Safety culture evaluations

The establishment of evaluation index system of safety culture is an arduous and complex task, including the establishment of safety culture evaluation index, determination of evaluation method, measurement of evaluation results and so on. At present, domestic research in this area is still not perfect. 

Elina Pietikfiinen works as senior research scientist at the VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland. Her background is in psychology. Her research interests include safety culture evaluation and development, safety management, safety expertise, organisational evaluation and organisational learning. She works in research and development projects in several safety critical industries, such as social and healthcare and the nuclear industry. 

Conduct anonymous surveys to evaluate safety culture... 

Different metrics may be used to describe past performance, predict future performance, and encourage behavioral change. They are a means to evaluate the overall system performance and to develop a path toward superior process safety performance. This is accomplished by identifying where the current performance falls within a spectrum of excellent-to-poor performance. Such information will allow executives and site management to develop plans to address the specific improvement opportunities that could lead to measurable improvement in process safety. Good process safety metrics reinforce a process safety culture that promotes the belief that process safety incidents are preventable, that improvement is continuous, and that policies and procedures are necessary and will be followed. Continuous improvement is necessary and any improvement program will be based on measurable elements. Therefore, to continuously improve performance, organizations must develop and implement effective process safety metrics. 

Diaz-cabera, D., Hernandez-Femaud, E., Isla-Diaz, R. (2007). An evaluation of a new instmment to measure organizational safety culture values and practises. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 39, 1202-1211. 

Rather than discussing the implementation of various regulations or seeking to evaluate the effectiveness of safety management systems against templates of best practice, it considers how people think about safety, what it means to them and how they go on to collectively use those ideas in their everyday work. This could also be deemed an evaluation of construction site safety culture, a notoriously problematic term and one that is discussed in more... 

Guldenmund, F.W. (2007) The use of questionnaires in safety culture research - an evaluation. Safety Science, 45(6) 723-43. 

Compared with foreign countries, China has not formed a set of effective model and index system of the evaluation and measurement on safety culture, which resulted in the current coal industry security standards obsolete, lack of pertinence and maneuverability. Enterprises, as responsible body and the implementation main body for safety production, are less or passively involved in the standardization construction. Some leaders of the larger coal mines think that the enterprise has passed ISO quality management system and HSE management system certification, and safety standardization has little difference with safety management and safety standards, so they do no need to carry out safety standardization construction. Some leaders of coal mines are lack of awareness of the importance to carry out safety standardization, and lack of management, enthusiasm. They implement... 

Through evaluation of safety culture level and measurements of atmosphere, it can make the enterprise know the situation of safety culture of enterprise development, understand the weak part of safety culture construction work, determine the direction and goal of safety culture improvement. The key of evaluation and measurement is to construct the index system and select method. In construction of evaluation model, mature evaluation model should be referenced, and successful foreign experiences and practices should be learned from and modification and innovation should be made, in order to adapt to the situation in the construction of safety culture in coal mine in China, and to achieve the scientific, rational and efficient purpose. 

Coal mining enterprises not pay enough attention to the safety culture in construction, light on the surface. (2) Safety culture in construction research emphasis on theory and the theory cannot be combined with practice. (3) Coal employees there is a widespread misunderstanding of the safety culture in construction, compared with weak safety awareness. (4) Scientific, reasonable and effective evaluation of the measurement system is not perfect. 

Arendt, S., 2009. Evaluate HSE/Process Safety Culture. LAI/MEP Forum, Lake Charles, LA. 

A.22. Management. The management s involvement in the facility and its effectiveness in paying appropriate attention to operational issues, including abnormal events, should be evaluated. In inspections it should be considered whether the organizational structure is suitable whether there are adequate numbers of staff how well management and staff communicate and how the management emphasizes the importance of safety and fosters safety culture. 

These deficiencies and the need for holistic evaluation to determine whether a safety culture has been achieved are emphasized in major reports at notes 14 and 15 supra in particular. But the term safety culture is ambiguous and requires definition and criteria to be useful, as discussed in M. Baram and M. Schoebel, Safety Culture and Behavioral Change at the Workplace, Safety Science, v. 45, n. 6 (July 2007). 

Establishing the status of the safety systems, controls, degree of management, and employee and union participation via means of risk assessment, and evaluating the physical risks in the woikplace, is a vital part of the safety culture shift process. This forms the foundation on which a positive safety culture is built. Risks in the workplace can only be managed once they have been assessed. Ongoing risk assessment is an important component of safety culture. 

The issue of hindsight bias was not explicitly discussed or evaluated in the reports. In one case a prior survey of safety culture before the accident indicated a focus on safety, while the accident report indicated poor focus on safety, ref Antonsen (2009). The hindsight bias could be useful to reflect on in the accident reports, to uncover underlying factors or root causes that may have been missed or misrepresented. 

There was no explicit assessment of safety culture, in combination with a quantitative evaluation of the HSE environment in the accident reports. Such an assessment could be used to get a collective measure or temperarnre of the priority of safety in the organization, related to best practice . In Itho (2004) there is shown a correlation between the level of safety culture and quantitative incidents/acddents thus safety culture could be used as an indicator of the holes in harriers or the level of erosion of barriers, in combination with quantitative HSE data. A more specific measure tan culture is described by Rundmo (1997) i.e. when an employee in the Norwegian oil and gas industry feels at risk he/she is at risk. A proactive indicator could thus be a workplace survey, measuring risk perceptions or performing a more broadly based assessment of safety culture in combination with other local quantitative indicators such as gas emissions, injuries compared with best practice in the industry. 

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