Transcript Slide 1

Why Safety Culture?
Historical & Conceptual Issues
Kathryn Mearns
‘It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think
that we can change it by simply declaring new values.
Such declarations usually produce only cynicism’.
Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (1994)
Safety Culture
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History
What is it?
Why are organizations focused on it?
Can we measure it?
Can we manage it?
Chernobyl
“…that assembly of characteristics and
attitudes in organizations and individuals
which established that, as an overriding
priority, nuclear plant safety issues receive
the attention warranted by their
significance”
(IAEA, 1986)
Piper Alpha
‘It is essential to create a corporate
atmosphere or culture in which safety is
understood to be and is accepted as, the
number one priority” .’
(Cullen, 1990, p300)
UK Health & Safety Executive,
1999
“Reducing error and
influencing behaviour”
Companies should measure
safety culture
Definition of safety culture
• ‘The safety culture of an organisation is the product of
individual and group competencies and patterns of
behaviour that determine commitment to, and the style and
proficiency of, an organisation’s health and safety
management’
Advisory Committee for Safety on Nuclear Installations (HSC, 1993,
p. 23)
Disentangle this..
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Individuals
Groups
Values
Attitudes
Competencies
Patterns of Behaviour
Commitment
Style
Proficiency
Health and Safety
Management
Is safety culture…
• Something the organization has?
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Imposed on the organization (top down)
Can be measured and managed
Functional approach
Assumes culture can be changed through management interventions
• Something the organization is?
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Emerges from interactions between organizational members
Has a life of its own?
Interpretative approach
Assumes the culture is a pattern of underlying meanings and
symbols that are not easily changed
Model of Safety Culture
VISIBLE BEHAVIOUR
(what people do)
ESPOUSED VALUES
(what is said)
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
(what is believed)
Adapted from Schein (1992)
Organizational layers
Organizational Level:
Management
Supervisors
Operations
Technicians
Team
Divisional
Organisational
National
Regional
Safety Culture in a Nutshell
What is believed
What is said
What is done
Safety
performance
Eurocontrol model
MODEL OF SAFETY CULTURE
ECONOMIC,
NATIONAL &
REGULATORY
INFLUENCES
Enacted by
Leaders
Work/production pressure
•Supervisor commitment
•Management commitment
SOCIETAL CULTURE
Organisational Culture
Safety Management
Practices
Safety Climate
Attitudes and
feelings
•Risk-taking
•Unsafe acts
•Violations
•Citizenship
•Reporting
•Learning
•Values
•Beliefs
•Norms
•Assumptions
•Expectations
•H&S policy
•Organising for H&S
•Communication
•H&S auditing
•H&S training/promotion
•Satisfaction with safety
•Attitudes to reporting
•Risk perception
•Involvement
Behaviour
Organisational
Safety
Set by
Leaders?
•Accidents
•Incidents
•Near-misses
Safety culture should measure:
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Values
Attitudes
Norms
Assumptions
Expectations
• Extent to which these are ‘shared’ by members of the
organization & across different groups
Measuring Safety Culture:
Methodological Approaches
Kathryn Mearns
Measures should have:
• Validity
– Face
– Construct
• Content
• Discriminant
– Predictive
• Reliability
– Consistent
– Robust
Some Initial Requirements
• Robustness
– Strength of Evidence
• SMS Coherence
– SMS compatible (not competing)
• Diagnosticity
– Showing how to improve
• Usability
– Not too demanding of organization’s
resources
Possible Approaches
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Safety Culture Maturity
Enablers/Disablers
Interviews
Questionnaires/Rating Scales
Stories
Safety Culture
Maturity
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(Parker & Hudson, 2001)
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Increasing maturity
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• Why do we need to
waste our time on risk
management and
safety issues?
• We take risk seriously
and do something every
time we have an
incident
• We have systems in place
to manage all likely risks
Pathological
Reactive
Calculative
Proactive
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• We are always on the
alert thinking about the
risks that might arise
Generative
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• Risk management is an
integral part of everything
we do
Safety Culture Enablers & Disablers
Just, Reporting & Learning Culture
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Enablers:
• Management believe that it is human to make
errors
• We learn from incidents in a way that people
don’t feel they will be punished
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Disablers:
• Some people don’t report incidents because
they believe they might get blamed
• There is a lack of consistency in the
organization regarding discipline and retraining
Enablers/Disablers
Enablers:
Operators stay in position during handover
until incoming operator is comfortable with
job
Agree  Disagree 
Disablers:
Operators sometimes have to deviate
from the procedures to get their job done
Agree  Disagree 
Safety Culture Story: Developing trust
Management
Operations
What was Management do not punish those who report,
DONE
instead they are supported and the report is
addressed
The ATCO reports the incident to the supervisor,
they discuss the incident
What was
BELIEVED
Both controllers and management believe they
should submit reports of all occurrences
Both controllers and management believe human
errors exist and reports are an important basis for
learning and improving safety
OUTCOME
Controllers and management trust each other and a
just culture exists where occurrences are reported
Management believe that it is human to make
errors
Questionnaire
Rating Scales
Strongly
Agree
Strongly
Disagree
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2
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We learn from incidents in a way that people
don’t feel punished
Strongly
Agree
Strongly
Disagree
1
employees are motivated
for safety by doing
interesting tasks
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1
2
4
5
employees are
bound to safety by
strict control
Scenarios
Possible error for the
operator is higher in:
Scenario A 
Scenario B 
Scenario A
Scenario B
Operator has low
competency
Operator has average
competency
Average supervision
and team decision
making
Excellent supervision
and team decision
making
Capacity pressure
Capacity pressure
Company has an
excellent ‘safety
culture’
Company has average
‘safety culture’
No difference 
Don’t know 
Collecting Evidence
during semi-structured interviews
• Number of reports
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1 person reports
2 people report
3 people report
4+ people report
• Type of evidence
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Hearsay
Internal evidence
Public evidence
Change request
Can provide evidence of how widely
spread this view is held
Can provide evidence of how
trustworthy the evidence is
(or important)
Evidence / stories
• can provide a detailed assessment of how
widely spread the issue is believed, and how
important it is
• can identify level of shared views between
management and controllers
• can identify specific areas where
improvements could be targeted
– aimed either at a specific group or in general
Eurocontrol approach
• Questionnaire to determine what people
perceive
• Workshops to determine why people
perceive things as they do and how to bring
about change – workforce involvement
• Scenarios used to develop questionnaire but
not applied to safety culture measurement –
used in ‘Safety Intelligence’ measurement