Safety Management Culture

Management safety culture means the employer s commitment and leadership in making a safer workplace environment. In this research, our empirical measure of management safety culture is a Likert scale index of responses to the following issues  

1) management s support for clear goals and objectives on safety and health policy, 

2) management s leadership in setting goals on safety and health, 

3) management s interest in safety and health issues as a part of the firm s strategic level of decision making, 

4) management s willingness to share safety-related information with employees, and 

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Systemic safety management culture, where the causes of errors are analysed in relation to the total work context. Not only are traditional causes such as poor design and procedures considered, but also such aspects as unclear responsibilities, lack of knowledge and a low morale. These in turn are traced back to management liability issues. 

Process safety management can be applied worldwide, but the implementation of PSM cannot succeed simply by taking U.S. programs and attempting to install them unchanged in other parts of the world. Management styles differ in different cultures and PSM systems must be designed to respect th> )se differences. 

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. 

As discussed earlier in this chapter, the main requirements to ensure an appropriate safety culture are similar to those which are advocated in quality management systems. These include active participation by the workforce in error and safety management initiatives, a blame-free culture which fosters the free flow of information, and an explicit policy which ensures that safety considerations will always be primary. In addition both operations and management staff need feedback which indicates that participation in error reduction programs has a real impact on the way in which the plant is operated and systems are designed. 

The general approach that has been advocated in this chapter is that it is the responsibility of an organization, through its safety management policies, to create the systems, environment, and culture that will minimize human error and thereby maximize safety. 

Common sense and the OSHA Chemical Process Safety Management Law requires an audit of compliance to the Management of Change. Periodic review and documentation of a sites activities in managing aspects of personnel and process safety is often a part of an organization s culture. A good audit can measure the actual versus intended effectiveness of various programs. 

Lucas (1992) proposes that different safety cultures will have an impact on which accidents are investigated and whether or not near miss reporting is perceived as a valuable use of resources an occupational safety culture would probably investigate only serious personal injuries the risk management culture might be interested in certain types of near misses with very direct and serious potential safety consequences finally a systemic safety culture will encourage its employees to report anything related to possible deviations, either with immediate or delayed consequences for safety control. 

The CCPS s process safety management system approach that uses risk-based strategies and implementation tactics that are commensurate with the risk-based need for process safety activities, availability of resources, and existing process safety culture to design, correct, and improve process safety management activities. 

If exiting employees are not voicing safety concerns, then the organization may not have the necessary knowledge required to prompt corrective action, and the new employee (even those with realistic expectations of the normal safety risk profile for the job type) may be about to enter a job with an unacceptable level of safety risk (beyond those normally associated with the type of work). Thus, new employee safety will be enhanced if a workplace has a safety voicing culture, where employees freely share safety information, and this is supported and reinforced by both management and co-workers. In contrast, a new employee that enters a workplace which has a silence culture, or has employees that want to voice about safety but feel they cannot for some reason, can be exposed to more safety risk than is necessary. 

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... 

Other key ideas within the cognitive theories that are often employed within social research are those of values, attitudes and beliefs (Baron et a/. 2006). These elements are often seen as the basic criteria of many social phenomena, including the highly complex concept of culture, although it is attitudes, the inherent disposition to respond favourably or unfavourably to an object/person/ event (Aronson et a/. 2007), that are most frequently used, due to their accessibility through tools such as questionnaires or observed behaviours (Ajzen 2005). In construction, safety management often draws on this way of thinking in the use of safety climate surveys. 

Hale, A.R., Guldenmund, F.W., van Loenhout, P.L.C.H. (2010) Evaluating safety management and culture interventions to improve safety Effective intervention strategies. Safety Science, 48(8), 1026-35. 

So if current ideas of safety on site are not really working, what can be done Well, as the introduction to this chapter suggested -the ideas and understandings of safety unpacked above are indeed helpful. They are able to illustrate what safety is on site -and that it is all a bit of a mess is itself well worth knowing. However, it would perhaps be more helpful to be able to understand these ideas in a more coherent way - and whenever the complexities of both people and the social worlds are explored, very often the concept of culture comes to the fore. This is what Choudhry et a/. (2007 1003) were alluding to in the quote found at the start of this chapter. Where complexity and dissonance start to emerge around safety, the check-sheets and tick boxes of proceduralised safety management systems become less relevant... 

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