Every group of people develops a “culture” – shared attitudes, beliefs and ways of working. The group’s shared attitudes, beliefs and ways of working in relation to health and safety can be described as its safety culture. This holds true for manufacturing companies in the thermoforming and vacuum forming industries. In a company with a good safety culture everyone puts health and safety high on the organisation’s list of priorities. People share accurate perceptions of the risks and adopt the same positive attitudes to health and safety. Everyone in the organisation, including shop floor employees, know that they are not expected to react to a problem by cutting corners on health and safety.

Q 1 - Why is it so important for companies in our industry to have a positive safety culture?

There has been a spate of very serious accidents, including fatalities, during the operation and setting of thermoforming and vacuum forming machines over the past few years. In most cases investigations into the circumstances revealed that the underlying root causes included a poor safety culture prevailing within the employer’s organisation.

An organisation’s safety culture has a direct impact on things like:

• the quality of the safety management system;
• the success or failure of health and safety initiatives;
• whether employees comply with rules and procedures;
• whether they are prepared to take risks;
• the balance between safety and production.
  

If the industry wishes to ensure that risks to health and safety are well managed and that serious accidents are prevented then it is essential that employers develop a sound safety culture within their organisations.

Companies with a well-developed safety culture tend to manage health and safety risks well. Their accident rates tend to be low compared with companies with a poor safety culture. Employees suffer less occupational ill health. Absenteeism rates are lower and the overall costs to the business from personal injury claims, sickness absence and other accidental loss are lower.
Companies with a well-developed safety culture may find it easier to obtain liability insurance cover and they probably stand a better chance of doing so for a reasonable annual premium.

Q 2 : What are the features of an organisation with a good safety culture?

Companies with a good safety culture tend to be “learning organisations”. They learn from experience and make the necessary improvements to ensure that they will benefit in the future.

In general, they also:

• provide high quality training, including health and safety training, for their staff;
• provide a good working environment for their employees;
• have employees who experience a high degree of job satisfaction;
• have a stable workforce;
• handle external pressures well.

Q 3 : What influences safety culture?

An effective health and safety management system is essential. However, simply adopting a systematic approach to managing health and safety is not enough on its own to guarantee success. Much depends on how the system “lives” and this is determined by how senior and line managers behave when it comes to health and safety.

There are a number of key aspects of an organisation that influence its culture. These include the following.

• Senior management commitment. This is absolutely crucial to a positive health and safety culture. If the senior executives are genuinely committed to achieving high standards of health and safety and demonstrate that commitment through effective leadership they can succeed in producing higher levels of motivation and concern for health and safety throughout the company. How much resource (time, money, people) and support that is given to health and safety by the “controlling minds” of the company is a good indicator of the level of commitment. It is essential that senior managers are actively involved in leading the health and safety effort and that they are seen to be doing so.
  
• Management style. A humanistic approach in which managers show regard for the individual’s personal and work problems is most likely to be effective. Managers need to take direct and rapid action to identify and resolve individual problems in an appropriate caring and concerned manner.
  
  
• Management being “visible” on health and safety. This is very important for a good safety culture. Managers at all levels communicate their attitudes to health and safety not only by what they say but also by what they do. Good managers are seen regularly on the shop floor and talk to their employees about health and safety every day. They participate in health and safety tours and audits, accident and incident investigations and they attend and play an active role in meetings of safety committees. They do not just leave it all to the health and safety manager, health and safety adviser or safety officer.
  
  
• Good communications at all levels. Managers need to be open and approachable on health and safety issues. Employees need to be given direct access to senior managers where appropriate. Questions about health and safety should be part of everyday work conversations at all levels in the company. Health and safety should be given priority as an item for discussion at management meetings from board level downwards. Team briefings and toolbox talks can be used to communicate important health and safety messages. Above all the communication should always be a “two way” process.
  
