|
All the
interested stakeholders are safety culture oriented as long as the enterprise
functions. Moreover, they are ready to perform durable improvements on all the lifecycle
of safety culture.
|
-Management
concern;
-Perception of
safety importance;
-Prioritization
on safety;
-Personnel
involvement and accountability;
|
|
Behavior
|
Safety oriented
behavior and its drivers
|
-Employee’s with
the respect to safety;
-Mutual
expectations;
-Job
satisfaction;
|
|
Awarness
|
Understanding the
presence of hazards , learning how to identify them and to pre-mitigate them
below the ALARP level.
|
-attitude towards
unreported hazards<
-concern for
safety;
|
|
Adaptability
|
Giving efficiency
to safety culture for specific environments.
|
-Pro-active
attitude to prevent undesired behaviors;
-Actions in
respect to negative happenings;
-Employee input;
|
|
Information
|
Includes all the
aspects regarding data, information and knowledge at the safety culture
level.
|
-Availability of
information;
-Communication of
world related information;
-Training;
-Safety issues
reporting system;
-Consequences on
safety reports;
-Information
exchange about safety issues;
|
|
Justness
|
Usage of just
culture as the basis for safety culture;
|
-Evaluation of
safety related behaviors;
-Perception of
evaluation and HR management;
-Passing of
responsibility;
|
Figure 3 gives an equivalent of the
framework structure .
1.
Cox S.,Cox T. (1991), The
structure of employee attitude to safety-an European Sample, in Work and stress
5, pg.93-96
2.
Reason J (1998), Achieving a
safety culture in theory and practice, in Work and Stress, 2,pg.293-296
Figure 3 Framework
improved
