The Outovator’s Guide to Building a Safety Culture - Part 3 Framework and Self Assessment Tool
HISTORICAL CONTEXT As industrial safety received increasing emphasis in the 1970s and 1980s, large companies began tracking their journey and noted annual progress over a period of years. For multinationals with dozens or even hundreds of locations, a shared understanding emerged that the health, safety, and environment journey was a multi-year process[1]. A few highly visible accidents in the 1980s, like the Chernobyl disaster, led to the development of the term “safety culture.”[2]
How does a company practically plan, develop, and implement a safety culture change journey? How does one establish a baseline measurement? How does one track progress periodically?
A COMMON FALLACY Some people believe that in a behavior-based safety culture, you watch an employee’s behavior as they work on the manufacturing floor to identify what they do incorrectly and analyze how those actions could cause harm. Those corrections then help create a safer, more productive environment.
But I’d ask you to look at the situation from a different angle.
Put yourself in the position of the employee: would you feel trusted to do your job while your manager watched your every move? Would you feel stressed or anxious about making a mistake that could cause you to lose your job? Would you worry about possible retaliation if you raised a concern with your manager?
RECOMMENDED APPROACH
When starting on the safety culture journey with a company, I find it helpful to draw an analogy to building a house with five levels. I highlight seven well known tools (from the management team’s toolbox) that help them build the “safety house.” Let’s look at an overview of these concepts.
Safety House Analogy when Building a Safety Culture The “safety culture house” has five levels : (1) Foundation (management commitment), (2) Sub-Basement (Communication and Incorporation into Daily Business), (3) Basement (BASIC Safety Training – govt, OSHA rules, company rules, workplace safety guidelines), (4) Main Level ( ADVANCED Training – Accident analyses, root cause analyses, Data trend analyses), (5) Upper Levels (HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT ISSUES including worker health, product design, life cycle analyses, etc.)
Analogy of a Safety Culture “House” - depicting the various levels.
Just as a house requires a strong foundation so too does a strong HSE culture, complete with an explicit and visible commitment by management in writing, verbally, and most importantly, in action! The next levels in the HSE house ensure that health and safety are incorporated into the organization’s daily business, establishing processes focused on safety rules, establishing training and documentation, emphasizing employee health and environmental aspects, and finally, empowering the organization. We’ll explore these topics in upcoming articles as part of this series.
Seven Tools for Building your Safety Culture House Seven management tools have repeatedly helped my colleagues and I to build a robust safety culture : (1) Transparent Self Assessments, (2) Building Trust, (3) Focus on leading indicators, (4) Borrowing the concept of “early adopters” from Diffusion of Innovations, (5) Systematic Use of Positive Reinforcements, (6) Deep emotional Engagement and (7) PDCA – Plan -Do-Check -Act Rigor. Some of these will look familiar and others may surprise you.
TOOL #1 TRANSPARENT SELF-ASSESSMENTS
So, where are you in the process of building a behavior-based safety culture? In the previous article, I recommended to start the process with a deep candid conversation with the senior leadership team. Assuming you and your team are ready to begin your safety journey, I recommend you conduct an organizational self-assessment – that is shared transparently with the entire organization.
Drawing on the analogy the “safety house,” I have created a questionnaire to help leadership assess an organization’s readiness. You can download a copy of the questionnaire here. As you answer these questions, you will create a heat map with colors red, yellow, and green that represent the present state of your organization. Leaders and employees can compare their statistics in an easy, visual method to help identify the current situation, make improvements, or continue the next step in their journey. Sharing the assessment helps employees visualize the “gaps” and builds a consensus supporting the tasks ahead. Periodically repeating the assessment (perhaps annually) and watching the heat map evolve from “red” toward “green” builds positive momentum in the safety culture journey.
Evolution of Safety Culture - depicted as a self-assessment heat map. As the organization improves its safety culture - its collective responses steadily change from red to green.
This article has introduced the analogy of the safety house, listed the five levels of the house, and listed the seven tools to be used to build the “house”. We also described the first of the seven tools – self-assessment. Subsequent articles will delve deeper into the seven tools and into the five levels of the safety house.
[1] Creating a Culture of Prevention in Occupational Safety and Health Practice Yangho Kim, Jungsun Park, Mijin Park Safety and Health at Work 7 (2016) 89e96