Summit statement on safety culture
The second international safety culture summit was held in Halifax on October 10th-12th 2017. Over 300 delegates from Canada, United States and Europe attended the summit. These delegates represented significant intellectual capital, as they included senior leaders and safety professionals from a range of safety critical industries such as transportation, petrochemical and energy. Their expert perspective on safety culture was captured during the summit and synthesised to produce this statement on the status of safety culture including current knowledge and areas for further development.
There was a broad consensus about the importance of safety culture and agreement that safety culture consists of shared norms, values and attitudes that determine the effectiveness of safety management. It was also clear that companies from a wide range of industries face similar challenges in creating and maintaining a positive safety culture. These challenges include identifying valid assessment tools, involving employees in safety and educating leaders about safety culture. While it was accepted that companies find safety culture improvement challenging, it was also argued that there is a need to reframe the conversation from culture change being “hard” to a positive ongoing journey.
A common challenge across industries was assessing safety culture. Best practices have evolved over time to include a number of quantitative and qualitative methods such as focus groups, interviews, observations, and document analysis. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive assessment tools and it is hard for companies to identify quality providers. Areas for future work on safety culture assessment included providing guidance on how to select a safety culture provider, enabling small organizations to conduct an assessment and developing simple tools and guidance on how to conduct a comprehensive safety culture assessment.
There was also agreement that leaders are a key driver of safety culture. One of the challenges for leaders is being perceived as authentic and genuine when discussing safety. Demonstrating authentic commitment to safety is difficult for senior leaders, as they have limited opportunity to interact directly with employees. Experts at the summit suggested that leaders demonstrate commitment by engaging employees in safety interventions, providing resources for safety and implementation of safety systems. Leaders should strive to have a “Say:Do” ratio of 1 and a 2:1 ratio of listening to speaking.
It was recognized that regulators have a role in promoting a positive safety culture, but there was less agreement about their level of involvement. It was generally agreed that regulators should provide guidance and support to companies and less support for regulators specifying safety culture requirements. It was also acknowledged that the regulator’s own safety culture is an important topic, which requires further attention.
The greatest cultural challenge discussed during the summit was the need to view safety differently. Instead of viewing safety as the absence of failure, it needs to be viewed as the presence of safeguards. We need to build a safety culture where safety is viewed as the effectiveness of defenses to manage failure in a way that prevents harm. This type of safety culture views the worker as the solution, not the problem. This shift involves moving away from focusing on the consequence of incidents to focusing on the context of the event. This approach accepts that worker error is never the root cause of an incident, as worker errors are triggering events that we need to understand. It is important to focus on what failed and not who failed. This will require a significant cultural shift for safety critical companies.
In order to build on the success of the summit, there was a desire to create an international community of practice to share knowledge on safety culture. This community could work together to find solutions to the challenges identified during the summit.
There was a broad consensus about the importance of safety culture and agreement that safety culture consists of shared norms, values and attitudes that determine the effectiveness of safety management. It was also clear that companies from a wide range of industries face similar challenges in creating and maintaining a positive safety culture. These challenges include identifying valid assessment tools, involving employees in safety and educating leaders about safety culture. While it was accepted that companies find safety culture improvement challenging, it was also argued that there is a need to reframe the conversation from culture change being “hard” to a positive ongoing journey.
A common challenge across industries was assessing safety culture. Best practices have evolved over time to include a number of quantitative and qualitative methods such as focus groups, interviews, observations, and document analysis. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive assessment tools and it is hard for companies to identify quality providers. Areas for future work on safety culture assessment included providing guidance on how to select a safety culture provider, enabling small organizations to conduct an assessment and developing simple tools and guidance on how to conduct a comprehensive safety culture assessment.
There was also agreement that leaders are a key driver of safety culture. One of the challenges for leaders is being perceived as authentic and genuine when discussing safety. Demonstrating authentic commitment to safety is difficult for senior leaders, as they have limited opportunity to interact directly with employees. Experts at the summit suggested that leaders demonstrate commitment by engaging employees in safety interventions, providing resources for safety and implementation of safety systems. Leaders should strive to have a “Say:Do” ratio of 1 and a 2:1 ratio of listening to speaking.
It was recognized that regulators have a role in promoting a positive safety culture, but there was less agreement about their level of involvement. It was generally agreed that regulators should provide guidance and support to companies and less support for regulators specifying safety culture requirements. It was also acknowledged that the regulator’s own safety culture is an important topic, which requires further attention.
The greatest cultural challenge discussed during the summit was the need to view safety differently. Instead of viewing safety as the absence of failure, it needs to be viewed as the presence of safeguards. We need to build a safety culture where safety is viewed as the effectiveness of defenses to manage failure in a way that prevents harm. This type of safety culture views the worker as the solution, not the problem. This shift involves moving away from focusing on the consequence of incidents to focusing on the context of the event. This approach accepts that worker error is never the root cause of an incident, as worker errors are triggering events that we need to understand. It is important to focus on what failed and not who failed. This will require a significant cultural shift for safety critical companies.
In order to build on the success of the summit, there was a desire to create an international community of practice to share knowledge on safety culture. This community could work together to find solutions to the challenges identified during the summit.
