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Posted By Raymond Rapp
Can a safety culture be accurately measured? If so, I would be obliged if someone can provide me with an example.
I am not convinced that a safety culture can be accurately measured, but I am prepared to be proved wrong. Those that I have seen eg employee attitude surveys,in my humble opinion, are methodogically weak and therefore not an accurate measuring device.
Should you wish to contribute any comments for or against, please feel free.
Regards,
Ray
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Posted By Robert K Lewis
Measurement of any cultural attribute is always fraught with difficulties. I have to agree with you that the attitude type surveys are subject to many of the drawbacks of any other type of survey/opinion poll with a few extra. The only measures that have some real value are the soft ones which are very reliant on the "feel" or "impressions" gained by the measurer. I tend to view things in terms of a Wheel - divided into 3 segmments People, Procedures, Hardware (equipment etc) and the central hub is Leadership. Only procedures and hardware are truly susceptible to hard measurement. The remainder depend on the skills and sensitivity of the assessor.
I looked at the question some years ago and had to admit defeat in achieving an accurate, repeatable measure. Even the HSE climate tool for me looks primarily at Procedures and Hardware although it does nod at people en route.
Bob
Bob
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Posted By Raymond Rapp
thanks for your opinion Bob. I suspect many will agree with your points, a safety culture is not tangible and can only be measured subjectively.
Ray
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Posted By David Brede
The HSE Climate tool is probably the only measure that has been widely used across a range of businesses and orgaisations and has quantititative outcomes. Thus using it enables one firm or organisation to be compared against another in this way.
However culture, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder and one persons view is not the same as another.
Personally I take the view that you can compare one organisations safety culture against another and justify your findings with evidence such as the Safety Climate tool, published data, interviews with staff employed et al.
For my degree I looked at the overall culture of a business and developed a view as to the impact of safety culture within it.
There is a lot of published work on business culture but few if any consider safety as such. Nonetheless the safety issue is there but it requires more researchers coming from a safety perspective to explore it.
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Posted By Ken Lucas
Conversely on the topic why bother measuring anyway - I seem to remember reading that a safety culture when developed:
"is not the be-all and end-all, I've never heard anyone in business talk about the production culture or the financial management culture. I haven't heard it, because managers understand that they have to manage their finances and ensure production to ensure the very survival of their business". (Shaw)
RSVP
Ken
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Posted By Peter Vintner
I have to agree with Ken. I have never seen a safety culture in practice. The term is bandied about as if it actually does exist. Over the years one becomes aware of managers who manage well and others who manage less well.
In my view term safety culture should be laid to rest and replaced with actual safety practice.
Pete
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Posted By Geoff Burt
Agree completely. Any safety practitioner with a bit of experience can go into a workplace and within 3 or 4 minutes at the most (usually instantly) you can tell if there is a poor, average or good attitude to safety.
I've never understood what purpose it serves to try to 'measure' a non-tangible - but I'm willing to listen!
Geoff
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Posted By Robert K Lewis
I think the reason most people hit the drum on this is for the very reason that no one has to think about the culture for instance of financial management etc because it is so firmly established to manage these items that there is no need to spend time and effort, to any great degree, to reinforce the desired results - precisely as Barings Bank understood life!
It is not an end in itself merely an indicator of whether things are moving in the right direction. The sense that you can repidly tell where a particular individual sits is precisely the sort of soft measure I was talking of. In my wheel analogy it is well to remember that at least 90% of accidents are rooted in People and Leadership - The areas that have to be soft measured.
I must admit that it is not a regular occurrence to do it methodically but I do undertake it at each and every site visit informally to asssess whether the team is moving forwards, backwards or is stationery. It only takes a couple of minutes in reality, and comes at the end of the Action Tour.
Bob
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Posted By David Brede
The point of measuring safety culture or indeed business culture in its widest sense is to gain an understanding of the dynamics of an organisation and from there to implement change.
As a safety practitioner I have a tool box of quick fixes of training programmes, toolbox talks, enforcing changes in procedure, adherence to rules or law among others. The point that understanding culture tries to reach is are these activities ends in themselves or are they symptomatic of a wider malaise, and if so, what?
Organisation culture comes from where the power lies (not necessarily with the CEO),its history, how it sees itself, and the attitudes of key players including personnel and customers. In the rail industry many engineers see their proudest moments as how they coped with a major disaster. Most rail travellers want to have an uneventful journey that starts and arrives on time on a train that is comfortable, clean and crewed with pleasant staff who know and perform their jobs to a high level of competance. Spot the cultural difference there!
