If an organization stops searching for improvements and new ideas through benchmarking and seeking out best practices, it is in danger of no longer improving safety performance and culture. A learning organization will tap into the ideas, energy, and concerns of personnel at all levels of the organization and benchmark competitors and industries.
Enhancements in safety are sustained by ensuring that individuals and teams widely recognize the benefits obtained from improvements, leading to even greater commitment and identification with improving safety culture. Ideally, all employees are involved in proactively contributing ideas for improvement and are encouraged to become aware of what world-class performance in terms of safety means in their jobs. They contribute not because they are told to do so but because they want to do so. To do this, staff need to be allowed to compare how they do things with how other workers do so that they know what constitutes excellence in their field of work.
To generate a sense of achievement, they need to be enabled to carry out, wherever it is safe and sensible for them to do so, the improvements they have identified, and to do so with the evident encouragement and the full backing of management. It is necessary to provide mechanisms to transfer experience and ideas within the organization. It is also necessary to have formal systems for monitoring and providing feedback to management so that they know the effectiveness of the improvements that have been carried out and to ensure that the organization retains ‘corporate memory’ of why and how improvements have been made.
Although employees often concentrate initially on industrial safety and issues relating to plant conditions, involvement in and commitment to the improvement process is likely to lead to a wider appreciation of issues of nuclear safety and environmental issues and to have broader benefits for the business in promoting a culture of active involvement and teamwork.
Schemes which encourage staff to provide ideas for improvement are valuable. Sometimes they can lead to either a team being rewarded or donations being made to good causes. However, experience shows that such schemes tend to lose momentum and become less effective with time. More sustainable approaches involve encouraging staff to work as teams and continue to seek improvements by identifying prioritized actions to enhance safety in their own work areas.
Various indicators have been developed which allow some assessment to be made of the quality of particular aspects of safety culture in any organization. These are difficult to measure reliably and should not be given undue weight. Nonetheless, they can provide a useful indication of the progress and areas where further attention is required.
The process of safety performance declining through failure to encourage the adoption of new ideas and practices is insidious. Organizations rarely recognize the early signs of deterioration. The following questions might be considered concerning an organization’s commitment to learning:
- Are there mechanisms that fully involve staff and relevant contractors in contributing ideas for improvement?
- Are they encouraged to implement these measures themselves whenever it is safe and beneficial for them to do so?
- Are employees, as individuals and in teams, given the opportunity to look outside their organization to learn from best practices
- Are they given time to effect improvements?
- Are they encouraged to share ideas with their peers and to evaluate their working practices and performance?
- Are the results of the learning process fed back into the system of management and training for safety, and are mechanisms in place to ensure that a ‘corporate
memory’ of events is retained? - Are there systems in place to allow safety performance to be critically appraised, both by line managers and by others independent of line managers, to try to identify whether the organization’s safety standards are falling or whether complacency is developing?
Adapted from:
KEY PRACTICAL ISSUES IN STRENGTHENING SAFETY CULTURE
A report by the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group
