Organizational culture involvement

Promoting diversity and inclusion involves establishing responsibility for these efforts and creating a supportive organizational culture. To advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace, HR must carefully attend to both structural and cultural elements of the organization. We address both of these in this section. 

There are numerous involved and well-researched explanations and definitions of company and organizational culture available, and to discuss them all would serve no purpose. Oddly, safety culture does not deviate from the definitions of corporate culture and will give the reader a good idea as to how a safety culture is defined in broad terms. As Ardem (2012) puts it ... 

Filho et al. (2010) developed a framework to measure safety culture in the Brazilian oil and gas companies. They applied a five level safety culture maturity model (e.g., pathological, reactive, bureaucratic, proactive and sustainable) using five dimensions (e.g., information, organizational learning, involvement, communication and commitment) to identify current state of safety practices in petrochemical companies. 

Culture Involves the things people do and say in an organization, and why they say or do those things. Organizational cultures develop over time and consist of traditions, beliefs, values, and the way things are done in the organization. The culture consists of the internal atmosphere or climate and commonly includes subcultures and countercultures. 

The issues that need to be confronted involve moving to an organizational culture in which process safety is as well managed as personal safety... 

Nathan was involved in the insurance industry for more than 20 years. As part of underwriting studies for insurance placement, it was necessary to visit prospective companies to discuss their safety process and visit operations and facilities to determine their overall risk status. In retrospect, as previously discussed under organizational culture, what was being done was an attempt to determine what the safety culture was through observation of the various Artifacts and discussions about the Espoused Values as evidenced by mission statements, policies, procedures, etc. 

Getting employees involved in the development of the safety management system is particularly important to create ownership and buy-in. Employee involvement in the development of the safety management system will help to ensure that it fits within the existing organizational culture. 

A strong central structure can have an organizational culture that readily reinforces the safety process at all locations. The organization may have a general culture that espouses a participative style. This style is ideal to enhance the safety culture as it can increase employee involvement in the safety management system. 

The common theme in each of these cases is that employees were not involved in the process nor asked for their insight. Instead, a mandated solution was forced upon them. This type of approach is authoritarian and not a participatory organizational culture. If you continue to respond to problems with limited discussions and analysis, why would you then expect employees to want to be involved in solving safety issues Based on these lessons learned, take a look at your own organization to see if you can identify similar situations. 

As a point of beginning, determining if employees have a level of trust that the leadership team is serious about asking for their involvement in the safety process is crucial. In your evaluation of the organizational culture, an assessment of the level of trust between all employees provides an indication of the potential success of the safety management system. 

Some organizational cultures inhibit the kinds of behavior needed to reduce industrial injuries. Getting employees involved in safety is difficult within the context of top-down rules, regulations, and programs supported almost exclusively with the threat of negative consequences. In contrast, employee involvement is much more likely with top-down support of safety processes developed, owned, and continuously improved upon by work teams educated to understand relevant rationale and principles. 

The last area addressed by the systems approach is concerned with global issues involving the influence of organizational factors on human error. The major issues in this area are discussed in Chapter 2, Section 7. The two major perspectives that need to be considered as part of an error reduction program are the creation of an appropriate safety culture and the inclusion of human error reduction within safety management policies. 

The two categories of data described above relate to immediate causes of error. However, the question of how these factors came to be as they are, involves a consideration of the effects of organizational, and management and cultural issues. 

The first main challenge is to prevent persistent and harmful employee conflicts - that is, the balance between diversity and similarity (or organizational norms ) can in some cases lean too far toward diversity. This implies that the differences in perspectives, behaviours and work concepts become dysfunctional and lead to culture clashes (Loden and Rosener, 1991). The manifestation of these involves misunderstandings, feelings of threat... 

Reuse of software is not simply a matter of cut-and-paste it should involve the reuse of interface specifications before implementation code is reused. Successful reuse poses many organizational challenges (culture, development processes, and so on) as well as technical ones (designing components that are adaptable to many different contexts and devising techniques for plugging in the adaptations). 

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