System safety concepts management commitment

The safety policy statement is a substitute for repetitive management decisions and is mandatory. This is the guiding document in a safety system and perhaps the most important in implementing a change in safety culture. Although the concept safety should appear in the vision and mission statements of the organization, the safety policy statement is the declaration of the company s safety intent, commitment, and responsibility to constantly promote a safe and healthy work enviromnent. This policy should be extensively publicized and displayed on all notice boards, on the company website, in the employee safety handbook, and in prominent positions throughout the workplace. 

In Chapter 5, we introduced the concept of SHE culture. It deals with shared values and beliefs of the members of an industrial organisation that determine their commitment to the organisation s SHE management systems and achievements. We will here use the term safety climate to denote such aspects of an organisation that are possible to measure by use of a questionnaire-based survey and where the results meet statistical criteria for aggregation to the organisational level (Cox and Elin, 1998). Results of such attitude surveys are used as performance indicators at the organisational level. 

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