There seems to be a movement within the safety community that proposes that there is no “safety culture” or “culture of safety” within workplaces. After all, I have seen and lived over the past 30+ years; I find this difficult to believe. Just because we can’t see a “culture,” although I believe we can certainly see one or feel a culture, again, I believe we most certainly can feel it, that somehow one does not exist. I am certain I could take ten safety professionals with 15+ years of experience and visit ten different facilities. We would all agree on which facilities had a safety culture or culture of safety. We can determine this quickly by touring the facilities and interviewing facility personnel. I am serious; most facilities will take less than 4 hours, and some may take a bit more time, but I am sure that out of the ten safety pro’s involved in the evaluation, most, if not all, would walk away convinced of what they saw and heard as to the status of the facility’s safety culture or culture of safety.
I have come to view safety thru the lens of society. We are bombarded with news (and opinions from talking heads) about our “decaying culture”. And they offer up some damning metrics to make their case. Most types of crime rates are up, the divorce rate is up, school graduations are down, student test scores on standardized tests are down, and if you believe in the accuracy of “polls,” you can glean more from those to support your beliefs about our culture. But these are metrics that can be indicators of the culture of a society.
So if we can use these indicators/metrics to evaluate the “culture” of a society, why is it so far-fetched that we can have a culture within our workplace and that we can not measure its up and downs?
In my example of visiting ten facilities and being able to establish if there is a safety culture or culture of safety within hours, what do you think we would be looking at and for to establish our belief that the facility has a good safety culture or a bad (non-existent) safety culture?
Here are a few ringers:
- Housekeeping
- Labeling of containers/piping/vessels/electrical
- Guarding on machinery/equipment
- Lighting
- Noise levels and any attempts to reduce it
- how supervisors and managers talk of safety and, most importantly, their involvement in managing safety
- Proper PPE usage
- Condition of the safety signs
Spending some time with management (executives and front-line) and understanding their thoughts and role in managing safety will say more than any banners or signed safety policies hanging on the walls.
The crux of all this is we can determine their culture toward safety. We may debate whether to call it a “safety culture” or just a “facility culture” in general, where safety is either a priority or a value or neither. But there is for sure a culture within the walls of every facility – whether it embraces safety or not, there is a culture.