Posted By Raymond Rapp OSH The concept of organisational culture is a difficult one to appraise because there are few tangible links in which to make any comparisons. That said, there is a good argument that the health and safety culture is either influenced by the wider organisational culture or it is one and the same. In my experience policies such as discipline, rewards, benefits etc play an important role in both doctrines. However, often undervalued are extrinsic values such as trust, fairness and honesty. These have an enormous impact on the safety culture of an organistaion. Regards Ray

Posted By Merv Newman A useful definition of "safety culture" is "the sum total of everything we do here to ensure Health and Safety" I can dig out the source but I thing it is related to the atomic energy industry. It takes years to change a company culture. I usually start at the top with the board or site management first getting them to express, before their n-1 managers their personal commitment to safety. I then tend to ask them to take a personal responsibility to champion one aspect of H&S - PPE, chemicals, training, incident inquiries, safety audits and so on. (non production managers are not spared) Best way for them to do this is to form and guide a small work group, members being a cross section of the site - all levels, all departments. Depending on the site I can usually get a reasonable percentage of employees directly involved in some aspect of safety. Each of those involved people then becomes the local "expert" on whatever his group is responsible for. I also want managers to get out on the shop floor talking to employees about H&S. I used to do this exclusively put putting in monthly management safety audits but have since developed other tools (including BBS) which are much more congenial and user friendly. So all of this is intended to increase the frequency, the quality and the penetration of H&S in the lives of managers and employees. Go back to the original quote ; "The sum total of everything we do around here to improve H&S" More people directly and indirectly involved, higher quality procedures and systems developed by the safety groups, increased management and employee ownership. That "sum total" goes sky high. And the accident rates nosedive. Easy peasy. The other quote explaining safety culture is "That's the way we do things here"

Posted By Michael Ellerby A useful publication that discusses the impoertance of safety culture is the 2000 NHS publication "An organisation with a memory"

Posted By SteveHowells Morning OSH, My company have been heavily involved with changing the culture of their business for around 3 years now. I agree with the previous in that it has to start at the top. If senior management are not comitted then it is virtually inmpossible, and unexpected, for the rest of the workforce top take it on. Our performance has been improved 10 fold with our R.I.R. figure going from 3.3 down to 0.50, major accidents from 24 down to 6, minors from 300 down to 115 and Near Miss/Continuous Improvement ideas up from 110 to 2500, all in the space of 3 years. The major factor in this is the "Behavioural Safety" workshops undertaken by every colleague within the company, which gets them to focus on personal risk assessment before carrying out a task. Management systems are good, but not everything. We need to rely on empowering people to grasp the H&S thing. After all we can Tell Tell Tell, but I would rather have colleagues doing it for themselves. A behavioural approach has been part of the Big Boys systems for years now, and they don't do badly, performance wise. Hope this helps Steve

Posted By Raymond Rapp The HSE have a Safety Climate Tool (SCT) package that can be purchased. However, I think that designing your own bespoke SCT is a better and more interesting way of testing the curent safety culture of your organisation. Ray

Posted By Kieran J Duignan OSH 'As useful as you can make it...' is a reasonable answer to your question 'How useful is the concept of organisational culture to the management of occupational health and safety? For the userfulness of the concept, like any tool, depends on the user. Coaching is probably the approach to organisational culture that has most impact, when delivered by a skilful coach able to work at all levels. In a highly sophisticated environment, he/she can fine tune the culture; in a run o' the mill environment, he/she may either get the process ticking - or wisely withdraw advising management to 'get real' about their commitment. For some stimulating ideas, visit www.davidsarkus.com the URL of 'The Safety Coach'.