Organization and safety culture

Category II Organizational aspects. These are cooperation between organizations and safety culture. 

While management contemplates important issues such as safety investment and safety culture on organizational accidents, the results of this paper suggest that they should also consider the size and life cycle of the companies. Where the size do not favor workplace safety, managers should consider substitutes for these factors through networks or other forms of organization. 

The term health and safety climate has been used to describe the tangible outputs of an organization s health and safety culture as perceived by individuals or work groups at a point in time. (p. 15)... 

Safety management normally experiences more resistance than any other aspect introduced into an organization. The safety culture that is embedded in the organization tends to prevail in the future. Safety attitudes and behaviors experienced in the past tend to be carried over to the future. These can only be changed with a deep, ongoing, and concerted effort to make the implementation of the safety system work. 

High-risk behaviors and conditions mostly exist where the work takes place. The heart of an organization s safety culture centers on the workplace. Management is not always at the workplace therefore, the employees doing the work are key when it comes to reporting deviations such as high-risk work practices, hazardous conditions, and the occurrences of near-miss incidents and accidents. 

An organization s safety culture is ultimately reflected in the way safety is managed in the workplace. If the day-to-day business incorporates safety functions and activities on an ongoing basis, then safety has been integrated into the normal business process. That is an indicator of a positive safety culture. 

Safety values are beliefs that are shared among the employees and management of an organization. Safety values drive an organization s safety culture and priorities and provide a framework in which decisions that affect the safety of employees are made. For example, the majority of accidents can be prevented. ... 

From the literature it emerged that management was the key influence of an organization s safety culture. A review of the safety climate literature revealed that employee perceptions of management s attitudes and behaviors towards safety, production and issues such as planning, discipline, etc. was the most useful measurement of an organization s safety climate. (HSE, 2002, summary page)... 

The health and safety culture of an organization is an important factor in ensuring the effectiveness of risk control. The health and safety management system is an important influence on the safety culture, which in turn impacts on the effectiveness of the health and safety management system. Measuring aspects of the safety culture therefore forms part of the overall process of measuring health and safety performance. (P-14)... 

With so much information and work that has culminated in this document, numerous people need to be thanked. I thank the industrialists and miners who 1 have worked with over the last 38 years. 1 learned industrial safety from them and a great deal about what safety culture is all about and how they have changed their organization s safety culture. 

Safety standards are only effective, however, if they are properly applied in practice. The IAEA s safety services — which range in scope from engineering safety, operational safety, and radiation, transport and waste safety to regulatory matters and safety culture in organizations — assist Member States in applying the standards and appraise their effectiveness. These safety services enable valuable insights to be shared and I continue to urge all Member States to make use of them. 

Watching teams and teamwork quickly reveals that a group of weU intentioned individuals does not make a team and furthermore, that teamwork has to be planned and organized. In this section we will review some apparently simple interventions, which turn out to have quite profound effects. Daily goals, preoperative and post-operative checklists seem mundane, and this partly accounts for clinicians resistance to their use. However, a checklist is not a piece of paper or even a list it is a team intervention which, used well, can affect the wider team functioning, the relationships across professions and hierarchies and even the values and safety culture of the team. To my mind, the impact of these simple tools on clinical processes and patient outcome suggests that their effect can only be fully understood by appreciating their wider impact on team performance. 

This paper explores the role of trust within integrated operations (distributed work activities) and safety culture. In our study, we found that trust building is dependent on people s attitudes and communication skills concerning whether or not you succeed in creating a safety culture. The collaboration between onshore operators and onshore discipline experts is characterized by a mutually dependent relationship -based on their roles in the organization (the operational... 

Human and organizational faetors are also important and these were addressed in Recommendations 19-22. Recommendation 19 provided key characteristics of high reliability organizations. They eehoed the discussions in the Baker Report on the BP Texas City incident and CSB reports which covered that 2005 incident (see previous chapter). Finally, Recommendations 23-25 dealt with broader strategic objectives relating to sector leadership and safety culture, essential to ensure continuing progress [9],... 

It should be understood that Section 3.0 is the standard s most important section. Safety professionals will surely agree that Top management leadership and effective employee participation are crucial for the success of an Occupational Health and Safety Management System (OHSMS). Top management leadership is vital because it sets the organization s safety culture and because continual improvement processes cannot be successful without sincere top management direction. Key statements in the shall column of the standard follow ... 

The significance of an organization s safety culture in serious injury prevention and causal factor determination... 

Reference is made several times in this book to an organization s safety culture and how it impacts on the injury experience attained, favorable or unfavorable. Since causal factors for incidents resulting in serious injury are largely systemic and their accumulation is a reflection of the organization s safety culture, that subject must be explored. Comments made on organizational culture in the August 2003 Report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board on the Columbia space ship disaster are pertinent here. They follow. 

As top management makes decisions directing the organization, its safety culture is established and that culture is translated into a system of expected behavior. 

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