Hi Forum,
I am interested in measuring my company’s safety culture. What are people’s experiences of the providers out there? Can you recommend one?
Thanks!

An effective provider ensures that YOU and your colleagues actually pinpoint how you will use the survey results by offering an assessment of where your company, and you, are in your safety evolution.

Two good providers of this kind are:

www.rydermarsh.com

www.keilcentre.com

Since the single most important element of a safety culture survey is what managers in your company will actually DO in response to it, from what you say you may really best benefit from coaching to learn to design, pilot, administer, score and discuss data from a survey. That way, you not only get baseline data you - and ideally some managers - actually want but also the knowledge of how to carry out repeat exercises on an annual basis with little or no further cost.

If you need further suggestions, why not look up the directory of chartered (occupational) psychologists at www.bps.org.uk though those members of the BPS who ae familiar with safety may well be registered at www.oshcr.co.uk (as the BPS is not yet one of the organisations recognised for eligbility on the OSHCR)

The penultimate observation by 'teh-boy' about the HSE survey highlights a very important consideration in the design and use of a cultural survey.

The approach used by the HSE (and most safety psychologists) is what is termed 'positivist'. In effect, this means that it's assumed that there's a world that objectively exists which can be identified and measured by 'experts' using scientific methods, in language of their choice. Technically, this method is called 'nomothetic', due to its emphasis on scientific laws or patterns.

An alternative approach has proved very effective in enabling organisations to recognise the patterns of beliefs and attitudes shaping their behaviour; known as 'phenomenological', the method used by personal construct psychologists is to design a survey in the LANGUAGE OF THE MANAGEMENT AND WORKERS OF AN ORGANISATION. When well designed, the feedback provides numerical information on areas of similarity and of difference - so you can build on the former in order to really understand the latter. (For example, while very few managers will openly indicate they treat safety as forgettable, this approach can reveal how what they do value implies that it rates far, far below what they rate highly).

BOTH approaches can be productive or a waste of resources, depending on the skill with which the survey is designed and how the feedback is used. While the personal construct approach has the great advantage of generating feedback in the very words chosen by your own managers and workers, it may be a bit more expensive to access because very few safety psychologists are qualified to apply it well.