Key takeaways: An organization’s safety culture, or its workforce’s perceptions of the organization’s commitment to a safe work environment, is critical to improving safety performance and reducing serious incident rates. Read more about the history of and evaluating your safety culture, which can help identify weak areas within your system and prioritize actions.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that each year, 2.3 million workers worldwide die from a work-related injury or illness. Since the mid- ‘90s, safety literature has shifted away from employee-level factors that might be responsible for accidents and incidents, such as error or non-compliance with safety procedures, towards broader organizational factors such as safety culture and climate.
Safety culture can be defined as a collective set of attitudes, values, norms, beliefs and practices that employees of an organization and its contractors and subcontractors share with respect to safety.
Industry experts, specialists and organizations, such as the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), suggest safety culture is essential to the overall safety performance of an organization. It can have a direct impact on work-related incidents and injuries. Because of this, many organizations have begun to ask how they can gauge the health of their safety culture.
An organization’s safety culture, or its workforce’s perceptions of the organization’s commitment to a safe work environment, is critical to improving safety performance and reducing serious incident rates. As worksites adjust to the new COVID-19 reality, a strong safety culture, which now includes health concerns, has become even more critical.
Safety culture can be difficult to measure. Many organizational culture surveys focus on issues related to Human Resources or employee engagement. Feedback from ISN Hiring Client subscribers shows these HR engagements rarely provide actionable feedback for safety professionals and seldom capture the perceptions from the contractor and subcontractor perspective despite their involvement in many high-risk activities for clients.
A Brief History of Safety Culture
All too often it takes a serious incident to get the attention of industry, regulators, governments and even the public. When these parties become involved, the result often includes requirements for measuring, improving, and reporting on operational elements that effect the environment, employees, contractors or the public.
Examples include a focus on the adequacy of an organization’s safety culture within the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor incident. As a result, safety culture has become a foundational aspect of safety and working in the nuclear energy industry around the world.
Likewise, the American Petroleum Institute (API) created Recommended Practice (RP) 1173 to assist operators in the pipeline industry with creating, managing and improving their Pipeline Management Program (PMP). RP1173 has seen a large number of operators adopting the practice as standard operating procedure. A culture of safety is a prominent element of any PMP and operators following the process must ensure key indicators are established, measured, validated and improved. These indicators lead to a measurement of safety culture as a key performance indicator and improvement marker.
Why has measuring Safety Culture become more prominent?
Over the past 20 years, ISN contractor customer data shows a significant decrease in recordable incident rates; however, Serious Incidents and Fatalities (SIFs) are declining at a much slower pace. Based on this metric, there has been a prominent shift of focus among industry thought leaders towards life-altering events versus other recordable incidents. Leaders are shifting away from lagging indicators to leading indicators and leaning into an approach that is expectant and proactive.
In a survey conducted by ISN, 75% of the surveyed Hiring Clients believe improving safety culture and value alignment is an effective approach to reducing SIFs. This same group of respondents indicated they expect the outsourcing of their work to contractors to increase or remain the same. The increase in outsourcing increases risk exposure and creates other challenges for Hiring Clients; however, contractors usually bring an expertise and skillset to the task they are contracted to complete.
The idea that companies should capture feedback and include contractors and subcontractors in the overall workplace safety culture conversations is not limited to Hiring Clients. In fact, ISO recently released ISO 45001:2018 as an international standard for Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S). The standard requires all workers to be part of the consultation and decision-making process surrounding workplace safety culture. The standard now defines “worker” to include contractors as well as employees.
According to ISO 45001:2018 Clause 5, safety culture is characterized in part by several factors, including:
Assess. Address. Evolve.
Best-in-class organizations that seek to improve their safety culture follow a similar process in their transformation journeys. That is, leadership clearly defines and communicates the organization’s goals down to the front-line worker, ensuring they understand the importance of assessing areas of strength, weakness and potential risk for the organization. They also capture feedback from the contractor and subcontractor perspective. Leaders across best-in-class organizations ensure the company acts on key areas of opportunity and communicates results and actions back to the workforce throughout the process. In the spirit of continuous improvement, they address and reassess improvements periodically, usually at least every 18-24 months.
Evaluating your safety culture can help management understand the perceptions of safety across the organization’s operation, identify weak areas within your system and prioritize actions. Having a pulse on the safety culture allows you to implement policies or procedures to help proactively mitigate risk. Clear and consistent communication from the top down about these changes can help the workforce adapt to changing conditions, which is crucial amid a crisis.
To learn more about how we can help assess your safety culture, please reach out to ISN at monarch@isn.com.