To improve safety performance, coherent action is required in three (3) areas:
1) technical aspects,
2) safety management, and
3) human and organizational factors
These different “pillars” all influence the safety culture. It should be emphasized that, in any given company, safety priorities have undergone several phases of chronological development, with each new area of concern being added to the previous in order to improve safety performance:
▷ a phase focusing on actions in the technical sphere (facility design, equipment quality, redundancy, fault sensors, automated protection systems, etc.);
▷ followed by the development of safety management systems (SMS, formalization of all processes, procedures, and rules implemented to promote safety);
▷ and finally, more recently, recognition of the importance of human and organizational factors (HOF), or in other words, the identification and integration of the factors necessary for a human activity to be conducted efficiently and safely:
– individuals (skills, state of health, etc.),
– the workgroup (quality of the groups and discussions, sharing of information and knowledge, solidarity, etc.),
– the working environment (the extent to which it is designed to take into account human characteristics and the tasks required),
– the living organization (particularly the role of managers, the involvement of employees in setting the rules, and a participative approach to handling problematic situations…)
Source: The ICSI “Safety Culture” working group (2017); Safety Culture: from Understanding to Action. Issue 2018-01 of the Cahiers de la Sécurité Industrielle collection, Institut pour une Culture de Sécurité Industrielle (ICSI), Toulouse, France.