  
• Workforce participation and ownership of the health and safety effort. Companies with a well-developed safety culture encourage the workforce at all levels to become actively involved in the health and safety effort. They consult them properly on all proposals that have implications for health and safety. But they do more than this, they encourage the employees who are required to follow safety-related rules and procedures to get involved in developing and writing those rules and procedures and they invite them to participate in health and safety workplace inspections and audits as well as incident investigations. Employees who work on the shop floor often have a good understanding of the health and safety problems and are usually best placed to help suggest or devise the solutions.
  
  
• Balancing production and health and safety goals. Getting a balance between production and health and safety goals is essential. If people believe that high standards of safety inevitably mean slower production rates or that increased production can only be achieved by “cutting corners” then the organisation is unlikely to succeed in establishing a positive safety culture. Excessive production pressure produces an atmosphere of distraction and a shortage of time that will lead to human errors. Excessive pressure can also give rise to physical or mental health effects. In a positive safety culture health and safety is regarded as important, is promoted, and never compromised.

Q 4 : What can we do to influence our safety culture?

The culture of a company can be influenced in a positive way if the most senior executives, the “controlling minds” of the organisation, take the lead in implementing a step-by-step approach to improvement.

Step 1. Review the existing health and safety climate in the company.

This involves deciding where you are now in terms of the level of development of your safety culture. It also involves understanding that it takes time to change the culture of an organisation. But it can be done. You need to start by gathering information to help you decide where you are now. You can use specialist consultants to help you do this. Another way would be to use the Health and Safety Executive’s “Health and Safety Climate Tool” (see reference 1) that can be purchased off the shelf. It consists of a set of questionnaires that you can use to obtain information from your managers, supervisors and shop floor employees, a computer software programme for analysing the results together with a guidebook to explain how to use the tool. Alternatively, you can carry out an independent health and safety attitudes survey of your workforce asking them questions about their perception of how committed the organisation is to health and safety, how well health and safety goals, plans and rules are communicated, how well trained they feel they are in relation to health and safety, whether they believe that corners are cut or people take risks, what they see as the obstacles to safe behaviour and so on.

If you prefer not to adopt such a formal survey approach there are informal ways of reviewing the current situation.

For example, you could:

• Review the status of the health and safety professional within the organisation. Does he/she have an appropriate high status and profile with direct access to the chief executive?
• Review the status of the safety committee. Do senior managers attend its meetings? Do the meetings deal with strategic and planning issues or is the committee just a “clearing house” for dealing with reported health and safety problems? Is the committee taken seriously? Does everyone value its work?
• Ask how, and how often, senior managers ask for, and receive, information about the company’s health and safety performance. What information do they receive? How do they analyse and interpret it? How do they act on it?
• Ask how, and how often, managers and supervisors interact with the people they manage on health and safety issues?
• Do they always discuss progress on health and safety at all management meetings and team briefings? Is health and safety item 1 on the agenda?
• Do managers carry out or lead health and safety tours and inspections in their departments at appropriate intervals?
• Do they lead or participate in health and safety audits and incident investigations?
• Do they visit the shop floor regularly and talk to shop floor employees about health and safety issues?
• Do they always intervene and take appropriate action if they witness unsafe acts or conditions or rules being violated?
• Do they always set a good example by following the rules themselves e.g. always wearing personal protective equipment in designated protection areas? Is the message from managers: “Do as I do – It is the same as what I say”?
  

A fuller list of questions that you can ask yourself about your organisation to help assess its safety culture is given at the appendix.

Step 2. Decide the aspects that should be given priority for change.

Some companies will find the information they obtain from step 1 very revealing. There may be a great deal that they need to change. Companies will be unable to make all the necessary changes at once. So they will have to decide what to tackle first. Trying to get employees at shop floor level to change their attitudes, beliefs and behaviour in relation to health and safety without first ensuring that senior executives and managers are demonstrating full commitment and leadership on health and safety is unlikely to succeed. As a general rule changes usually need to start from the top down. Shop floor workers are unlikely to respond positively to initiatives aimed at improving their health and safety behaviour unless they believe that senior managers are genuinely committed to health and safety and that their line managers and supervisors are providing the necessary leadership and support.

