As the “safety culture” debate rages on, I came across this 2019 research paper that I found to be spot on. Of course, those are my biases shining through as I believe all organizations have a culture; in fact, they will have multiple cultures. So I am not one who subscribes to the idea that organizations do not have a “safety culture”. I like to use the phrase “culture of safety” as this implies safety is just one of the cultures within an organization.
I think those safety pros who have had the opportunity to work for BOTH, an organization that has a solid culture of safety and one that just talks about safety, can quickly identify the status of an organization’s culture AND MORE IMPORTANTLY the desires of the senior management to improve safety. Although a “culture of safety” is near impossible to measure; it is palpable! Meaning you can get a feel for it (or not) within days, maybe even hours.
A recent “safety culture” research study yielded seven (7) safety culture-enabling factors that explicate how building a culture of safety may take place. I think most of us will agree with all seven, but certainly the vast majority of items. The report does an excellent job of laying out how a “culture of safety” is built within an organization. Here are their seven (7) safety culture-enabling factors:
- leader commitment and prioritization of safety,
- policies and resources for safety,
- group cohesion,
- psychological safety,
- safety knowledge,
- employee sense of control, and
- individual commitment to safety
We emphasize this is not necessarily a comprehensive list of factors that enable safety culture; rather, these are the broad factors uncovered in our review.
A few more highlights from the report:
Safety culture is a relatively stable social construct, gradually shaped over time by multilevel influences. We identify seven enabling factors that create conditions allowing employees to adopt safety culture values, assumptions, and norms; and four behaviors used to enact them. The consequences of these enacting behaviors provide feedback that may reinforce or revise held values, assumptions, and norms.
… four categories of individual behavioral manifestations of safety culture: (1) communication and information flow, (2) teamwork and collaboration, (3) incident reporting, and (4) fair rewarding and punishing. We do not claim this to be a comprehensive list of behavioral enactments of safety culture, but these are the factors that emerged from our review of existing models to represent the consequences of safety culture.
As norms associated with enacting behaviors develop over time, we expect safety culture to become reinforced through enhanced safety outcomes. Over time, certain situations might occur in which safety culture becomes diluted or deteriorated, such as membership changes, organizational restructuring, or major events that impact the industry. A single event is unlikely to impact the culture of an organization, as culture is inherently rooted in history (Denison, 1996), but sustaining safety culture requires the appropriate norms, values, and assumptions be relatively maintained throughout organizational changes. To explain how safety culture might be sustained, we leverage the framework depicted in Figure 2 to summarize how safety culture evolves over time and with interventions.
The basis of organizational culture is individual members sharing assumptions, values, and norms that result in similar thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Ensuring that employees adopt the appropriate values, norms, and assumptions requires imparting consistent reinforcement across the organization for an extended time.
As discussed, employees learn how they should behave, think, and feel by testing various approaches and repeating what they found successful or resulted in desirable outcomes (Rerup & Feldman, 2011; Schein, 1984). Desirable outcomes are learned through these trial-and-error attempts, social identity processes (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), and social learning (Bandura, 1977), and individuals begin to form values and assumptions that direct their behaviors.
With stability, consistency, and collectively shared experiences over time, safety culture may be reinforced (Schein, 1984). Without stability and consistency, employees may receive unreliable or mixed messages and further find it difficult to discern the appropriate values, assumptions, and norms to hold.
We suggest safety culture development relies on three key ingredients:
(1) to uphold enabling factors that create conditions conducive for safe behavioral norms, values, and assumptions,
(2) for individual employees to observe and learn from consistent outcomes of their enacting behaviors, and
(3) stability over time to allow for the collective adoption of safety culture behavioral norms, values, and assumptions.
CLICK HERE to read the full report (FREE as of 3/25/23)
