Strategic Map for Change

Safety cultures consist of shared beliefs, practices, and attitudes that exist at an establishment. Culture is the atmosphere created by those beliefs, attitudes, etc., which shape our behavior. An organization s safety culture is the result of a number of factors such as  

In a strong safety culture, everyone feels responsible for safety and pursues it on a daily basis employees go beyond the call of duty to identify unsafe conditions and behaviors, and intervene to correct them. For example, in a strong safety culture any employee would feel comfortable walking up to any top manager and reminding him or her to wear personal protective equipment. This type of behavior would not be viewed as forward or overzealous, but would be valued by the organization and rewarded. Likewise, co-workers routinely look out for one another and point out unsafe behaviors to each other [7]. 

A company with a strong safety culture typically experiences few at-risk behaviors. Consequently, they experience low accident rates, low turnover, low absenteeism, and high productivity. These are usually companies that are extremely successful, excelling in all aspects of business. 

Creating a safety culture takes time. It is frequently a multi-year process. A series of continuous process improvement steps can be followed to create a safety culture. Management and employee commitment are hallmarks of a true safety culture where safety is an integral part of daily operations [7]. 

This is intended to focus you on the process rather than individual tasks. It is common to have a tendency to focus on the accomplishment of tasks—for example, to train everyone on a particular topic or implement a new procedure for incident investigations [7]. 

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