Actions to improve safety culture might also include ensuring that health and safety procedures:

• are based on a shared perception of the hazards and risks;
• are realistic and workable;
• have been developed with the full participation of employees; and
• are continuously reviewed.
  

There are a number of commercially available behavioural safety programmes that employers who are keen to improve safety culture can adopt to help develop a more positive safety culture. They involve modifying the behaviour of employees in order to make the behaviours “safe”. The programme steps typically involve securing management commitment to, and workforce ownership of, the programme, establishing a representative steering group, training members of the steering group in behaviour observation, listing the safety-critical behaviours to be observed, establishing the baseline position, carrying out observations and providing feedback, target setting and review, modifying the work environment, monitoring the programme’s performance and reviewing the list of critical behaviours before starting the next round of behaviour observation.

These programmes can be successful but important prerequisites include your organisation having a reasonable safety management system in place already, a sufficient level of cultural maturity and commitment to the programme from the chief executive. In other words your organisation must be “ready” to adopt a behavioural safety programme. A further drawback is that most commercial behavioural programmes focus on the behaviours of shop floor employees. Often it is the behaviours of senior managers, line managers and supervisors in relation to the way they provide leadership and manage health and safety that are most in need of change in the first instance.

Step 3. Decide the actions that you need to take to bring about these changes and draw up a plan for implementing them.

The usual rules of planning apply here. The objectives you set for bringing about the required change need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and with Target dates by when they are to be achieved). You also need to involve line managers, supervisors and others in the planning process. You will require their cooperation in implementing the plans so you need to secure their buy-in from the outset.

Step 4. Check and review the actions you have taken.

At the appropriate point in time you need to check how well the changes you have made are working. Are they becoming embedded into the way people do things within the organisation and are they working properly? You then need to go back to step 1 and repeat the cycle for the next phase of improvements.

But Remember That !

The underlying causes of serious accidents and cases of occupational ill health in the thermoforming and vacuum forming industries often include fundamental problems with the safety culture within the employer’s organisation.
Employers who have experienced serious incidents and those who are serious about improving their management of the risks to the health and safety at work of employees would do well to critically examine their organisational safety culture. If they find it wanting they can change it. The change will not happen overnight. It will take time and requires sustained effort and commitment from the very top of the organisation.

The most important factors for ensuring success include the level of commitment and determination on the part of the Chief Executive and senior managers, how well they communicate and demonstrate that commitment and determination to the workforce and how successful they are at getting the workforce at all levels to buy-into, and become actively involved in, the health and safety effort.

References

1. HSG 48. Reducing error and protecting people. Health and Safety Executive 1999 (ISBN 0-7176-2452-8). Available from HSE Books, PO Box 1999, Sudbury, Suffolk CO10 6FS. Telephone 01787 881165.

2. HSG 65. Successful health and safety management. Health and Safety Executive 1997 (ISBN 0-7176-1276-7). Available from HSE Books.

3. Health and Safety Climate Tool. Health and Safety Executive 1997 ISBN (0 7176 1462 X). Available from HSE Books.

If you answer the questions set out below honestly it will help you to assess your organisation’s safety culture. But before you can answer these questions you need to find out about the true perceptions of your workforce at all levels. You need to bear in mind that the perceptions of shop floor workers may be considerably different from those of supervisors and line managers. You also need to bear in mind that the answers that employees give to any questions will depend on who is asking them. The most honest responses are likely to come if the questions are asked by someone who is independent of company management and if questions are asked, and answered, in confidence, in such a way that the respondents can be confident that their names will not be recorded or revealed.
The following are questions that the chief executive or senior managers need to ask themselves about their organisation. You will need to devise appropriate questions to put to your employees so that you can then use the collective answers to help you answer these “big picture” questions.