Doing a site visit as said by others in this thread gives you a quick appraisal and often the opportunity to do a quick fix. Assessing safety culture and changing it for the better is the long term, strategic approach which is aimed at getting the guys and gals on site to do things right first time without your intervention.
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Posted By Robert K Lewis
I think I indicated that it was done periodically but I feel that often we place a lot of bias on the hardware and procedures and this diguises the people element. Root and branch change when we can get a true sense of the nature of the interdependenc of all persons at work.
Bob
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Posted By Raymond Rapp
Thanks to all those who have contributed on this subject and to summarise:
Why measure a safety culture? In health and safety it seems we are obsessed with measuring everything - 'you can't manage what you can't measure' syndrome.
A safety culture is a topical phrase, most of those who use it probably could not define it. John Prescott said after the Paddington train crash - "I would like to see a change froma blame culture to a safety culture in the railway industry." I rest my case.
Can a safety culture be separated from the business culture? A for profit organisation's culture has been described as 'the dynamic tension between four fundamental business factors' eg production, cost, quality and safety. Therefore, arguably the safety culture is an intergral part of the organisation and not a separate entity.
In theory it would be possible to measure an organisations safety culture reasonably accurately. The problem is to develop a tool to measure with would take a great deal of time and resources ie a survey of some description. Due to the vast amount of factors associated with safety only those with a specific knowledge of safety would be able to comprehend it. That being the case it would mainly be senior management, h&s advisors and possibly some h&s reps, probably less than 5% of most organisations employees. Would it be worth the trouble anyway?
Some have mentioned 'hardware' issues such management systems etc These have little bearing on the subject, a culture by definition evolves around people. Taking into account issues such as training, risk perception and behavioural safety. Although the latter is a little contentious, just focusing on individual behaviour should absolve management from providing safe systems of work etc. or promoting a blame culture. I see a safety culture as a clock, at 9 0'clock is a blame culture, 3 O'clock is a blame free culture and somewhere in between is a safety culture.
Ray
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Posted By Jay Joshi You may want to refer to:- Title: "ACSNI human factors study group. Third report: Organising for safety. [Study Group on Human Factors. Third report]" Corporate Author(s): Health and Safety Commission. Advisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations (ACSNI). Study Group on Human Factors HMSO, 1993 "Safety cultures : giving staff a clear role" http://www.hse.gov.uk/re...rr_pdf/1999/CRR99214.pdfHSE Contract Research Report; no. 214/1999
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Posted By Robert K Lewis
Raymond
Be careful in dismissing hardware - anthropologically and sociologically speaking a culture has to be defined in terms of the "Tools" that it uses. Yes the people are important as I have said because they cause 90%+ of the failures. Management systems are not hardware they are procedures which is a separate element of culture.
There was a Brazilian educator - Paolo Freire who looked at learning and he established that there are effectively three levels
Iliterate - Where all are told what to do by the educated classes
Banking - People are trained in precise terms to think and do in particular ways which match the educator
Independent - People are trained to think and analyse for themseleves and they recognise connections between themselves and others AND with the social group within which they are established.
Most education as currently undertaken falls into the second category. It is actually essential to achieve high standards of safety to bring people's learning and doing into the third category - this is the one I would suggest is what I termed a culture of Interdependency. Measurement helps to know how far we have come and how far there is to go.
Bob
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Posted By Ken Lucas
A very good thread Ray - I found all the responses very interesting.
Ken
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Posted By Raymond Rapp
Robert and of course Ken,
Thanks for your comments. Although psychosocial issues are not my strong point, I think I get your point Robert. I will have to read your comments again when I have my dictionary to hand...
Incidentally, the main purpose of this thread was to gain some insight into the possible use/merits of a safety culture, which may be the topic of my dissertation next year.
Thanks to all and a merry Xmas.
Ray
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Posted By David Brede
Ray,
Well you certainly have a wide range of views on the issue to build in to your dissertation.
Best of Luck with your dissertation. It certaily worked for me!
David
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Posted By Dave Wilson In my organisation we do an annual safety culture survey and I have the results from the last 3 and all the surrounding documentation that went withit. Must say that I was sceptical beforehand but am now a convert! Get in touch if you want the info can email electronically david.m.wilson@britishairways.com
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Posted By Raymond Rapp
David,
Thanks for your offer and I have responded directly via your email and yes, I too can see the benefits of a properly designed and implemented 'climate survey'.
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