BS : - Positive Safety Culture

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Chapter : Behavioral Safety

Positive Safety Culture

Developing and maintaining a positive safety culture can be an effective tool for improving safety within any organization .The challenge is how to develop a culture that is favorable to good safety performance. 

There are many listed a number of elements for an implementation of good safety culture, these include importance to safety; involvement of workers at all levels; role of safety staff; the caring trust (that all parties to have a watchful eye and helping hand to cope with inevitable slips and blunders); openness in communication; belief in safety improvements; and integration of safety into the organization. To develop and further promote a positive safety culture, a review from is given below:

Changing Attitudes & Behaviors: Safe behaviors can be enhanced by capitalizing on activities such as verbal instructions, training, and warning signs. Nevertheless, if things are communicated in the way that the work is easier, and the task can be Wnished earlier and thus rewarded with monetary incentive, then certainly employees will be cutting corners, may not be observing safety rules, not wearing personal protective equipment, and ultimately not working safely. Long-term values include employees being able to work without injury so they can continue to provide earning for both the company and for her/his family.

Management Commitment: Management plays a key role in promoting a positive safety culture. This can be best demonstrated by allocating resources, time, walk the talk, inspections, by participating in risk assessments and consultative committee meetings, and by completing actions.

Employee Involvement: For a positive safety culture, employees’ involvement, ownership and commitment is necessary; in particular empowerment promotes feelings of selfworth, belonging and value. Employees should be involved in training, consultation about noise, machinery isolation, sound barriers, job rotation, PPE, and wearing different earmuffs.

Promotional Strategies: In order to enhance safety awareness amongst employees, promotional strategies to be used should include the following:

1. Mission statements, slogans and logos;
2. Publish materials (library, statistics, newsletters);
3. Media (posters, displays, audiovisual, e-mail, Internet).

Training & Seminars: Training activities should include short talks, group meetings, training for personal Wtness, hygiene, workplace stress and responsibilities towards safety (including compliance with rules and regulations, hazard identification and risk assessment, incident investigation and job safety analysis).

Special Campaigns: This item should include Health and Safety Week, health promotion, safety inductions, emergency response, incident reporting and investigation, risk assessment, introduction to existing health, safety and environment management systems. 

Promoting management commitment and employees participation in safety can enhance the organization’s safety culture. When employees become more aware of their responsibilities for incident and injury prevention, they will exhibit more interest in maintaining a safe and healthy work site. Mostly positive safety culture comprises five components which include: management commitment to safety; management concerns for the workforce; mutual trust and credibility between management and employees; workforce empowerment; and lastly continuous monitoring, corrective action, review of system and continual improvements to reflect the safety at the work site. It is suggest within any construction organization, a positive safety culture will ascertain and reflect the effectiveness of a safety management system in the construction site environments.

Safety Culture Assessment:- 

A safety culture assessment involves systematically gathering, reviewing and analyzing culturally relevant data, as well as identifying and implementing improvement actions. This is to promote safety, learn about organizational factors affecting safety, and to continually seek an understanding of how culture operates within the organization.

Safety culture is influenced by external and internal factors including all workers”. Organizations engaged in complex work involving many interdependent workers and processes can benefit from safety culture assessments.

Safety culture is complex and changes over time.” Changes in the organization can affect the safety culture – assessments should be carried out as operational needs dictate (new ownership, governance, structure, responsibilities or new activities such as refurbishment, decommissioning, etc.).

A safety culture assessment provides an opportunity for organizational leaders to actively promote and foster a healthy safety culture. Their support for engaging workers in open discussions, decisions and actions on safety ensures an environment of continual safety improvement. Shared space is a critical aspect of safety culture assessments; these assessments depend on the free flow of views and opinions in an environment of trust.

To improve safety culture,  assessment , monitoring, behaviour data provided a focus area to management for discussion and analysis. That include:

• Surveys, including topic-based surveys, worker surveys in focused areas, and follow-up surveys
• Safety-related focus groups, town hall sessions or feedback tools
• Opportunities for workers to discuss and reflect on their personal roles and responsibilities for safety
• Seeking feedback on specific focus areas from workers, management, regulators, contractors or stakeholders
• Trending and analysis of leading organizational performance indicators, and other organizational audits and evaluations
• Trending and analysis of operational performance indicators detected through routine monitoring
• Reflecting on formal and informal dialogue focused on safety between management and other workers
• Potential for changes in safety culture following significant organizational changes, such as change in ownership, structure or responsibilities
• Reporting of and responses to near misses, events or incident

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