"Safety Culture"
Safety Culture is the way safety is perceived, valued and prioritized in an organisation. It reflects the real commitment to safety at all levels in the organisation. It has also been described as "how an organisation behaves when no one is watching".
"Safety culture heavily is influenced by metrics. How safety is measured can fundamentally change how safety is managed, and how safety is managed is a primary contributor to an organization's safety culture. In companies with strong safety cultures, safety is embedded in daily management; it is part of the fabric of daily activity. It infuses every interaction, every decision and every behavior.
Unfortunately, in many organizations, leaders only attend to safety during safety meetings, audits and re-actively, when there is an incident. The reason lies in metrics. Managers attend to what they are measured on because those measures are associated with consequences (positive and negative).
So, one important foundational step to building an effective safety culture is to change the way safety is measured. While incident rate is a necessary metric, it should be one of several. The majority of measures should focus on proactive behaviors on the part of all employees – measures that track what people are doing to prevent accidents. When there are measures of what leaders do on a daily and weekly basis to prevent accidents, immediate and certain consequences can be engineered in to ensure those activities occur. This ensures that safety is attended to all the time, not just when there are incidents. Daily and weekly accountabilities will raise safety to an equal playing field with other business objectives and help infuse safety into all parts of work.