1: Management Commitment

• Where do employees perceive safety to be in the priorities of:
  • Senior managers?
  • Middle managers?
  • First line supervisors?
    
• How do senior and middle managers and first line managers show their commitment to health and safety?
• How often are they seen on the shop floor?
• Do they talk about safety issues when they are on the shop floor?
• How often?
• How often are health and safety issues discussed compared with other issues such as production or quality?
• Do managers “walk the talk” on health and safety?
• Do they always deal effectively with safety issues raised?
• What balance do the actions of senior, middle and first line managers show between safety and production?
• Do employees trust management over safety?
• Is the message from managers consistently “Do as I do –It is the same as what I say” (or are employees unable to hear what the manager says about safety because they are being deafened by what he/she does)?

2: Communication

• Is there effective two-way communication on health and safety issues?
• How often is safety discussed:
• Between line mangers and the people they manage?
• Between colleagues?
• What is the workforce told about the company’s health and safety action plan or programme?
• How good is their understanding of the action plan?
• How open are people about health and safety?
• When it comes to health and safety Is the message from managers consistently: “Do as I do –It is the same as what I say” (or are employees unable to hear what the manager says because they are being deafened by what he/she does)?

3: Employee Involvement

• How are people at all levels, including shop floor workers, involved in the health and safety effort?
• How often are individual employees asked for their input on safety issues?
• How often do operators report unsafe conditions and near miss incidents?
• Is there active, structured involvement from shop floor workers in the health and safety effort (e.g. problem solving, writing rules and procedures, safety-related projects)?
• Is there a continuous improvement approach to health and safety at work?
• Whose responsibility is health and safety regarded to be (is it perceived to rest with operators, supervisors and line managers or with the health and safety advisor or officer)?
• Is there genuine cooperation (joint effort between everyone in the company) on health and safety?
  

4: Training & Provision Of Information

• Do employees feel confident that they have had all the training they need?
  
• How accurate are employees’ perceptions of workplace hazards and risks?
  
• How effective is the safety training (including that given to supervisors and managers)?
  
• How are safety-related training needs identified?
  
• How easily available is health and safety information to employees?

5: Motivation

• Do managers give employees feedback on the company’s or the factory’s health and safety performance?
• How?
  
• Do managers notice unsafe acts?
• Do managers at all levels intervene and take appropriate action if they witness unsafe acts or violations of rules and procedures?
  
• How do they deal with them?
  
• Do employees feel able to report unsafe acts?
  
• How is discipline applied to safety (Is the shop floor employee blamed and disciplined when things go wrong? Are line managers and senior managers held accountable for enforcing safety-related rules and procedures?)
  
• Do employees feel that this is a good place to work? Why/why not?
  
• Are employees proud of the company?

6: Compliance With Procedures?

• What are written procedures used for?
  
• What decides that a particular task needs to be covered by a written procedure?
  
• Are procedures read?
  
• Do they always follow them? Why/why not?
  
• Do the rules and procedures reflect the way things are actually done in practice?
  
• Do employees feel there are too many procedures and rules?
  
• How well are people trained in the rules and procedures?
  
• Do supervisors and managers monitor/check that important rules and procedures are complied with?
  
• Are the rules and procedures written by those who are required to follow them?

7: Learning Organisation

• Are accidents, incidents and cases of ill health reported, investigated and analysed in a systematic way?
  
• Are the immediate causes identified and dealt with promptly?
  
• Are the underlying weaknesses in the management system that allowed the circumstances of the incident to arise always identified by asking the question why?
  
• Are appropriate actions taken to deal with these weaknesses?
  
• Do employees feel confident in reporting incidents, near misses and unsafe conditions?
  
• Do they report them in practice?
  
• Are their reports acted upon?
  
• Are they told what remedial action has been taken?
  
• Do people at all levels challenge the way things are done (or do they just accept them because that is the way they have always been done)?

Issue 1 : Nov 2003
M Woodley : G King